To use the Practical XML parser or applications you need to install the current release in your own space on a Linux system. Then set an environment variable PXML_HOME to point to the installation directory. Perl 5.8 or later is required. The pdf generator uses Latex as its output engine, so one of the current Tex/Latex packages is needed. The ImageMagick convert-6.0.0 or higher is needed for graphics conversion, and the graphviz package is used in a DocBook extension. The software tool requirements should be satisfied by any recent Linux distribution. Once you are set up you should be able to process xml documents in the doc area, by running make in the xml subdirectories. The results are placed in the docbook, html and pdf subdirectories. Expect some error messages: this is a beta release.