Overview

Welcome to the install section of Rifidi.   One of the main goals of Rifidi was to create a truly plug and play application.   Rifidi is meant to be downloaded, installed and easily run in a matter of minutes.  

However, like any application there are some dependencies required to fully exploit some of the capabilities of Rifidi that are noted below.

System Requirements

Rifidi is written completely in Java so general system requirements for running Java apply.   Rifidi runs well and has been tested on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.  

It requires at a minimum the Sun Java Runtime Environment 1.5 (J2SE 5.0) or higher.

Due to each platform's native installation wizards and different UI libraries it is imperative that you download the correct version of Rifidi that is built for your operation system. The different versions can be found on The Rifidi Sourceforge Download Page.

Other Dependencies

Rifidi does have some dependencies when it comes to emulating a Serial Port Reader.   This is due to the fact that a Serial port implementation varies greatly from one Operating System to another.

Rifidi has currently been tested for Serial Port support for the Windows 2000/XP platform.   In order to run this emulation Rifidi requires the use of the following open source projects.

The RxTx libraries - This project provides the java libraries necessary for Serial port functions.

The Com0Com project - This project creates virtual Serial ports and links them together, which is needed for creating virtual Serial readers.

If there is enough demand for Serial Port emulation we may include these libraries as part of our UI and let you control their functions.   Cases like these demonstrate the power of open source, as we would otherwise not have the resources to pursue such robust solutions.

If you are serious about Serial Port development we suggest taking a look at these excellent open source projects.