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Twin - a Textmode WINdow environment, by Massimiliano Ghilardi
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Version 0.5.0

Twin is a windowing environment with mouse support, window manager,
terminal emulator and networked clients, all inside a text display.

It supports a variety of displays:
* plain text terminals (any termcap/ncurses compatible terminal,
  Linux console, twin's own terminal emulator);
* X11, where it can be used as a multi-window xterm;
* itself (you can display a twin on another twin);
* twdisplay, a general network-transparent display client, used
  to attach/detach more displays on-the-fly.

Currently, twin is tested on Linux (i386, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc)
and on FreeBSD; SunOS porting is in progress.
I had yet no chance to seriously test it on other systems.
   
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Documentation


Twin comes with the following documentation:

README		This file.
README.CVS	Hints to build twin from CVS repository (for developers).
README.porting  Tips and warnings to compile twin on unsupported OSes.
COPYING		License: twin server and clients are GPL'ed software.
COPYING.LIB	Library license: libTutf, libTw, libTT are LGPL'ed.
Changelog.txt	List of all changes between the various versions of twin.
BUGS		Known bugs.
INSTALL		Quick compile/install guide.
system.twinrc	A detailed example of ~/.twinrc look-n-feel configuration file.


The docs/ subdirectory contains additional documentation:

Configure	Description of twin configuration script with the meaning
		of every single option.
Tutorial	A quite complete tour of twin features: the user interface,
		how to use twin clients, compression, attaching/detaching
		displays, fonts. It also contains installation instructions
		and some caveats for system administrators.
libTw.txt	a reference file for programmers who want to write
		twin clients (INCOMPLETE).
libTw++.txt	a reference file for programmers who want to write
		twin C++ clients (INCOMPLETE).

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Getting twin


Since you are reading this README, you probably already have it,
anyway twin can be downloaded from

http://sourceforge.net/projects/twin/


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Building and installing twin

For the impatient, it basically reduces to
  ./configure
  make
  make install

To compile twin you need the following programs installed
on your system:
	
  * recent GNU make (versions <= 3.76.1 do not to work)

  * ANSI C compiler (gcc for example)


But of course you may want to know more details:
First, you might want to edit the files `makerules.in' and `makeautoconf.in'
to change the install directory, tweak compiler flags (enable debugging), etc.

First you may want to tweak the configuration options, install directory,
compiler flags, etc. generated by `./configure'; this is possible with
`./configure [options]' or `scripts/Configure.sh [configuration options]'

For instructions about compiling and installing twin, see the file `Tutorial',
sections 3 and 4, distributed with twin in the docs/ subdirectory.


For a discussion about MANUALLY configuring twin (almost never necessary),
see the help file `Configure', again in the docs/ subdirectory.
-- WARNING: if you manually enable options that were disabled by `./configure',
build will almost certainly fail! --

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Other topics:

See the rest of the documentation.


Greetings,

Massimiliano Ghilardi

