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<h1>UNCLE UNC BINARY DISTRIBUTION</h1>
<h4>Downloaded from <a href=http://sourceforge.net/projects/uncleunc>SourceForge</a></h4>; <p>Released under the <a href=http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>GNU General Public License</a>

<h3><a href=CHANGES.unc.html>changelog</a></h3>

<p>This bundle contains everything you need to run Uncle Unc sample program as a end-user. No source code is provided in this package, but that can be downloaded separately from sourceforge, if you want to see how we did it, or join in with the development. This document assumes that you just want to use Uncle Unc and get the example gui desktop application 'Sirius' running on your computer.

<p>The program is released under the GNU public license, and is currently in alpha release. This means it is potentially unstable, has bugs and missing features. Do not use it for mission-critical purposes, and don't blame us if it all goes horribly wrong! That said, we believe it is safe to play with, and there is no reason why running the demos should collapse your network.

<h3>INSTALLATION</h3>
<p>To run the demo program, first of all, unzip the archives in the directory of your choice. There are two archives for the binary distribution, called uncle.unc-(version number).tar.gz, and uncle.unc.lib-(version number).tar.gz. The first is the core Unc code, the latter a convenient bundle of third-party libraries used by Uncle Unc. As such, the latter will change more slowly, and may therefore have a lower version number. Take the latest version of each from Sourceforge's download section. <p>The archive is a tar.gz file. Unix users should use 'tar xvfz', with the caveat that this was created using proper GNU tar on Linux. Solaris users experience here with standard Solaris tar may vary, apparently. Windows users should use whatever extraction utility you have on your system. Winzip unzips tar.gz quite elegantly, other compression programs may require you to extract the tar file and then extract that as two separate steps. Both files should be extracted to the same folder.

<p>This will create a 'bin' directory, and a 'lib' directory for you. To run the demo program, invoke the appropriate file in the bin directory:

<ul>
<li><p><b>Windows Users</b>unc.bat - either in the DOS prompt or double click from explorer <li><p><b>UNIX users</b>unc.sh - invoke from the command line. I don't use Nautilus, Konqueror or anything of that ilk often enough to know what the options are for GUI invoking. </ul>

<p>Both startup scripts are cribbed from the admirably thorough Ant invocation scripts, and should cope with a range of exotic systems such as MacOS and cygwin. I will assume that if you are using any of these you know what you're doing, until told otherwise!

<p>I have developed and deployed mainly on Linux with Sun JDK's 1.3 & 1.4. A few tests on Windows NT4,Sun JDK1.3 and Win2K with JDK1.4.0 show that it works on Windows, although the GUI performance seemed extremely sluggish if other java apps were also running concurrently. I'm not a seasoned java-on-windows user, don't know if this is to be expected, but I was surprised!

<h3>EXTENDING THE DISTRIBUTION</h3>
<p>The system as it ships does not contain the jini library files, nor the ones for the mysql database drivers. The demo view will therefore lack the jini view (and present an exception on the command-line), and the mysql database link won't behave properly. To reinstate these, do the following:

<h4>JINI</h4>
<p>Copy the jini jar files from the developers kit into the lib directory of the uncle unc install. That's jini-core.jar, jini-ext.jar and sun-util.jar. And that's it. The startup scripts will append anything found in here to the classpath automatically.

<h4>MYSQL (and other databases)</h4>
<p>Get Mark Matthew's MySQL driver from <a href="http://mmmysql.sourceforge.net">sourceforge</a> and install it as per the instructions. Place the binary jar file in the unc 'lib' directory. To log in to your own database, select the database view, and press the 'login' button. Then fill in the fields for host, database, user id and password, and hit login again. Sirius can be configured to start your database automatically with the correct credentials, and to use other JDBC drivers, but that isn't yet a point'n'click job, so go to the developers list (see below) if you feel you must do that.

<h4>GUI Themes</h4>
<p>The client ships with the default fairly plain icon/background set. I have created a few others and put them on sourceforge. Using them will require downloading the theme jars, putting them in your lib directory and then editing the 'config.properties' property file in the conf/scripts/unc directory. If you want to do this, ask for details on the mailing lists. There are a few screenshots showing off the various themes on the <a href="http://uncleunc.sourceforge.net">sourceforge home page</a>.

<p>If anything doesn't work for you, seek help at

<p>uncleunc-users@lists.sourceforge.net

<p>The usual bug report etiquette applies. Tell me what operating system you're using, what version of java, send in the command-line output from your program. All these will help me to identify the problem and help to get you running again.

<p>Suggestions, constructive criticisms, etc. to the same place. If you'd like to contribute code to the project, join the uncleunc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net list, the more the merrier! Graphics, documentation etc. also welcome.

<p>Enjoy!

<h3>Dave Crane</h3>
<p>dave@cranepeople.co.uk