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README
Copyright (C) 1991, 1992, 1994 Lysator Academic Computer Association
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This is the README file for the server of the electronic conference
LysKOM has a lot in common with netnews, but LysKOM is intended for
local discussions (instead of worldwide). LysKOM consists of a server
process and several client programs. The server process maintains a
data base of persons, conferences and articles. The clients connect
to the server and let the users browse the database for unread
articles. Currently the only protocol available for connections is
TCP/IP, but rewriting the server and clients for using e.g. DECNET
should be trivial.
LysKOM is much faster than netnews - almost as fast as irc! - but
like in netnews the articles are saved so that you don't have to be
logged in to receive the news.
As mentioned above, you need a client to be able to do something
useful with LysKOM. As of now, there is only one client that has been
released. It is written in elisp (and thus requires GNU Emacs to run)
and its language is Swedish. It should be easy to translate to
english since all text strings are collected in one source file. The
client is available via anonymous ftp from ftp.lysator.liu.se in the
directory pub/lyskom. Don't forget to fetch the documentation for it
at the same time - it is well worth reading it! (If you know
Swedish... :-)
A LysKOM server has been running at Lysator since July 25th 1990.
You can connect to it and test it out if you like to get a feel for
what LysKOM is. The IP address of the server is kom.lysator.liu.se.
Of course, you need a client to test it.
How do you set up a LysKOM server?
Installation instructions are in the file INSTALL. Instructions
for maintaining a LysKOM server are in the file doc/ADMINISTRATION.
Some other documentation, such as the specification for the
server-client protocol is also available in the doc directory.
If you find a bug, please send your bug reports to the email address
bug-lyskom@lysator.liu.se, but before you do, please check the file
doc/known-server-bugs.
This release tries to adhere to the GNU Coding Standars, except that
we indent the code in another way (use "M-x set-c-style RET BSD RET"
if you are using Emacs 19). See the file NEWS for information about
changes, or the various ChangeLogs for more detailed information.
The testsuite
=============
You should be able to compile, install and run lyskomd in almost any
reasonably modern Unix environment. The test suite, however, require
that some special software is installed on your system. In the list
below we give the location for the version that was used to run the
test suite prior to release of the LysKOM server. Later versions may
be available when you read this. Later versions may of course cause
the test suite to fail.
DejaGnu
-------
DejaGnu is a test suite framework. It is based on expect, which is in
turn unfortunately based on TCL. I really wish there was something
like DejaGnu based on something better than TCL, but for now we are
stuck with this. It is better than no framework. DejaGnu can be
found at this location:
ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/dejagnu-1.3.tar.gz
Tcputils
--------
Tcputils is a small package of tiny shell utilities that are very
handy when you use the network. It can be found at this localtion:
ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/unix/tcputils-0.6.2.tar.gz