3.1 Downloading ns-3

From this point forward, we are going to assume that the reader is working in Linux or a Linux emulation environment (Linux, Cygwin, etc.) and has the GNU toolchain installed and verified. We are also going to assume that you have Mercurial and Waf installed and running on the target system as described in the Getting Started section of the ns-3 web site: http://www.nsnam.org/getting_started.html.

The ns-3 code is available in Mercurial repositories on the server code.nsnam.org. You can download a tarball release at http://www.nsnam.org/releases/, or you can work with repositories using Mercurial.

If you go to the following link: http://code.nsnam.org/, you will see a number of repositories. Many are the private repositories of the ns-3 development team. The repositories of interest to you will be prefixed with “ns-3”. The current development snapshot (unreleased) of ns-3 may be found at: http://code.nsnam.org/ns-3-dev/. Official releases of ns-3 will be numbered as ns-3.<release> with any required hotfixes added as minor release numbers. For example, a second hotfix to a hypothetical release nine of ns-3 would be numbered ns-3.9.2.

The current development snapshot (unreleased) of ns-3 may be found at: http://code.nsnam.org/ns-3-dev/. The developers attempt to keep this repository in a consistent, working state but it is a development area with unreleased code present, so you may want to consider staying with an official release if you do not need newly-introduced features.

Since the release numbers are going to be changing, I will stick with the more constant ns-3-dev here in the tutorial, but you can replace the string “ns-3-dev” with your choice of release (e.g., ns-3.2) in the text below. You can find the latest version of the code either by inspection of the repository list or by going to the “Getting Started” web page and looking for the latest release identifier.

One practice is to create a directory called repos in one's home directory under which one can keep local Mercurial repositories. Hint: we will assume you do this later in the tutorial. If you adopt that approach, you can get a copy of the development version of ns-3 by typing the following into your Linux shell (assuming you have installed Mercurial):

  cd
  mkdir repos
  cd repos
  hg clone http://code.nanam.org/ns-3-dev

As the hg (Mercurial) command executes, you should see something like the following,

  destination directory: ns-3-dev
  requesting all changes
  adding changesets
  adding manifests
  adding file changes
  added 3276 changesets with 12301 changes to 1353 files
  594 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

After the clone command completes, you should have a directory called ns-3-dev under your ~/repos directory, the contents of which should look something like the following:

  AUTHORS  examples/  README         samples/  utils/   waf.bat*
  build/   LICENSE    regression/    scratch/  VERSION  wscript
  doc/     ns3/       RELEASE_NOTES  src/      waf*

Similarly, if working from a released version instead, you can simply

  cd
  mkdir repos
  wget http://www.nsnam.org/releases/ns-3.2.tar.bz2
  bunzip2 ns-3.2.tar.bz2
  tar xvf ns-3.2.tar

You are now ready to build the ns-3 distribution.

This document was generated on December, 19 2008 using texi2html 1.78.