Tkchooser

Tkchooser2 - A Unix/X network broswer

Note: I'm in the process of moving and starting school again in a new program. Once I'm settled development should pick up again.

Tkchooser is a Macintosh Chooser-like network browser utility that supports multiple protocols (appletalk, smb) with a modular architecture and relies on external plugins to provide client-specific functionality (appleshare, laserwriters). The idea is to bring a simple GUI-based network interface to Unix.

Current Version: 0.58

Version 0.58 is an alpha/beta release. It is alpha because I'm still having trouble with appleshare mounting among other things. It is beta because the code seems to be fairly stable and the plugin architecture, while subject to change, is in place and ready to receive plugins. Protocol and plugin switching all seem to work just fine. I am releasing this to the public in the hopes that some capable souls will help me with some of the nastier aspects of the smb implementation and start thinking about adding plugins. The tarball contains an architecture/API description of sorts which will hopefully inspire some interest.

Current Features:

Appletalk layer is functional
Appleshare browsing (not mounting yet)
LaserWriter browsing and printing, both postscript and text, including support for a pre-configured printfilter
appletalk Broadcast browsing, but not sending/receiving - on hold until I (or someone else) has ported CAP broadcast to netatalk.
Winpop SMB plugin works
Smb workgroup browsing
Smb shared volume mounting
Smb printing with printfilter support
Print previewing for both printing plugins
"Misc" layer for non-network plugins like a printfilter configurator
Enscript plugin for configuring enscript for use as a printfilter or just configuring a .enscriptrc for general use.
Maintains a set of selectable printfilters for use with the printing plugins

Future Plans:

Full appletalk broadcast (BC) functionality with a good GUI interface option unlike the "current" version of CAP broadcast.
Better installation Makefile
Clean up all the debugging output
Quote SMB entity names internally to allow embedded spaces
smbfs detection, version handling
GUI for configuration (longer term)

Obstacles to Progress:

Problems with afpfs (need a better testbed, afpmount bugs?)
broadcast needs to be rewritten

Bugs/Changes:

See the CHANGES and TODO files in the distribution for more detail

Fixed - There's some trouble getting smbclient to behave consistantly across machines. Sometime the client hangs waiting for standard input, causing tkchooser to wait as well.
Possibly fixed by the above: Tkchooser is dependant on the local SMB server and Samba seems to be picky about local server configuration
Switching between plugins very quickly messing up the widgets because the stop functions do not get to complete. Sometimes this also has the effect of duplicating entity names in the plugin listbox. If you let each plugin complete it's startup sequence before clicking on the next one this shouldn't be a problem. This has been addressed somewhat in 0.55e.
Fixed - bash and tcsh use different environment variables (USER, LOGNAME)
Fixed - selected plugin feedback
inadequate feedback from pap and others
can't handle new smbfs utils yet - for some reason the syntax has changed

Call for Help:

I've written the protocol layers as well as the volume mounting, printing, and broadcast/winpop plugins on my own. In particular, if you have netatalk programming experience, I could use help (lots) rewriting appletalk broadcast and getting afpfs to work. If you are interested in helping with any of these pieces or writing any other kinds of plugins or layers, please contact me. (See contact info at the end). Also, if anyone would like to write a separate rumba plugin to support smbshare mounting under non-Linux machines, please email me.

Requirements:

Tcl/Tk versions anything-that-supports-"file" or newer. I THINK that means 7.4/4.2+. I use 8.0 and 8.1.
Netatalk if you want appletalk stuff to work (your kernel must have appletalk support compiled in if you're using linux)
afpfs if you want to be able to mount appleshare volumes. Note that this is my copy of the source and that the author is no longer supporting it. I have never gotten afpfs to work on my intel systems and thus have not finished the associated interface code in tkchooser. If you get it running, please let me know! Perhaps someone would like to adopt this package if it is truly abandoned. The author's name is inside.
Samba if you want SMB stuff to work. Note that only machines supporting the SMB filesystem (Linux + others?) will be able to use the smbmount plugin. This means that you must also have the smbfs utils (2.0.2 works). If your machine does not support smbmount on the commandline (Solaris), then you won't be able to use it in the chooser either. Rumba support for non-smbfs machines is in the works.
GNU Enscript 1.6.1 (or 1.5.5) if you want to use the enscript configurator plugin. Genscript is also available from here

Getting tkchooser:

The following are in the tkchooser distribution, but can be used separatly as well

Standalone Enscript configurator

Additional/Contributed Plugins

The plugins listed below have been contributed by other authors and/or are not part of the current distribution. Please see the documentation that comes with them. For the most part, installing a plugin is as simple as copying the tcl file to your untarred distribution's plugin directory, its icon to the distributions icon directory, and running "make install." If you've already installed tkchooser, however, you can just copy the plugin tcl file and icon into your installation's directory tree (e.g. /usr/local/lib/tkchooser/icons, /usr/local/lib/tkchooser/plugins).

Brian Kelley's smbtar plugin for backing up shared Windows directories to local tar files
Ilgam Vasilyev's Smbshare patch to tkchooser2/plugins/Smbshare.tcl (version 0.56) which implements simple smbfs unmounting via the Smbshare plugin

Tkchooser icon search

As an owner of both a mac and PC, I didn't think much about using the appropriate proprietary icons for tkchooser. However, at the suggestion of a user, I've decided to replace them with something more in e GNU spirit. Since I'm a miserable computer artist, I'm soliciting submissions for replacements to the proprietary icons currently used in tkchooser.
The guidelines are as follows:

icons must be 32x32 pixels - I know this is smaller than the "normal" size, but it is the standard Macintosh icon size and anything else feels clunky in the chooser

icons should look good in 8bit color - I use a laptop with a measley 896k of VRAM

submissions should be emailed to me either as a MIME attachment or uuencoded file. Along with a simple description of what you did or what software you used.
shaped icons are preferable to square ones

Discussion, Suggestions, Bug reports, Offers of Help, etc.

Email me, Ethan Gold at etgold@cs.columbia.edu.

"Chooser", "Macintosh", and "MacOS" are Trademarks and/or copyrights of Apple Computer Inc.

This page has been accessed

times since 1/23/99
Last modified 3/1/99

etgold@cs.columbia.edu