There are two ways of installing Sparse1.4. The first is to simply go to the Sourceforge dowload page for Sparse and download the latest version. It should be a file with a name like sparse1.4x.tar.gz where 1.4x represents the version. Then simply unzip and untar this file.

It is also possible to check out Sparse source code directly from the Sourceforge CVS files. In this way you are getting access to the development version, meaning both that you can contributed to the development of Sparse, and you might be getting experimental code. To do this, first create the following directories: src, doc, lib, bin, matrices, and matrices/Archive. Then run the following command:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/sparse co src doc matrices

Once you have the Sparse source hierarchy, you can make the lib/sparse.a archive and the bin/sparse test program by running make in the src directory. You can test sparse by running make in the matrices directory. If you plan to make changes to sparse and want to configure the tests so that they can detect changes in the results, run make update in the matrices directory to populate the archive of golden files. Later, after making your changes and rerunning all of the tests, run make compare in the matrices directories to compare against the golden files.