# About Tahoe

Welcome to the Tahoe project, a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem.

See the about page for more information.

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# How To Install Tahoe

This procedure has been verified to work on Windows, Cygwin, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. It's likely to work on other platforms. If you have trouble with this install process, please write to the tahoe-dev mailing list, where friendly hackers will help you out.

## Install Python

Check if you already have an adequate version of Python installed by running python -V. Python v2.5 is best. Python v2.4.2 or greater or Python v2.6.0 or greater should also work, although Tahoe isn't as well-tested on them as it is on Python v2.5. Python v3 does not work.

If you don't have a proper version of Python installed, then follow the instructions on the Python download page to download and install Python v2.5.

## Get Tahoe

Download the 1.3.0 release zip file:

    http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/releases/allmydata-tahoe-1.3.0.zip

## Build Tahoe

Unpack the zip file and cd into the top-level directory.

Run python setup.py build to install the tahoe executable into a subdirectory of the current directory named bin.

Optionally run python setup.py test to verify that it passes tests.

Run bin/tahoe --version to verify that the executable tool runs and prints out the right version number.

## Run

Now you have the Tahoe source code installed and are ready to use it to form a decentralized filesystem. The tahoe executable in the bin directory can configure and launch your Tahoe node. See running.html for instructions on how to do that.

## More Details

For more details, including platform-specific hints for Debian, Windows, and Mac systems, please see the InstallDetails wiki page.