FLAIM Tool Kit README file
==========================

NOTE: This README file covers platform-independant, and GNU/Linux and
Unix specific information. For information on building and installing
on Windows platforms, please see the README.W32 file.

Contents
--------
1. What is the FLAIM Tool Kit?
2. Building the FLAIM Tool Kit
3. Installing the FLAIM Tool Kit

What is the FLAIM Tool Kit?
---------------------------

FLAIM is an acronym that stands for FLexible Adaptable Information 
Management. The FLAIM Tool Kit is a system abstraction layer designed
to provide maximum performance AND portability to all of the flaim 
projects. The FLAIM Tool Kit (FTK) can be linked either statically 
or dynamically into the various flaim project libraries, or even into
your own applications and libraries, thereby providing you with the
same degree of portability between Unix, Linux, Windows and NetWare.

The FTK package provide source code for the FTK libraries in the "src" 
directory, and a useful test application (ftktest) in the "util" 
directory. The test utility is currently only built when you enter
"make check" on your build host.

Building the FLAIM Tool Kit
---------------------------

IMPORTANT: You must have installed Autoconf version 2.62, Automake version 
1.10 and Libtool version 2.2. These are the latest versions of these three
tools, as of this writing (July 2, 2008).

Building FTK on Unix and Linux systems is as simple as with any other
Autotools-based project. If you're building from an SVN working directory,
enter the following command first, immediately after a clean check-out:

  $ autoreconf -i

This command will generate a configure script and Makefile.in templates. 
If you find yourself modifying the FTK build system (eg., configure.ac
and Makefile.am files), then you may omit the "-i" option in later 
executions of the autoreconf utility. 

If you're building from a tarball, you may skip the "autoreconf" step above
and move right to the following steps:

  $ ./configure
  $ make all check 

The FTK build system provides all the default functionality provided by 
any Autotools build system, including VPATH build support. To build from 
outside the source directory, enter the following commands (for example):

  $ mkdir build
  $ cd build
  $ ../configure
  $ make all check
 
The FLAIM Tool Kit is completely independent of any other projects,
depending only on a few widely distributed system-level resources, such as
a POSIX threads library. The FLAIM Tool Kit will also provide a level of
HTTP security if you use the --enable-openssl option on the configure
command line. However, this functionality is ancillary and optional.

Installing the FLAIM Tool Kit
-----------------------------

To install FTK libraries and header files, you may type the following 
command after building the FLAIM Tool Kit:

  $ sudo make install

The default prefix for the FTK Autotools build system is "/usr/local".
If you wish to install in a different location, then use either one of the
following commands:

  $ ./configure PREFIX=/usr
  $ make all check
  $ sudo make install

or 

  $ ./configure
  $ make prefix=/usr 
  $ sudo make prefix=/usr install

If you have questions or feedback, please send mail to one of the two user-
writeable flaim mailing lists:

  1. flaim-users@forge.novell.com
  2. flaim-devel@forge.novell.com

The flaim-announce list may be subscribed to for occasional notifications of
updates to the FLAIM projects.

Enjoy!