BLib - Library of useful things to hack the Blinkenlights --------------------------------------------------------- This version (1.1.7) is a development release that adds a number of new features that haven't seen much testing yet. Future 1.1.x releases might change the newly added API. When the new API has settled and all new features are tested, we will do a stable blib-1.2 release. This library contains some code that you will find useful if you want to create any kind of software related to Blinkenlights. If you have never heard about Blinkenlights, you want to check http://www.blinkenlights.de/ first. There is code to read and write the old-style BLM movie format as well as code to handle GIF files and the new Blinkenlights Markup Language. Actually you don't have to care much since this is all hidden in the BMovie object. Both sides of the Blinkenlights network protocol are implemented so that you don't have to care about the details. The BModule object defines an API for games and the like. The modules directory contains some BModule implementations. Last but not least there is code that reads Blinkenthemes. Based on these themes, there are views for DirectFB, GTK+-2.0, GdkPixbuf and aalib that you can use to implement graphical viewers and editors. You will want to download the blinkenthemes package. We suggest you also download blinkentools and blinkensim. Both packages make heavy use of BLib. Requirements: ------------- BLib requires glib-2.0. You'll also need pkg-config to build BLib. The configure script should detect whether you have DirectFB, GTK+-2.0 and/or aalib installed and will skip building some parts of BLib if you don't have these libraries. This software is known to compile and work on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X and Win32 (using the MinGW environment; see http://www.mingw.org/). Installation: ------------- BLib is configured, built and installed the usual way. Read the file INSTALL or simply try to run ./configure; make; make install BLib will install a couple of pkg-config files into the prefix. These are used by application to detect your blib installation. If BLib is installed into a different prefix than the pkg-config utility, you will want to adapt your PKG_CONFIG_PATH accordingly. See the man-page for pkg-config(1). Legal Disclaimer: ----------------- (c) Copyright 2002-2004 The Blinkenlights Crew All rights reversed. This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. The complete text of the license is found in the file COPYING. A list of authors is included with this package in the file AUTHORS. The BFire module contains code taken from aafire which is distributed with aalib. AAlib rules, nuff respect to the AA crew! BQix was inspired by the qix hack from the xscreensaver distribution. I haven't copied from the code but since I had a look at the implementation, let's credit Jamie Zawinski as well. BMatrix is based on the Matrix hack from the xscreensaver package which comes with the following copyright notice: Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty. The code to load and save GIF images contained in this package is loosely based on the GIF plug-in for The GIMP which appears to have had this copyright notices at one point in time: GIMP plug-in written by Adam D. Moss Based around original GIF code by David Koblas.