
This document includes:

    * General information
    * Tour
    * Licensing
    * Requirements

* General information

   This is a snapshot of the GNOME libraries, part of the GNOME
project, the GNU desktop.

* Tour

   GNOME is using several capabilities in all of its applications.

   One of these is internationalization, often abbreviated I18N.  A
GNOME programmer should modify his C coding style slightly so that his
messages go through a mapping function.  This allows a non-programmer
to supply a translation of the strings into another language.  Look at
the GNU readtext package and intl/ for more information.

   Another capability is Guile, which is a scheme interpreter.
Programs that need more configuration than just loading a few values
can include Guile in their program.  This allows users much more
freedom to extend the program.  Look in guile-gnome/ and guile-gtk/
for more information.

   Another capability is the gtk, Gimp Tool Kit.  It's an X toolkit,
originally written for the Gimp image editing system, but now extended
to be generally useful.  It is the use of gtk that gives gnome
applications a common look and feel.

   And of course, GNOME comes with applications.  Look in programs/
for more information.

* Licensing

The GNOME libraries (libgnome, libgnomeui, gtk-xmhtml and libgtktty) are
released under the terms of the LGPL license, read the file COPYING.LIB
for more information. 

The zvt library is released under the terms of the GNU GPL, read the file
COPYING for more information.

The rest of the code is released under the terms of the GPL license,
read the file COPYING for more information. 

* Requirements

The Gnome desktop environment depends on a couple of extra packages
for working properly:

	- GNU gettext:

	   ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu

	   Note: This is not required if you pass --with-included-gettext
	   flat to configure

	- Gtk+ 1.0 

	   ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gtk/

	- libXpm.

	- DB 1.85, or DB 2.x with 1.86 compatibility enabled

	  http://www.sleepycat.com/

Optional libraries that might be used during compile:

	- JPEG, PNG and zlib are optionally used by the HTML display
	  engine.  If found the engine will support those image formats.

