Download, Installation, and Update

In order to install and use the Psychtoolbox, you must already have Matlab or Octave installed on your computer. If you already have Matlab or Octave installed, start it up and read on.

Removing Old Versions of Psychtoolbox
Installation Instructions
- Mac
- Linux
- Windows
Staying Up-to-Date
More Information

Preliminaries

First, you should make sure you don’t already have Psychtoolbox-3. Type the following in the Matlab command window:

>> PsychtoolboxVersion

The first number in the output is the version number. If it is 3.0.8 or greater, then you have Psychtoolbox-3. Pick one:

If you have an older version of Psychtoolbox, remove it by following the instructions in the next section, Removing Old Versions
If you don’t have Psychtoolbox-3 at all, read the Installation Instructions below.
If you do have it, skip down to the Staying Up-to-Date section below.

Removing Old Versions of Psychtoolbox

If you have an old version of Psychtoolbox installed, the installer will prompt you if it should automatically delete those version from your file system and do so if you agree. If you want to delete the folder manually, apply the following procedure.

To find the Psychtoolbox installation directory, type the following in the Matlab command window:

>> PsychtoolboxRoot

Find that folder and drag it to the Trash or Recycling Bin. Then type pathtool in the Matlab command window. This will bring up a dialog box with a list of folders that Matlab searches to find commands. Select all the folders that have “Psychtoolbox” in the name and click the “Remove” button.

Installation Instructions

These are simple instructions to get you up and running with the Psychophysics Toolbox on a computer. It is assumed that you already have Matlab or Octave installed on your computer. See the System Requirements.

Mac

Mac OS X < 10.5 Leopard only: Download Subversion installer
- Subversion (Look for “Binaries for Mac OS X”).
Skip this step on OS X 10.5 Leopard or later, as Subversion (svn) is already installed on your system by default.
Download the Psychtoolbox installer to your desktop.
Open Matlab and type the following in the command window:
```
>> cd ~/Desktop
>> DownloadPsychtoolbox
```

The second command will take a long time and generate a lot of output. Please be patient.

If the download fails, read below on Download Problems. If you want to know more, see DownloadPsychtoolbox (or help DownloadPsychtoolbox in the Matlab command window.)

Linux

Packages

Psychtoolbox for Linux has been packaged and is available in the following repositories:

NeuroDebian provides installation instructions on its website. The packages from these sources only ship with GNU Octave support, hence the package to install is octave-psychtoolbox-3. Use the script DownloadAdditionsForNeuroDebian after the package installation to post-install the Matlab versions of the binary MEX routines as well.

The advantage of the above repositories is that third-party dependencies are automatically installed by the package manager.

Subversion-based installation

Alternatively, you can perform the regular installation via our DownloadPsychtoolbox.m script. The following will install Psychtoolbox by checking out the Subversion repo to the specified local directory.

Get the subversion package from your Linux distribution’s archive (i.e. apt-get install subversion, or yum install subversion, et al.).
Start Octave or Matlab, cd into the folder that you saved the DownloadPsychtoolbox.m script in, and run
```
>> DownloadPsychtoolbox('/home/foo/toolbox')
```

Additional tips for installing and using Psychtoolbox on Linux can be found under UsingPsychtoolboxOnLinux.

Windows

Download Subversion installer
- Windows: Subversion 1.7.x command-line client
Download the Psychtoolbox installer to your desktop.
Open the My Computer icon (it is either on the desktop or in the Start Menu).
Double-click on the C: drive icon.
Create a new folder called toolbox. This assumes you want to install into the toolbox folder.
Move the Psychtoolbox installer (DownloadPsychtoolbox) from the Desktop to the new toolbox folder.
Open Matlab and type the following in the command window:
```
>> cd C:\toolbox
>> DownloadPsychtoolbox('C:\toolbox')
```
The second command will take a long time (~10 min in some cases) and generate a lot of output. Please be patient (and make sure your computer is not going to go onto standby while installing). You may get the command line reappear before the installation is finished - so don’t assume the command line reappearing means that installation has hung. The installer will tell you when it is finished.

If the download fails, read below on Download Problems.

If you want to know more about the downloader, see DownloadPsychtoolbox (or help DownloadPsychtoolbox in the Matlab command window.)

You should now have a complete Psychtoolbox installation. Occasionally type the command UpdatePsychtoolbox in the Matlab command window: this will ensure that you have the latest version of Psychtoolbox. To start learning about the Psychtoolbox, use the help command. For example,

>> help Psychtoolbox will list the categories of functions in the toolbox, and

>> help PsychDemos will list all the demos available.

A PDF file with the presentation slides of an introduction into Psychtoolbox-3 and the differences to Psychtoolbox-2: Talk slides of Psychtoolbox presentation, given at ECVP 2007 Arezzo

Installation without Download

If you already have downloaded a copy of the Psychtoolbox folder onto a local computer and want to replicate that installation onto other computers you don’t need to download the toolbox again. Instead, simply copy the Psychtoolbox folder to the other target machines. Next, startup Matlab or Octave on that machines, change Matlab’s or Octave’s working directory to the copied Psychtoolbox folder (cd command) and then type SetupPsychtoolbox (see SetupPsychtoolbox or type help SetupPsychtoolbox). The SetupPsychtoolbox script will setup your copied local Psychtoolbox folder for use with Matlab or Octave, just as our installers would do. This procedure can save some download time.

Staying Up-to-Date

Psychtoolbox-3 can be updated to the latest version by typing the following Matlab command:

>> UpdatePsychtoolbox

For more information, see UpdatePsychtoolbox or type help UpdatePsychtoolbox inside Matlab.

More Information

Download problems

If the installer complains about being not able to find the Subversion client “svn” because it is installed in an unusual location, you can try to locate the client yourself on your filesystem by use of your operating systems search functions and then add the path to the folder which contains the “svn” executable to your Matlab or Octave path. E.g., if the svn client is found under /opt/local/bin/svn, do a addpath('/opt/local/bin') in Matlab or Octave, save the path via savepath and then retry.

Sometimes the downloader fails with a message like “Command CHECKOUT failed with error code xxx” with xxx being some number, followed by a description of the error condition. You may see any of these, or similar messages referring to the network or connections …

svn: Can't connect to host 'svn.berlios.de': A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable network.
svn: PROPFIND of '/svnroot/repos/osxptb/unsupported/Psychtoolbox': could not connect to server (http://svn.berlios.de)
svn: Connection timed out ...
svn: Connection refused ...

This can mean two things:

Subversion server is down: … our Source code repository server on BerliOS.de or part of your internet connection is experiencing temporary problems. Don’t panic, just wait a couple of minutes (sometimes a couple of hours) and retry.
Subversion server cannot be reached due to a network `proxy` or `firewall`: Your institution might route all web traffic trough a local proxy server, which can interfere with the operation of Subversion because it also uses HTTP to check-out the Psychtoolbox from the repository. See FaqDownloadFails to learn how to teach svn to use your institutions proxy.

If everything else fails, contact the Psychtoolbox forum with a description of what you tried.

On Microsoft Windows, if the download itself succeeds, but then the installer aborts with some error message about WaitSecs and other mex files not working, and asks you to install some Visual C++ 2005 SP1 security update runtime library, you’ll need to download and install that on your system. You’ll likely need administrator privileges to do so. It is important to download the runtime libraries for Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1), not just for Visual C++ 2005 !!! Last time we checked, this link pointed to the right download location. It is crucial that your operating system is up to date with the latest service packs, bug fixes and security fixes from Microsoft for this to work. A reboot may or may not be required but it never hurts. It is also very important to not use the ‘unsupported’ flavor of Psychtoolbox! ‘unsupported’ does not support Matlab V7.4 and later on Windows.

Subversion

Installing Psychtoolbox-3 requires Subversion because the toolbox is now kept in a Subversion database, which is stored on a publicly accessible server. The database both stores the latest version of the code and tracks all of the changes that have been made to it. This simplifies maintenance and development of the toolbox. The Psychtoolbox functions DownloadPsychtoolbox and UpdatePsychtoolbox automate interactions with the database, so you never have to use Subversion directly. To learn more about Subversion, you can visit the website: http://subversion.tigris.org/.

Downgrading

If you find something broken after an update, then you might want to revert to an earlier version. The UpdatePsychtoolbox script allows you to downgrade to an earlier version of Psychtoolbox. To downgrade to the previous version, type in the Matlab command window:

>> UpdatePsychtoolbox(PsychtoolboxRoot, 'PREV')

You can repeat this step to incrementally downgrade to earlier versions.

Access to Archived Versions of PTB-3

You can also choose to install specific old versions of PTB-3 by providing their name instead of ‘current’ or ‘unsupported’. E.g., to download Psychtoolbox-3.0.6 you would run DownloadLegacyPsychtoolbox([], [], [], 'Psychtoolbox-3.0.6'). A list of older versions can be found at the bottom of the page found here. Version 3.0.10 and later use the DownloadPsychtoolbox function instead of DownloadLegacyPsychtoolbox.

Contents