Downloading MARK

To download and install MARK, simply:

  1. download the current stable MARK setup.exe file (version 8.x). It is roughly 15 MB in size -- downloads should take <1 minute on a semi-decent broadband connection.

  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

MARK was written as a Windows application (meaning, it runs best on a machine running the Microsoft Windows operating system - either as the primary OS, or within a virtual machine). However, having said that can run MARK quite successfully on a number of non-Windows platforms 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 XP or newer (i.e., Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8). MARK is not supported in any way for software older than Windows XP.

windows

For Mac users, you have a couple of options. You can either (1) 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 Mac (or Linux) machine can be found here.

  Alternatively, you can (2) run MARK within a virtual machine. 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 either bootcamp, VirtualBox, or Parallels. 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 (or newer), 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 Windows installed into a virtual machine (e.g., VMWare server, or VirtualBox, both of which are free). Because you literally install Windows under VMWare or VirtualBox, 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 or VirtualBox generally is somewhat slower (maybe ~5%) than on a native Windows machine (or running under Wine, which has near-native speed, but can be flaky to get things working).

  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-based (or OS/X) machine can be found here.