README for

GOM (Gom is nOt yet another Mixer), Release 0.29.7 (1997 Jun 27).

"Unstable" update to Release 0.24b.


ADMINISTRATIVE
--------------

Map of admninistrative files:

  - README   : overall/meta/misc information (this file)
  - AUTHORS  : list of all copyright holders on the package (or parts of the package)
  - COPYING  : software licence for (this release of) gom
  - INSTALL  : GNU automake/autoconf generic installation descriptions
  - NEWS     : list of prominent changes between releases of gom
  - ChangeLog: detailed list of changes between releases of gom

(THIS RELEASE OF) GOM MAY ONLY BE DISTRIBUTED, COPIED OR MODIFIED UNDER THE TERMS
OF THE LICENSE FOUND IN THE FILE NAMED "COPYING" INCLUDED IN THIS DISTRIBUTION.


ABSTRACT
--------

gom is a generic audio mixer program; gom's facilities include sound
driver (compile time) and sound card (runtime time) independence,
arbitrary mixer selection, loading and saving of mixer settings,
volume fading, verbosity-level driven output, etc.

gom has a complete GNU-like command line interface, plus two built-in
interactive interfaces (that I call gomiis, gom interactive interfaces
;): a terminal gomii using ncurses, and a X gomii using the xview
toolkit.  All gomiis support adjustable real time updating
("adjustable" includes disabling).


INSTALLATION
------------

Building and installing is being done by GNU automake/autoconf. Please
refer to the file "INSTALL" for generic installation descriptions, and
to the (special) notes produced by the ./configure script.

However, to sum it up, it should be as simple as

$ ./configure [options]
$ make
# [make install]


DOCUMENTATION
-------------

* The manual page "gom.1" is the authoritative documentation source
  (e.g., "groff -man -Tascii gom.1 | less" views it without installing)
* "gom -h" == "gom --help" or 
  "gom -v -h" == "gom --verbose --help" gom's "online" help on options.


REQUIREMENTS, COMPATABILITY
---------------------------

(this section is out of date ;)

Mandatory:
* a Un*x system (whatever that is) with one of the following
  sound drivers installed:
  - Open Sound System (OSS) (all version claiming to instanciate the
    OSS API should work).
    The Linux kernel includes OSS/Free, so this should work on all
    Linux-based Un*x distributions.

Optional:
* a soundcard with mixer (this means that you can actually use gom...)
* ncurses (for the terminal gomii),
* xview toolkit (for the x gomii)

Well...:
At least, that's the theory. The only configurations successfully
tested by me are:
* ix86-Linux with kernel 2.0.x, and OSS/Free 3.5.4.
* ix86-Linux with kernel 2.1.5+, OSS/Free 3.7-beta (note: Hannu calls it
  "OSS Lite" in the Readme, neither "OSS/Free" nor "USS Lite", but I will
  stick to OSS/Free ;).

Other configurations or other configurations of the above configurations
might (and we all know: most likely will) fail to compile for whatever
unexpected reason.

Specials on the OSS driver:
Any improvements in the driver (e.g. if the new SB16 driver now
supports "mix") will of course directly affect gom; there should be no
need to update/recompile gom if you install a kernel with the new
driver. (Well, ok, for the purist: If the OSS API increases the amount
of possible channels (check SOUND_MIXER_NRDEVICES > 17 in soundcard.h)
-- which seems unlikely --, gom will support these (new channels) only
after recompilation with the new header file.)  However, if unsure,
recompile.


UPDATES
-------

Currently, http://www.fh-worms.de/~suerken/gom.html is the WWW-Home
of gom. 


THANKS TO
---------

* Hannu Savolainen (for OSS/Free, his informative OSS programmer's guide
                    and a good template for my X gomii (xvmixer))


--Stephan Suerken <suerken@fh-worms.de>                Worms, 1997 Jun 27
