Download the Software

After the pre-installation checklist is complete, you are ready to download the software and prepare the files in order to do the install.

Establish an Altair Accelerator Product Administrator User Account

It is recommended that you establish an Altair Accelerator Product Administrative user, or role account, on your computer. For example, define the user account accel_mgr, for installing and owning the Altair Accelerator software files.

This user is a normal user with no special privileges. The files owned by this user are shared by way of having the same user set up with the same name and UID on all the machines.

Important: This user should not be the UNIX root user. Doing so would be a badly designed way to share files that conflicts with best practices of UNIX security policy.

You can share the Altair Accelerator Product Administrative user account with other tools. For example you can use Cadence's recommended user account cdsmgr to also be the Altair Accelerator Product Administrative account.

For evaluations, you can use your own personal account as the Altair Accelerator Product Administrator, and use it do the product install.

In the following sections, examples will be written as if you will perform the installation as user accel_mgr. For Accelerator production installations, one step in the procedure must be performed by the root user.

Create or Reuse a Temporary Download Staging Area

Create a staging area to hold the downloaded files. It must be different from the directory where you plan to install the Altair Accelerator software. The staging area may be removed after installation.

For example, create the staging area directory as user accel_mgr.

On UNIX:
```
% mkdir /usr/tmp/altair_download  
```
On Windows:
```
C:\> md  c:\temp\altair_download  
```
Note: Location path names must not contain any spaces.

Download and Expand the Files

Access the Altair Marketplace and select the product to install.
Log in using the account you set up as part of the pre-installation planning steps.
Click the link for the release version you want, and download the appropriate files. Because this is a first install, download both the documentation files and the main installation files.
The documentation files includes a Release Notes file. This contains high level descriptions about what is in this release.
The first directory level contains a file called README-1st.txt. This is a text file that describes the files in the release and gives a high level overview of performing an installation.
For a UNIX installation, complete the steps below:
1. Download the Common.tar file into the staging directory you just created.
2. Download the platform-specific file(s) for each platform type that you will be using.
3. Expand the archives with tar extract.
```
% cd /usr/tmp/altair_download
% tar xf common.tar
% tar xf <platform>.tar    # For each platform 
```
  For example:
```
% cd /usr/tmp/altair_download
% tar xf common.tar
% tar xf linux.tar
```
For a Windows installation, complete the steps below:
1. When Windows is one of the platforms used in a networked multi-platform situation, you should download the win64.tar file into the staging area.
  
  Note: The name "win64" is a generic name for all versions of 64-bit Windows.
2. Expand the archives with tar extract:
```
% cd /usr/tmp/altair_download
% tar xf win64.tar
```
3. Expand this zip file into the staging area using Windows Explorer (via right-clicking on the file) or any utility that works with zip files.