How to Get and Install QTL Cartographer

Point your web browser to http://statgen.ncsu.edu/ and follow the link from the software submenu to QTL Cartographer. You can then follow the link to the ftp site and click on the files you want to download.

QTL Cartographer is also downloadable via anonymous ftp at statgen.ncsu.edu. Use ``ftp'' as your username and your email address as the password. Here is an example.

username: ftp
password: basten@statgen.ncsu.edu

Next, change directory into the distribution subdirectory, /pub/qtlcart, and view what is available. For example,

ftp> cd /pub/qtlcart
ftp> ls
ChangeLog
QTLCartMac.sea.hqx
QTLCartWin.zip
QTLCartUnix.tar.gz
README
gnuplot.exe
gnuplot.sit.hqx
gnuplot.tar.Z
WQtlSetup.exe
1.10b/
1.12f/
1.13g/
1.14d/
1.15d/
swang/

Download the appropriate version. Presently, the following versions are available.

• QTLCartWin.zip is for Microsoft Windows. These are 32-bit applications. You will need an unzip utility to unpack this file. There should be an unzip utility in the Windows system folder.
• QTLCartMac.sea.hqx is for Macintoshes.
• QTLCartUnix.tar.gz is for UNIX, and you should also use it under Mac OS X in the UNIX environment.
• the gnuplot.* files are the distributions of Gnuplot for various platforms.
• The 1.10b, 1.12f, 1.13g, 1.14d and 1.15d are directories containing older versions of QTL Cartographer.
• The swang directory contains an old version of Shengchu Wang's Windows front-end for QTL Cartographer. The WQtlSetup.exe file is the current and recommended version.

You can usually download a file by using the get command with a filename. On Macintoshes, using the server mode may require you to use the put command, as you are putting the files onto your local machine rather than getting them from the remote server. It is best to do the transfer in an empty subdirectory so that you don't inadvertently delete some important files. You will also want to download the README file if you don't already have a copy of it. The README file in the /pub/qtlcart subdirectory will often be more recent than the one in the archive.

The manual.pdf file is an Adobe Portable Document File of the manual and the UNIX manpages. It is contained within the distribution for each platform in a sudirectory doc/pdf (or the folder pdf inside the folder doc). You can view or print these files with Adobe's Acrobat Reader, which is freely available from Adobe at http://www.adobe.com.

The following sections indicate how to install the programs onto various computing platforms.