Jesktop wants NanoContainer. NanoContainer needs JDK1.4 (to be built) or JRE 1.4 (to run on). To build Jesktop, you'll need to have set two environmental varables:

1. JAVA_HOME e.g. c:\jdk1.4
2. PATH e.g. %PATH%;c:\jdk1.4\bin

Jesktop, uses Apache's Ant system for building the classes and jars from source. They both include their own version of Ant in their distribution. You don't need to download and install Ant separately. In fact, if you have Ant installed, you may get some problems building Jesktop as the two versions might be incompatible.

For those that haven't heard the news, Ant is the defacto standard for building Java based projects. Read about it at Apache's Ant website

There are multiple downloads for you to do, that range in size from 15Kb (JCalculator app) to 1.0Mb (Jesktop's source with NanoContainer). See Downloads page.

1. Download and unzip Jesktop and the separate applications zips.
2. Go into jesktop/ or the root directory of whichever application you have downloaded and run "build".
3. Also from the command line run "build docs" for Jesktop to make these documents and the API docs.
4. Go into jesktop/phoenix/bin and run "run"
5. Using Simple installer locate jars in their "dist" directories and install them. See Built-in apps for more.
6. Launch things from the Start button and play with them.