gtkSlash - Slashdot headlines news-ticker
 (c) 1998,9 Troy Engel <tengel@sonic.net>
 http://www.sonic.net/~tengel/gtkslash/
-----------------------------------------

01/11/99, v0.5.5


General
-------
This program is based on original code from slashes.pl (c) 
1998 Alex Shnitman <alexsh@linux.org.il>.  It's very simple - 
it reads the 'ultramode.txt' file from /. and gives you a 
nice little display unit locally.

gtkSlash requires Gtk+ (http://www.gtk.org) and curl 
(http://www.fts.frontec.se/~dast/curl/) for the display and 
file retrieval, respectively. Additionally, if you want to 
browse a news article from within gtkSlash you'll need some 
sort of web browser.  Currently it is working just fine with 
Gtk 1.1.3 (Windows) Gtk 1.1.12 (*nix) and curl 5.4 (both).

If you are on Windows, the Gtk+ version which has been used is 
from Tor Lillqvist; he also ports Gdk and GIMP.  If you don't 
have these libs, you'll probably need them to compile as I am 
unaware of anyone else who's done the porting. You can find 
all these at (http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/). I 
developed this whole thing using his libraries from 11/21/98.


Configuration
-------------
The program will read the file ~/.gtkslashrc (*nix) or 
~\_gtkslashrc (Windows) upon startup. If this file isn't 
found, it will look in /etc/gtkslashrc (*nix) or 
<WinDir>\gtkslashrc instead. A sample of this file has been 
included as gtkslashrc, and is self-descriptive.  Note: if 
you want web-browsing capabilities, you have to check this 
file and modify it accordingly - there is no default for the 
web-browser or curl at this time. A GUI editor for this file
isn't done yet, maybe someday.


Reasons I did things
--------------------
Curl is used specifically here instead of internal routines 
because of a fundamental reason: don't reinvent the wheel. :) 
Curl handles all kinds of stuff I'm not interested in 
(proxies, firewalls, weird ports and socket problems, etc) 
and is already portable across all kinds of platforms. It 
works great for me on Windows, so I hope it works great for 
you. And, uh, I'm a contributing author of sorts. :) (only a 
bugfix or two...)