About MARK

Program MARK is a Windows-based software application, developed by Gary White (Colorado State University) for the analysis of data from marked individuals. It is a large program, involving a number of numerically intensive functions, and as such requires a 'reasonable' computer for satisfactory performance. Minimum hardware requirements for 'reasonable' are:

  • A Pentium-based computer (or the equivalent) - 1.6 GHz or better

  • 512 Mb of RAM, although the more RAM you have the better (this is generally true for anything running under Windows - the more RAM, the better). The bigger your datasets, or the greater the complexity of the models you want to run, the more RAM you'll need.

  • a 17-inch monitor or better (MARK uses lots of windows and sub-windows, and larger monitors make your life a bit easier).

Downloading MARK

To download and install MARK, simply:

  1. download the MARK setup.exe file. It is roughly 12 MB in size, so trying to download via a dial-up connection is not a great idea! :-)

  2. Double-click the setup.exe file you just downloaded. This will spawn one of the (by now) ubiquitous setup routines most Windows programs use.

Operating system support

Although MARK was written as a Windows application (meaning, it runs best on a Windows maching), you can run MARK quite successfully on a number of platforms, including non-Windows machines, if you use robust Windows emulation software. The following table lists the platforms (operating systems) MARK has been run on, using either variants of native Windows, or Windows emulation software.

windows MARK was written for Windows 9x or better. However, having said that, MARK runs 'adequately' under Windows 98 and Windows NT, and perfectly under Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It runs fairly well under Windows Vista, but there are a few issues (e.g., MARK helpfiles don't work) that are still being worked out.

windows

For pre-OS/X Macs, your best option is probably Virtual PC. For newer Macs running OS/X, the best option at the moment seems to be the Parallels desktop. Note: When preparing .inp files on the Macintosh it seems to be important to convert the end-of-line character from Mac or Unix/Linus to DOS/Windows . This can be easily done in BBedit, a number of free utilities, or by opening and saving the file in WordPad.

windows You have several options for running MARK under Linux. First, you can run MARK under emulation. Your primary choices (at the moment) are to use either (i) wine, which is an open source implementation of the Windows API on top of Linux windowing environments. MARK runs nearly perfectly under wine 0.9.xx, although there are a few cosmetic problems which limit some uses of MARK (in particular, the simulation facility). Alternatively, (ii) you can run MARK using VMWare server, which is free. Because you literally install Windows under VMWare, you have 100% compatability with a true Windows machine (meaning, some of the small issues running MARK under wine go away), but the penalty is performance - MARK under VMWare generally is slower than on a native Windows machine (or running under Wine, which has near-native speed).

  Alternatively, you can access the numerical capacilities of MARK by running mark.exe either from the command line, or using the RMark interface. Instructions on setting up RMark and mark.exe on a Linux machine can be found here.