+## Notes ##
+
+* We were updating this page vigorously until about 2:30 pm on Saturday 31
+January. Now it is relatively stable, but we'll tweak it as we learn more. We
+encourage you to try to get the software set up sooner rather than later, and
+those who do so first should let us know how things go---whether it's smoothly
+or not---so that we might possibly refine or expand the instructions for
+others. It'd be great if you took careful notes of what you did, step by step.
+If our instructions are broken or misleading or incomplete, and you figure out
+how to fix them on your own, it'd also be great if you can tell us what went
+wrong and exactly what you did to achieve joy.
+
+* On a Mac or Linux system, you have a number of *system directories* such as `/usr` and `/Library`,
+ and also your *user home directory* which will be named something like `/User/george` or `/home/george`
+ if you are `george`. Other ways to refer to the user home directory are as `~` (the tilde character)
+ or as `$HOME`. When installing software, you sometimes have a choice of whether to install it into
+ the system directories or in subdirectories of your user home. When this choice was available,
+ I made the instructions that follow select the latter. This makes it somewhat harder for things
+ to get messed up, and makes it somewhat easier for you to remove things later.
+
+ If you're using a Mac without MacPorts (explained below), then Chicken and
+ OCaml will be installed under your user home; but Racket's and GHC's
+ Installers put them into system directories.
+
+