Here are the basics for starting the Knowbot Operating Environment (KOE) on your system. This document assumes you have already installed the system. (See the KOE installation manual.)
The KOE has a few major components you need to know about:
Three scripts will start and stop the KOE and let you launch Knowbot Programs:
Although not necessary for starting the KOE, the visualizer is a useful tool for monitoring it. The visualizer shows all the service stations, KPs, and plugins currently running. Another useful tool is nslist, which produces a listing of the namespace. See KOE tools for documentation of other tools.
The koeboot script starts the KOE components necessary to run KPs on your system:
% koeboot
This script starts a KOE described by the koeboot configuration files. The script does two things:
When a KSS is run, it starts any plugins that have been configured to run. By default, no plugins are started.
To run a Knowbot Program at a service station, you must launch it with the submit program. The $KOSROOT/examples and $KOSROOT/testcases directories contain some sample KPs. The kpshell KP implements an interactive Python mainloop so that you can experiment with commands by typing them in and immediately seeing the results.
By default, the submit program will treat its argument as a file containing a complete KP and launch it to the default KSS (the one with the same name as the current host).
% submit $KOSROOT/testcases/list-namespace.py
The submit program accepts several optional arguments. Three of the most useful are:
The submit program connects the KP's standard input, output, and error streams to the terminal, so you can interact with it while it runs.
Internally, the submit program performs the following actions:
koehalt terminates the service station(s) started by koeboot. (More precisely, if koehalt is given no arguments it will stop the KSSs that would have been started if koeboot had been invoked with no arguments.)
% koehalt
koehalt does not, by default, terminate the worldroot or visualizer. As a result, worldroot servers are left to run on a host over the course of multiple sessions. (koehalt -a will halt the worldroot and visualizer in addition to KSSs. See the koeboot/koehalt documentation.)