Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

MEDM: Motif Editor and Display Manager

MEDM is a Motif graphical user interface for designing and implementing control screens, called displays, that consist of a collection of graphical objects that display and/or change the values of EPICS process variables. The supported objects include buttons, meters, sliders, text displays/entries, and graphs. It has two modes of operation, EDIT and EXECUTE. Displays are created and edited in EDIT mode, and they are run in EXECUTE mode.

MEDM was developed at the APS, but future maintenance by us is likely to be very limited.

Documentation

The following documents are available. Textual links are to HTML documents, and other formats are indicated by an icon link. More information about the Flash demos and help, if you have trouble, can be obtained here.

• MEDM Reference Manual
  by Kenneth Evans, Jr. (August 2014 or later)
   
• KNOWN_PROBLEMS
  
• MEDM Is Not dead Yet
  by Kenneth Evans, Jr. (EPICS Collaboration, SLAC, April 27-29, 2005)
     
• MEDM Fonts for Exceed
  by Kenneth Evans, Jr. (December 2004 or later)
  
• EPICS Training - MEDM Presentation
  by Kenneth Evans, Jr. (August 2004)
  [Presentation]   [Handouts]    
• MEDM Main Window Demo in Flash
  by Kenneth Evans, Jr. (August 2004)
   
• MEDM Editing Demo in Flash
  by Kenneth Evans, Jr. (August 2004)
   
• MEDM Dynamic Attribute Demo in Flash
  by Kenneth Evans, Jr. (August 2004)
   
• MEDM Sample Control screens
  by Kenneth Evans, Jr. (May 1997)
  
• MEDM Color Selection Guidelines
  by Kenneth Evans, Jr. (May 1997)
  

Software Download

Binaries

A prebuilt version of MEDM for WIN32 is available in the EPICS Win32 Extensions distribution. A Windows X Server such as Exceed is necessary to run MEDM and other Motif extensions on WIN32. See "MEDM Fonts for Exceed" above for instructions on installing the MEDM fonts in Exceed.

Source

The source code repository for this software is the github project epics-extensions/medm.

The following tar files contain source code only (no binaries) and were compressed using gnuzip.

• See the Github Releases page for newer releases.
• MEDM 3.1.11 (22 November 2016). More Gnome-3 issues fixed.
• MEDM 3.1.10 (10 November 2016). Fixes Gnome-3 issue.
• MEDM 3.1.9 (01 August 2014). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32. R3.14 Makefiles.
• MEDM 3.1.8.1 (15 Nov 2013). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32. R3.14 Makefiles.
• MEDM 3.1.8 (15 Nov 2013). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32. R3.14 Makefiles.
• MEDM 3.1.7 (22 June 2012). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32. R3.14 Makefiles.
• MEDM 3.1.6 (07 March 2012). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32. R3.14 Makefiles.
• MEDM 3.1.5 (19 October 2010). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32. R3.14 Makefiles.
• MEDM 3.1.4 (26 February 2009). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32. R3.14 Makefiles.
• MEDM 3.1.3 (18 November 2008). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32. R3.14 Makefiles.
• MEDM 3.1.2.2 (07 May 2008). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32. R3.14 Makefiles.
• MEDM 3.1.2.1 (03 Jul 2007). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32. R3.14 Makefiles.
• MEDM 3.1.1 (22 Sep 2006). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32.
• MEDM 3.0.3 (17 Mar 2003). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32.
• MEDM 3.0.3Beta2 (5 Aug 2002). Needs Exceed 7.0 or later for WIN32.

Required Software

MEDM was originally designed to use the plotting capabilities of the commercial library XRT/graph for its graphing widgets. It can now also be built using SciPlot, included in the MEDM distribution, instead.

MEDM requires that the Motif and X11 header files and libraries be available and that the X11 and MOTIF settings in CONFIG_SITE.<host_arch> be set correctly. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux installations and derivatives you will need to install these development packages to build MEDM:

$ sudo yum install libXft-devel fontconfig-devel libjpeg-devel libpng-devel

The RHEL RPM packages listed below provide the standard set of fonts that MEDM uses at run-time, although the list here may be longer than is strictly necessary:

$ sudo yum install xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi
$ sudo yum install xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-100dpi xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-75dpi
$ sudo yum install xorg-x11-fonts-misc xorg-x11-fonts-Type1

On Ubuntu installations these commands will install the packages and fonts needed to be able to compile and run MEDM:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libmotif-dev
$ sudo apt-get install x11proto-print-dev xfonts-100dpi
$ sudo apt-get install libxp-dev libxmu-dev libxpm-dev

Other distributions should have similar packages. In addition you will have to download the list of font aliases that MEDM uses, found in the file medmfonts.ali.txt. What you do with this file to install the aliases varies with your Linux distribution. On Red Hat you would do something like one of these:

$ sudo cat medmfonts.ali.txt >> /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/fonts.alias

or possibly

$ sudo cp medmfonts.ali.txt /usr/share/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.alias

On recent Ubuntu versions (tested on 14.04) though do this instead:

$ sudo mv medmfonts.ali.txt /etc/X11/fonts/misc/medm.alias
$ sudo update-fonts-alias misc

You may have to restart the X11 server for these changes to take effect (logout and login again should be sufficient). The widgetDM_30 and larger aliases refer to fonts that are not available for Ubuntu, so you may wish to edit those aliases to avoid warnings (use xfontsel to find appropriate replacements).