Information regarding Nis3.5 pre release of the import of NIS software on
mac os X 

Installation notes
To install the binary programs  simply copy the contents of 
the bin directory to your target installation directory and make your PATH 
variable point to the target directory. 

The NIS software requires that "resize" program from the AIR package be in 
your PATH. There is additional program "resize" that usually ships as part
of the XDarwin program and is located in /usr/X11R6/bin directory by default.
Please be sure to adjust the PATH variable to point to the "resize" program 
from the AIR program. You can test this in your system by typing
"which resize" on the terminal.

The binaries can be directly invoked from the macosX terminal. They
can also be invoked using the NIS Java programs.

The graphical user interface to this programs requies the installation of 
java FisWidgets package.You need to install FisWidgets ( as well as java and
swing and for AirAlign the jama package) to use these interfaces.

To use the java programs simply copy the jar file provided with the package
to the target location and edit your CLASSPATH variable to include this
jar file.

You are also required to configure the .fisproperties file in your home
directory. The changes include modifying the NIS_PATH to point to your
NIS installatio directory and the FISDOC_PATH to include the documentation
directory for the NIS programs.

The java programs can be invoked directly using the terminal. The help 
file may not be currently visible as a web browser is not supplied in the
package itself.

Addtionally on maxosX it helps to 
1) Avoid using non-standard unix characters in file or directory names
   eg (avoid '.' ',' ' ' ..) (dot comma space dotdot)
2) restrict the filenames to less than 36 characters

You don't require any X Window system to run the NIS applications on macos X