Installing Additional Tools

last modified on Sep 09, 2014

As a modular system, the TextGridLab allows for installation of additional software or updates of existing modules.

Installing additional software using the Marketplace

The Marketplace offers a catalogue of additional tools that can be installed into the TextGridLab, tools from the TextGrid team as well as tools from external developers. 

The marketplace is still an experimental feature, not all features will work as desired.

Updating existing tools

By default, the TextGridLab will check for updates of all installed components in the background after startup. If there are updates available, it will notify you using a notification window (that will go away after a few seconds) and an icon in the status bar. Click on the icon or notification to open an update wizard that will install the new versions of the respective tools on request.

You can manually force an update using Help → Check for Updates. You can turn off automatic update checks using Window → Preferences → Install/Update → Automatic Updates (find the Preferences window in the TextGridLab menu on MacOS). 

If you wish to only update a specific tool, open the Installation Details dialog as described in the following section, select the tool on the Installed Software page and click Update.

Removing tools

You can remove tools you no longer need from your TextGridLab installation by way of the installation detail dialog:

  1. Open the About TextGridLab dialog from the Help menu (or the TextGridLab menu on Mac OS)
  2. Click the Installation Details button to open the corresponding dialog
  3. On the Installed Software page, select the tool(s) you wish to uninstall and click the Uninstall button.
  4. The uninstall wizard will list everything to be uninstalled. Click Finish.
  5. After uninstallation, you should restart the TextGridLab as recommended.

Note that you cannot remove tools that are TextGridLab base components or that other tools depend on.

Advanced Tasks

Marketplace and update management are easy-to-use frontends for the plugin management system that you can also use directly. If you plan to install tools or software versions that are not available from the Marketplace, follow the instructions in this section.

Background: Update Sites

TextGridLab components are available from Update Sites. There are three main composite update site for TextGridLab components:

Installing software directly from update sites

To browse an update site and directly install software from it (that may not yet be part of the marketplace), 

  1. Open the wizard at Help → Install New Software
  2. Select the update site you want to browse from the Work with drop down, or enter its URL (see the list above) into the drop down's input field and press your Enter key
  3. Check the tool(s) you wish to install in the tree below
  4. Work through the rest of the wizard using the Next and Finish buttons.

You will need to restart the TextGridLab after installing software.

You are not neccessarily limited to TextGridLab tools – you can theoretically install any Eclipse plug-in into the TextGridLab using this method. However, tools that are neither at our update site nor in our marketplace have not been tested to work with TextGridLab, and thus may not work.

Managing update sites

You can use the preference page at Window → Preferences → Install/Update → Available Software Sites to manage the sites that should be available from the dropdown box and that should be checked for updates.

If you would like to (e.g.) only work with the nightly versions of a specific tool and leave all other tools at their stable versions, you might want to enable only the nightlies update site for that tool. To do so,

  1. find out the nightly update site for the tool. Either you look at the index page of the composite nightly update site, or have a look at the corresponding build page on the integration build server.
  2. install the tool from that site as described above.
  3. Go to the Available Software Sites page and check that the composite nightly update site, http://www.textgridlab.org/updates/nightly, is not enabled.

If you wish, you can also download the nightly build of the complete TextGridLab from our integration build server.

Fixing broken nightlies

Since nightlies and their update process are not tested, it can happen that after an update the TextGridLab does not start anymore. There are various ways to recover from that:

  • You can always download a new working lab and move the workspace directory from the old one to the new one before the first start. This will retain your settings, but you'll have to reinstall all additional plugins in the new lab.

  • When someone has fixed the nightly such that the current nightly site contains a working version, you can update your installed lab from the command line by running the following command in the TextGridLab application directory:

    syntaxhighlighter-pre ./textgridlab -nosplash -application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director \ -uninstallIU info.textgrid.lab.base.product \ -installIU info.textgrid.lab.base.product \ -repository http://www.textgridlab.org/updates/nightly

    Windows users will need to run eclipsec.exe instead of ./textgridlab.