0) COPYRIGHT ------------ Please read the COPYRIGHT file. 1) BUILDING ----------- On FreeBSD you should be able to get the port/package from http://stephenroome.com/xglurbules/ On your run of the mill Unix box, you should just be able to type make This may not work for you, if you can edit the Makefile and get it to work then that's cool, if not send me the output that you get with make and I'll try and fix it. Just so you know: you may not like my code. That's okay, I don't either. 2) RUNNING IT ------------- Assuming it built fine, which is possible, if not likely, then you should have two executable : xglurbules and xglurbules_noshm You could try running either, both should catch (most) signals and clear up after themselves. I'm not promising anything, but they should be fine. However with any program that uses shared memory check out "ipcs(1)", hopefully you have a manpage there. It will show if you've shared memory segments not being cleared up. It *could* happen, if you kill an XSHM program in a way it can't handle. e.g. kill -9 pid_of_xglurbules 3) USAGE -------- keyboard controls are explained on screen (in the terminal you run it from) Command Line Switches for both xglurbules and xshmglurbules : (were at one time...) -h : Show help -l : Only show frames (before quitting) -n : set number of particles to -x : set x resolution -y : set y resolution -r : run in root window -m : randomly change force modes -b <0-255>: Set particle brightness -f : Show frames per second -c : Run with a colormap based on a given color : e.g. -c 0xffaa66 for shades of orange : -c 0xaaccff for shades of something?! e.g. ./xshmglurbules -x 640 -y 512 -n 20000 -f -c 0xfce3f6 (wow, what a vile colour that is!) 4) LUCK ------- of the Good and best of varieties. 5) FEEDBACK ----------- Comments, suggestions, bug reports, are all welcome. Please don't flame me if it doesn't work or unexpectedly trashes your system, it's not intended to and I apologise in advance if something goes wrong and causes you a problem, I'm only trying to write something that looks nice and is a bit of fun not destroy the world (or your computer!). It does have a frame rate limit of 30fps now, which means that on "modern" (this year) computers is can run fullscreen without putting a murderous load on your top of the range P100. This was never the case with my Pentium 100.