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 <adam@gimp.org> <adam@foxbox.org>
Based around original GIF code by David Koblas.
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