Homepage for 'Friends'

What is Friends? - -

Friends is a simple application for monitoring your friends logged-in to the system. It presents the users as a simple list and updates itself at regular (configurable, of course) intervals.

Friends lets you easily execute actions for a user. This means that you can select a user from the list and choose Mail which starts your favourite mailer and sends that person a mail. Or you can start a talk-session with the user, write to the user or execute some totally arbitrary command. You can set one of these actions as a default command which is executed when the middle button is clicked.

You can also choose to view only a subset of all possible user, i.e. your friends.

Usage - -

Start the application with :

	% Friends

If you start Friends for the first time it will tell you that it creates a new file $HOME/.Friends for storing all personal settings in. After that the main window will appear. It is a little listbox which list all users currently logged on to the system. The mousebuttons to the following tasks :

Left button - selects a user from the list. This is the current user from that point on. Otherwise the user listed first is the current user.
Middle button - activates the hot action on the current user. The hot action can be configured separately.
Right button - pops up a menu with some useful options :
- View - changes which users are viewed. Either all users or only those selected as your friends.
- Action - select one of all available actions to be executed for the current user. The hot action is one of these.
- Configure - shows the configuration-dialog, see below.
- Help - shows a really simple help.
- About - shows a simple 'about-text'.
- Quit - quits Friends

The configuration-dialog lets you tailor several aspects of the behaviour of Friends. You can set the :

interval that determines how often the dialog will update. This is given in seconds.
users which will be on your hotlist. You can then choose to monitor only these users. This is especially handy on systems where there may be a lot of people logged in, and it would be hard to spot your friends.
action for the middle mousebutton. This is chosen from one of the four available actions.
exact commands to run for specific actions. These are normal shell-commands. This enables you to run for instance your favourite mailer etc. In the strings you can use %s to mean the current selected user, and %h to mean the current hostname, so for instance :
```
 rxvt -title "Write to %s" -e write %s@%h 
```
would replace the %s with the name, giving an actual command like :
```
 rxvt -title "Write to chakie@infa" -e write chakie 
```
if chakie was the selected user.
enable a tooltip, i.e. a short text giving info about the user currently under the mousepointer. This shows some info, such as the host where the user is logged in from.

Downloading - -

Get the binary rpm for RedHat 5.1 of the package.
Get the source rpm of the package.
Get the gzipped tar-file. of the package.

Installation

Use the RPM-files if possible, and follow normal installation or rebuilding procedures. For the tar-file you first need to download the package and unpack it into a nice directory (for instance /usr/local/srs) with the command :

	% tar zvfx Friends-1.0.tar.gz

This will create a subdirectory Friends-1.0. Enter the directory :

	% cd Friends-1.0

Compiling the application should normally be just a matter of typing :

	% make
	% make install

as 'root'. This makes the application and installs it under /usr/local. If it however does not compile properly you might need to check the makefile 'src/Makefile' for compiler flags and utilities used by the installation process. This file also contains the paths for the install, modify is you want to install in another location.

Revision information : $Id: Friends.html,v 1.5 1998/08/13 10:41:03 chakie Exp $

Jan 'Chakie' Ekholm - chakie@infa.abo.fi