Blinkensim 2 - the next generation Blinkenlights simulator
----------------------------------------------------------

If you have no clue what Blinkenlights is, take a look at
http://www.blinkenlights.de/ first.

Blinkensim is a Blinkenlights simulator. It understands the network
protocol that we use for the Blinkenlights installations. If you
haven't seen Blinkenlights you missed something, but this simulator
will probably make you understand the Blinkenhype.

Starting with version 2.3 blinkensim has support for requesting a
blinkenlights stream from a server running blinkenproxy (as found in
the blinkentools package).

This version is built upon blib and thus speaks the next generation
Blinkenlights protocol. Since almost all functionality is in blib,
there is only very few code here. You will need blib >= 1.1.2 in order
to compile this software.  The simulator needs blinkenthemes to work
so you will also want to install the blinkenthemes package.

There are three version of blinkensim:

- blinkensim-directfb uses DirectFB to draw to the Linux frame buffer
  device.

- blinkensim-gtk uses GTK+-2.0 and is thus mainly targetted at the
  X11 window system on Unix flavours like Linux, BSD and Mac OS X.
  It should however be possible to compile a version for Win32.

- blinkensim-aa uses aalib and displays ascii art on a text console.


You also need pkg-config, a small utility that helps to locate
installed software such as DirectFB. pkg-config is available from
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig/. If you installed blib
into a different prefix than pkg-config, you may need to adapt the
PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable. See the pkg-config(1) man-page.


Installation
------------

Change to the toplevel source directory and type

  ./configure
  make
  make install

You can pass the usual options to configure (try ./configure --help).


Usage
-----

Usage is very simple, just start it and pass it a theme on the
command-line. For example:

  blinkensim-gtk hdl-640x480

Themes are by default searched first in the current directory, then in
the blinkentheme path as defined by blib ($prefix/share/blib-1.1/themes).
Or, if the environment variable B_THEME_PATH is set, in the directories
defined therein. You can use the --list command-line option to get a
list of available themes.

If you want to connect to a blinkenproxy, add the name (and optionally
the port number) on the command-line:

  blinkensim-gtk hdl-640x480 [host[:port]]

Try the --help command-line option to see what else you can do.

blinkensim-directfb also supports the usual options for DirectFB
applications (use --dfb-help to get a list). This version defaults to
fullscreen mode and exits when either the Q or ESC keys are pressed.

The GTK+ version creates a window the size of the theme. If you use
GTK+-2.2 you can switch to full-screen mode by pressing the F11 key.


But it doesn't blink
--------------------

blinkensim implements only one half of the Blinkenlights setup. You
still need a source for UDP packets. A good choice is to the utility
bsend that you can find in the blinkentools package.


Have Blinkenfun,
	Sven Neumann  <sven@gimp.org>
