1.2. Installing J-Ben from a precompiled package

1.2.1. Windows users

Most users should use the regular J-Ben installer package, which should be available from the project web site. This installer is most suitable for standard installs of J-Ben, and handles downloading of dictionary and stroke order diagram files during installation.

If you are installing J-Ben onto a USB thumb drive or similar device, you may want to instead download one of the zipped (.zip or .7z) versions of the program and extract it by hand. In this case, to run the program you will want to look for jben.exe, located in the J-Ben\bin folder.

Thumb drive installs include EDICT2 and KANJIDIC dictionary files and no stroke order diagrams. Additional files can be installed by hand if desired.

When you run J-Ben for the first time, it will prompt you as to whether you want to run J-Ben in "standard" or "mobile" mode. This simply refers to where J-Ben will store its data files. If you're running on a thumb drive or similar, select "mobile", and your data files will be saved to the thumb drive. If you've installed J-Ben permanently on your system, select "standard", and your files will be stored in your user's Application Data folder. (Usually this is C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data.)

1.2.2. Linux users

At the time of writing, no precompiled packages exist. Eventually I would like to make a Linux Standard Base-compliant package, and it would be cool to get J-Ben into Debian and maybe other distributions. For the time being though, it is necessary to compile from source.