Fri Jul 29 21:02:41 PDT 1994 *** NOTE *** Version 1.59 of wb requires changes to your .sd.tcl file. The file NOTES contains a new wb script that should replace the one in your .sd.tcl. This is a beta-release of the LBL 'whiteboard' for Sparcstations running Sun OS 4.x & Solaris 2.x, DECstations running Ultrix 4.x, SGI machines running IRIX 4.x or 5.x, DEC Alphas running OSF/1 and 386 or 486 boxes run BSDI's BSD-386 or NetBSD/FreeBSD. However you got it, the original came via anonymous ftp from ftp.ee.lbl.gov, directory conferencing/wb. Since this is an early beta, we expect it change frequently as users find bugs & we make our fumbling attempts to fix them. If you got wb from somewhere other than LBL, check LBL to see if there's a more recent version. Before using wb, read the file NOTES from the distribution (note especially the .sd.tcl change needed if you are running sd v1.14 or earlier) and print and read the postscript file lblwb.ps. If you simply want a shared "whiteboard" drawing surface, you don't need to do anything but install wb. But wb can also be used to export, view and annotate arbitrary PostScript files. If you want to include PostScript images in your wb conference, either your X server has to support Display PostScript (the DEC & SGI X servers do) or wb has to be able to exec the public domain postscript renderer `GhostScript'. If you want to render postscript with Ghostscript, it has to be installed on your machine and has to be in your shell search path with the name "gs". (If you don't have Ghostscript it can be ftp'd from prep.ai.mit.edu, file pub/gnu/ghostscript-*.tar.Z.). While the normal version of gs will work with wb, you might want to grab {sun,dec,sgi}-gs.Z from ftp.ee.lbl.gov. This is a version of gs 2.6.1 (patchlevel 4) with a change to limit the number of colors allocated and to not allocate 'dynamic' colors. If you don't have these changes then (1) wb/gs will not co-exist well with nv and (2) previously rendered color postscript pages will change color in strange ways when new color pages are rendered. The LBL version of gs also includes some bug fixes for rendering in rotated coordinate systems and caching of font glyphs at large point sizes (such as those used for viewgraphs). If you would rather build your own gs from source, the patch file LBL_GS.DIFFS can be applied to a gs 2.6.1pl4 source. If you want to use wb for giving seminars or lectures over a network, you might also want to grab wbimport.tar.Z. This is a tool that works together with wb to sequence through a set of slides & import scanned images or X window dumps into a wb session. The whiteboard tool is intended to work in conjunction with the LBL "Session Directory" tool, sd, and the LBL audio tool, vat. Both are available for anonymous ftp from ftp.ee.lbl.gov, files *-sd.tar.Z and *-vat.tar.Z. You might also want to get the network video tool, nv, developed by Ron Frederick at Xerox PARC. It is available for ftp from parcftp.xerox.com, file pub/net-research/nv*.tar.Z. These tools will work for point-to-point communication but they will be most useful in an environment that supports IP multicast. The SGI and Solaris 2.x kernels come from the vendor with multicast support. Ultrix and SunOS 4.x do not. If your kernel doesn't support IP multicast, you can ftp the necessary support from host gregorio.stanford.edu, files vmtp-ip/ipmult-*. You might find it useful to get connected to the Internet's multicast backbone, the MBone (ftp mbone/faq.txt from venera.isi.edu for information). SGI Notes --------- There is a serious bug in the Irix 5.x Display Postscript server that wb seems to trigger: Either your display will lock up completely or your X server will crash & you will be logged out. SGI has known about the bug for at least a year & may one day decide to fix it (don't hold your breath). A work-around seems to be to run xpsview once, just after you log in. This will initialize DPS & wb then seems to run without problems. A better work-around might be to use ghostscript instead of DPS. If gs is installed on your machine, just put "wb.UseDPS: false" in your .Xdefaults. Solaris-2 Notes --------------- There is a bug in Solaris-2.3 that prevents wb from working in unicast mode. There is a work-around for the bug on playground.sun.com in pub/solaris2/unicast-vat-workaround.tar (wb uses same work-around as vat). Solaris-2.4 appears to have the bug fixed. Please let us know of any problems, bugs or suggestions for improvement via email to wb@ee.lbl.gov. Thanks. Van Jacobson (van@ee.lbl.gov) Steve McCanne (mccanne@ee.lbl.gov) ----------------- The development of `wb', `vat', and `sd' were supported by the Director, Office of Energy Research, Scientific Computing Staff, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098.