Compiling and installing:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It's a standard GNU configure-based dist, so all you should have to do is:

tar xvzf xtraceroute-XXXX.tar.gz
cd xtraceroute-XXXX
./configure
make
make install

Hopefully.

You can do "./configure --help" to see all the options.

You may want to have a look at tweaks.h, there are a few performance-options
there. None of them make much difference anymore, but maybe it can help.

Upgrading users who had a pre 0.8.12 version, note that the location of the 
data files has changed. It's logical now. Just move your old files.

Other texture files:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The texture provided in the distribution is a 800x400 tiff image, which
is big enough for most usage, and certainly enough to download if you're on
a slow link.
You might want to have a higher-resolution texture, if you have the 
texture-memory and bandwidth to handle it.

There are a few good textures on http://www.radcyberzine.com/xglobe/
(Meant for use with Xglobe, but if you comvert them to tiff, they'll
work fine.)

For the crowd with the really hairy hardware there's a 4096x2048 version
of the default texture at http://www1.las.es/~amil/ssystem/
(Meant for use with Ssystem, but if you comvert them to tiff, they'll
work fine.)

You can replace the earth.tif file with these, or use the 
"--texture <file>" commandline argument.

NDG cache files:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

NDG (www.ndg.com.au) is an australian company that makes networking tools
for windows machines. They have a program which is very similar to 
xtraceroute, called "GeyBoy". It uses large databases of locations of
central sites, backbone routers, etc. I have support for those files in
xtraceroute. These files improve the "accuracy" of xtraceroute a great deal,
but it will still run without them.

Install the files to the (prefix)/share/xtraceroute directory (the same
directory that earth.tif gets installed to.)

A good thing to do would be to get the NDG cache files from 

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d3august/xt/dl/

Alternativly, you can get them directly from NDG, at

ftp://ftp.ndg.com.au/pub/demos/win/gb/geoboy_cache.exe

It's an archive in some sort of microsoftish install format. I don't know
of a way to unpack them under unix, so I went to a  win95 machine, installed
the stuff and  FTPd them over.

If anyone knows of a tool to unpack this stuff under unix, please let me
know.

There are however a number of errors in these files, I have two diffs
that can be used to patch them. They are in the misc directory.
patch them like this

patch <path to the cache files>/networks.cache < misc/networks.diff
patch <path to the cache files>/hosts.cache < misc/hosts.diff

This will fail if you transferred them wrongly from the windows machine
you unpacked them on. (you need LFs at the ends of the lines, not
CR,LF like DOS does.)

It can also fail if you have the wrong version of the NDG caches.
I used the latest one as of this writing, version 1.6)

But the easiest thing to do is to get the (all patched up and ready to 
use) ndg_files.tar.gz from the download area at my site.

Many thanks to NDG software for letting me redistribute them.

General notes:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The ends of any connection are the hardest for xtraceroute to place,
since the stuff in the middle generally are major backbones etc, which 
probably is in the databases. 
  There's not a whole lot to do about the far end, but A Good Thing To Do
is to add your machine (or your net, if all of it is in the same place)
to one of the local databases (yours or the site-wide). 
In fact, if xtraceroute can't get a good fix on the location of the first
site it finds (your machine) it'll display an annoying window, asking you
to enter it. It's for your own good, honest. :)

/August.
