BLib - Library of useful things to hack the Blinkenlights
---------------------------------------------------------

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 and GTK+-2.0 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.

As development continues, we will try to keep backward compatibility
with the BLib-1.0 release.


Requirements:
-------------

BLib requires glib-2.0. You'll also need pkg-config to build BLib.
The configure script should detect whether you have DirectFB and/or
GTK+-2.0 installed and will skip building some parts of BLib if you
don't have these libraries.


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 2002-2003  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.
