After installing the Mininet software-defined network simulator on a virtual machine, you may want to build the documentation. Documentation is available on the Mininet web site but, if you installed a beta version of a new development release or installed an old version, you may want to use the documentation specific for the version you are using.
Mininet documentation is built into the source code and can be generated using the doxypy program. This post details the simple steps required to install doxypy and other required software, and to build and view the documentation.
Install doxypy
Start the Mininet virtual machine and log into it via SSH. See my previous post about setting up the Mininet SDN Network Simulator virtual machine.
On the Mininet VM, run the following command to install doxypy, and supporting software packages:
$ sudo apt-get install doxypy doxygen doxygen-latex help2man
This could take a while because it downloads over one Gigabyte of data, such as fonts.
Build the documentation
On the Mininet VM, run the following command to build the documentation
$ cd ~/mininet
$ make doc
This builds a PDF version of the documentation named refman.pdf in the folder: ~/mininet/doc/latex/.
Install a PDF viewer application
To view the documentation, we need a PDF viewer. You may install your favorite PDF viewer from the Ubuntu repositories. A simple PDF viewer is xpdf.
To install xpdf, execute the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install xpdf
View the documentation
Assuming you connected to the Mininet VM using the SSH -Y command to enable X11 forwarding to the host computer, and assuming you have an X Server running on your host computer (see my post about setting up Mininet if you have not already done these things), then execute the following command on the Mininet VM, from the SSH session:
$ cd ~/mininet/doc/latex
$ xpdf refman.pdf
The xpdf window will open on the host computer’s screen. Now you may read the Mininet documentation built specifically for the version of Mininet you installed.
Thanks for the information! This will be very useful.