### 1.1 Unix Installation

We will use as an example the installation for GNU/Linux. The installation for other unix systems is similar. There are several references to ARCH below; these refer to the computer architecture that Scheme is compiled for, either ‘`i386`’ or ‘`x86-64`’.

MIT/GNU Scheme is distributed as a compressed ‘tar’ file. The tar file contains both source and binary files; the binary files are pre-compiled Scheme code for a particular computer architecture.

In order to install the software, it’s necessary to configure and compile the C code, then to install the combined C and Scheme binaries. This is done in the following steps:

1. Unpack the tar file, `mit-scheme-VERSION-ARCH.tar.gz`, into the directory `mit-scheme-VERSION`. For example,

       tar xzf mit-scheme-VERSION-i386.tar.gz

   will create a new directory `mit-scheme-VERSION`.

2. Move into the new directory:

       cd mit-scheme-VERSION/src

3. Configure the software:

       ./configure

4. Build the software:

       make compile-microcode

5. Install the software:

       make install

   Depending on configuration options and file-system permissions, you may need super-user privileges to do the installation step.

After installing the software, you can delete the unpacked directory:

    cd ../..
    rm -rf mit-scheme-VERSION

By default, the software will be installed in `/usr/local`, in the subdirectories `bin` and `lib`. If you want it installed somewhere else, for example `/opt/mit-scheme`, pass the `--prefix` option to the configure script, as in `./configure --prefix=/opt/mit-scheme`.

The configure script accepts all the normal arguments for such scripts, and additionally accepts some that are specific to MIT/GNU Scheme. To see all the possible arguments and their meanings, run the command `./configure --help`.