ZEUS: Frequently Asked Questions


How do I get a copy of ZEUS?

ZEUS is open source software, available free of charge to academic and industrial users, and is distributed under terms that are based on the Mozilla Public Licence. You can download a copy from here.

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What restrictions are there on using ZEUS?

In the spirit of Open Source software distribution there are no restrictions on using ZEUS. Users are free to incorporate ZEUS into their own projects, whether academic or commercial, providing they acknowledge the presence of our software.

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What are the system requirements?

As ZEUS uses the latest Swing GUI components it will run on any platform that has had a JDK1.2 (aka JDK2) virtual machine installed. Each host machine should also be capable of TCP/IP communication, but there is no need for any middleware services to be installed. So far ZEUS has been successfully tested on Windows 95/98/NT4 and Solaris platforms.

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Do I need a high-end machine to run ZEUS agents?

No, although a high-end machine will allow many agents to share the same host. From our experience we have found that ZEUS agents run comfortably on lower-specification machines like SPARC-5s and Pentium-133 PCs. Indeed, distributing the agents to spread the computational load is a key motivation for many agent applications.

However, the factor that has the most significant influence on agent performance is not CPU speed, but the amount of main memory available on the agent's host machine. This is because agents tend to perform relatively little processing, but their inherent complexity and their interpretation through a Java virtual machine mean they have a relatively large memory footprint.

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What technical support is provided for ZEUS?

No technical support can be promised for ZEUS users, but the ZEUS development team will try to answer questions sent through the ZEUS mailing list. As messages sent to the mailing list will be stored and accessible on the list home page, which will ultimately form an online archive of technical questions and answers.

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I've started one of the example applications, but nothing has appeared on screen - what's wrong?!

Do you have the current directory (.) listed in your system's CLASSPATH variable? From our experience this is by far the most common problem new users have. If so, make sure that you've added the full paths to the zeus.jar and gnu-regexp.jar files too.

If after that the examples fail to work on Windows machines, edit the launch scripts and remove the 'start /min' command so they run in the foreground, any error messages generated will then be visible.
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