README for xznola
=================

David Maze <dmaze@mit.edu>
$Id: README,v 1.5 2001/11/04 01:45:31 dmaze Exp $
Last updated for xznola-0.8.0


1. What is xznola?

The MIT Zephyr distribution comes with a handy little utility called
'znol'.  When given the right command-line switches, znol can display
a list of users visible by Zephyr and subscribe you to a notification
instance which tells you when users log in and log out.
Unfortunately, znol has a couple of little problems:

-- The .anyone file that it uses to find users is flat; I can drop a
   hundred user names in the file and run znol, and get a listing of
   these users with no particular structural organization.

-- The output of znol is ugly and difficult to read.

-- znol only works on a tty and through Zephyr notification.

xznola displays a tree of users logged into the system, using
specially formatted comments in the .anyone file to form categories.
It displays this tree in an X window, and updates it on demand.
xznola also has the capability to read from a file besides
$HOME/.anyone, either through an environment variable or with the
"Open" command from the xznola menu.

gznola is based on GNOME, rather than Gtk directly.  It's a little
prettier and the code is a little cleaner.  It also adds a timed
auto-update option.

The corresponding tty program, znola, displays a listing of users
similar to that znol provides, only with somewhat better formatting.


2. Requirements

xznola requires Gtk+ 1.2.0 or later, the MIT Zephyr libraries, and
Kerberos support.  In addition to these, gznola requires a "current"
version of GNOME.  znola requires Glib 1.2.0 or later, Zephyr, and
Kerberos.  There is not presently support for building znola
separately from xznola, or for not building gznola.

xznola is developed and tested primarily on a Debian GNU/Linux 2.1
system, using Gtk+ 1.2.3, GNOME 1.0.54, and GNU libc 2.1.  Other
configurations may exhibit different bugs.  This should be tested on
systems supported in MIT's Athena environment, including SunOS 5.6 and
IRIX 6.5.

Gtk+ is available from http://www.gtk.org/; GNOME's home page is at
http://www.gnome.org/.  This program won't be useful unless your
site already uses Zephyr; if you don't already have the Zephyr libraries,
they can be downloaded via anonymous FTP from athena-dist.mit.edu.


3. Installation

It's autoconf-based software.  Run 'configure', with the correct
options.  Run 'make'.  Run 'make install'.  Whee.  The Generic
Autoconf-Based Installation Instructions (TM) are in INSTALL in this
directory.


4. Known problems

When using gznola with the auto-update option enabled, it periodically
dies.  I haven't been able to track this bug down yet; if you have
insight, please let me know.
