-*- Mode: Indented-Text -*- XFaces 3.2 Christopher B. Liebman liebman@zod.clark.net March 7, 1994 What is XFaces? XFaces is a program that will display an image for each piece of mail in your mail box. This lets you know at a glance who you have mail from. XFaces starts out (when you have no mail) looking like a color xbiff. As you receive mail XFaces becomes a column of mail images. Some of XFaces features: - Both mono and color images. - Optional Shaped window support with both xpm and xbm. - Sound support using the NetAudio protocol. The NetAudio server currently supports Sun's SparcStation (SunOS 4.1.X and Solaris 2.2), SGI's Indigo and NCD MCX X terminals running NCDware 3.1 or later. - Face images can be "compressed" so that each image will only show up once on your display. This way, if you receive 30 messages from one user, list or whatever the image will only show up once. - You can use regular expressions to search any headers to choose images and sounds or ignore that mail message compleatly. This lets you specify an image/sound for mail that comes from a mailing list or ignore mail that you have already seen but left in your system mailbox. - Compatibility support for Rich Burridge's faces program. This includes the ability to run user command to generate the image list. - Support for POP mailboxes. - XFaces can kick off shell commands based upon mailbox contents. You could have yourself paged when a high priorty item needs your attention. - XFaces can run external filters to convert images into Xpm so that image formats that XFaces does not understand can be used. - The annotations for mail items include username, hostname, count, user@host, the contents of any header. XFaces is based on the Xt Intrinsics (-lXt) and the Athena Widget set (-lXaw). To build in Xpm support you need the xpm library (-lxpm) version 3.2 or later. To build in the sound support you will need NetAudio 1.1 or later. Both the xpm and the NetAudio distributions and publicly available with anon ftp from ftp.x.org in the contrib directory. If you want X-Face header support you will want James Ashton's compface library available from from ftp.clark.net in pub/liebman/compface.tar.Z. Whats new in this version? See the CHANGES file for a descriptions of what has changed since the previous version. What machines will XFaces run on? XFaces as been compiled and tested on the following machines/OS' (these are all that I have access to): Sun Sparc 10 SunOS 4.1.3 (MIT X11R5) Sun Sparc IPC SunOS 4.1.1 (MIT X11R5) It has also been reported to run on: DEC Alpha 3000 OSF 1.3 DEC 5000 Ultrix 4.2a (X11R5) IBM RS/6000 AIX 3.2.4 (X11R4) i486 System VR4 (X11R4) Macintosh IIci A/UX 3.0 (X11R5) SG Indigos IRIX 4.05H Bull DPX/2 68040 based, SV.3.1 POSIX/XPG3 80386 SCO UNIX 3.2.4 (ODT 2.0 with X11R4) Please help me add to this list. I am really interested to find out how well this works on other machines (SGI?, HP?, DEC? IBM?, etc). Building and Installing XFaces If you do not have Imake I have supplied a Makefile.noimake that you can tailor to your site. The easiest method is to use Imake. You need to look at the Imakefile in this directory to see the definitions for USE_XPM, USE_SOUND, USE_BUCKETS , USE_XFACE, USE_SHAPE and USE_POP are what you want. By default All of these are compiled in. If you do not want one of them, just comment out or delete the #define. Sound support has another option USE_BUCKETS. If this is defined then XFaces will store the sounds for all active sounds in the audio server. If you are using NetAudio 1.1 on a sparc then you will either neet to disable the BUCKET support or apply the included patch to ausun (the patch is in ausun.patch). The bug in the sun NetAudio server causes a weird audio "glitch" that I noticed when playing from buckets. USE_XPM - Requires the xpm library. This is available from ftp.x.org in /contrib/xpm-3.3.tar.gz USE_SOUND - Requires the net audio client library and includes. NetAudio is available from ftp.x.org in /contrib/netaudio/netaudio-1.1.tar.Z USE_SHAPE - Requires the MIT SHAPE extension. USE_XFACE - Requires the compface library available from cs.indiana.edu in /pub/faces/xfaces/compface.tar.Z or ftp.clark.net in /pub/liebman/compface.tar.Z USE_POP - Requires BSD style sockets. Next to build the Makefile run: xmkmf Then to build XFaces run: make To install XFaces type: make install How to set up XFaces I recomend the use of the facedb search to find the majority of the images and sounds. A couple large databases of face images are available from cs.indiana.edu in the /pub/faces directory. Included in this release are a number of sample icons that I use. Also the sample XFaces app defaults file contains examples of using the before bindings to show a particular image/sound for items from a mailing list. I will be glad to help anyone who is having problems setting up XFaces or anyone who has any questions about XFaces. The man page provides more detailed information than any normal human being can stand! :^) Unfortunatly it is not very well written. :^( Does anyone care to take a stab at it? Sample face images I have placed a number if images that we use for XFaces in the images subdirectory. You will want to copy them to your images directory. Bugs (bugs? never! :^), Fixes and Enhancements If you find any bugs or have fixes for bugs or have suggestions for enhancements or have patches for enhancements please send them to me at: liebman@zod.clark.net I will welcome *any* improvements to the documentation! Disscussions of future enhancements are also welcome on the faces mailing list: faces@cs.indiana.edu To subscribe send your request (and all other adminstrative requests to: faces-request@cs.indiana.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1994 Christopher B. Liebman 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, and that the name Christopher B. Liebman not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of this software without specific, written prior permission. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED `AS-IS'. CHRISTOPHER B. LIEBMAN, DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL CHRISTOPHER B. LIEBMAN, BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER, INCLUDING SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY THEREOF, AND REGARDLESS OF WHETHER IN AN ACTION IN CONTRACT, TORT OR NEGLIGENCE, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.