README file for xtea 1.3


1. WHAT IS XTEA?

xtea is a distributed multimedia tool to help users negotiate the
exchange of vital resources like tea, coffee, and beer. To do
this, every participating user starts xtea, indicating for which
resources he wants to act as a producer and/or consumer.

The xtea processes notify a central xtead (for xtea daemon) which
manages the flow of information and keeps track of the users.

When somebody has finished cooking his or her one-of-a-kind extra-strong
morning coffee, e.g., he can query a list of potential consumers
and invite them with a few mouse clicks.

xtea has been tested exhaustively in our department during the last
months and has proven to be a very stable and useful tool, not only for
beverage distribution, but also for group communications. You can
create quite a bit of activity by offering 500 units of jellybeans
to all those guys ...

xtea uses socket TCP/IP communications, Athena widgets and the
XPM library. It should compile out-of-the-box on most Unices using an 
ANSI C compiler; we've tested it on

		Intel with Linux
		Intel with BSDI
		DEC MIPS with Ultrix 4.4
		DEC Alpha with OSF/1

Please send me an email if it works or doen't work on your kind of
machine.


2. HOW DO I GET IT?

You can get xtea from

	ftp.x.org:/contrib/applications

or one of its mirrors.

The home site of xtea is

	ftp.regent.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de:/local/regent/xtea/

The file name is

	xtea-1.3.tar.gz

You may also look at

	http://www.regent.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de/proj/xtea

Questions may be directed to

	xtea@regent.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de


2. HOW DO I COMPILE IT?

Unpack the distributions using

	zcat xtea-1.3.tgz | tar xvf -

and take a look at the files.

First, edit XTea.config to suit your needs. You have to

  - specify a search path for icon files
  - specify where to install the supplied icons
  - give parameters for the client-server communication
  - give the location of XPM include and library files
  - specify the language to be used (currently, english or german)

Then, type

	xmkmf
	make Makefiles
	make

to compile the program. You may now give it a test run by changing
into the icons directory (so that the icons can be found) and
starting xtead and one xtea client:

	cd icons
	../src/xtead -v &
	xrdb -merge ../src/XTea-english.ad
	../src/xtea -p all -c all

Finally, install the programs, icons, application resources and manual
pages by typing

	make install
	make install.man


3. HOW DO I RUN IT?

First, you have to start xtead on the host specified in the
XTea.config file. If it isn't started from some /etc/rc.* at boot time,
you may want to start xtead in its own process group so that it 
continues running after you log out. Using ksh, this can be done using

	nohup xtead &

Now, all users can start xtea clients using e.g.

    	xtea -pall -call &
    	
and start drinking.	    


4. CUSTOMISATION

To add new resources, edit the string list in src/config.c. In addition,
you may want to change the application resource file to specify
the pixmaps. Some constants like timeouts etc. are specified in
src/config.h


5. SOUND SUPPORT

When the xtea client is started or when some resource is offered, a program
specified by X resources is executed with appropriate arguments. This can
be used to play sounds whenever some resource is being offered. For example,
if aplay is used for sound output, the following lines can be added to 
the .Xresources file:

	XTea.eventprogram: aplay %s
	XTea.default_event: ping.au
	XTea.startup_event: -g 10 xtea.au
	XTea.tea_event: teaready.au
	XTea.coffee_event: coffeeready.au
	XTea.beep: false

This requires that aplay is in your PATH and that it can find the sound
files (using the SOUND_PATH environment variable).

The last line is used to turn the default double-beep off. 



6. COPYRIGHT AND CREDITS

This program is Copyright (c) 1994,1995 by Henning Spruth and the Institute of
Electronic Design Automation, Technical University of Munich, Germany. It may
be freely copied and used as long as this README is left intact.

If you have suggestions, questions, icons, sounds, or language-specific 
application resources, send an email to:

	xtea@regent.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de