Table of Contents

• Introduction
• News
• Acknowledgements
• Requirements
• Documentation
  • Installation
  • Usage
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Screen shots
  • Main window
  • Browser window
• Downloads

Introduction ⇑

dTk is written with the purpose of bringing the comfort of the DCSE search engine, also known as Dance, to Unix.

While Windows users have the comfort of Dance right under their fingertips with a nice web-interface, users of other operating systems are stuck and need to resolve to other measures. Luckily, for Unix users, a nice tool named Samba exists, so they can access Windows shares just like Windows users can. Unfortunally, accessing Windows shares using Samba, wheter it be in combination with the Dance search engine, can be really painfull, especially, if you are not an expirienced Samba user.

So, to help Unix users, a graphical front-end was written that directly connects to the Dance search engine and enables you to browse Windows shares.

News ⇑

18/12/02 - Released version 1.3 of dTk! For all you frequent visitors who have had enough coffee: there's no 1.2 release! Nope, at least: not publically. The 1.2 was an internal release only. Check out what's new or go download it immediatly!
change overview: lots of speed improvements and some additional bug fixes (what's new...)
06/09/02 - Oops! It seems I didn't test the new page all to well! I forgot to upload the actual dTk releases, so you had to do a little searching before you could obtain the actual releases of dTk. The links are fixed now.

Acknowledgements ⇑

Ok, in this section I am thanking everybody who contributes to the development of dTk or was of any interest for the project. For all those who think they contributed to this project: thanks a million! Your help is greatly appreciated!

First of all, I want to show my appreciation to SourceForge for providing me with free CVS-access and download space!

There is one person I want to thank in particular and that is Thomas van Gulick for setting up and developing Dance and letting me shamelessly abuse his vind script for protocol details!

During the development of dTk 1.0 beta though its 1.0 final release I was helped a lot by Mark Borst and Christiaan Boomsma, who both confronted me with lots of bugs and other “obscure” things.

Requirements ⇑

The requirements for dTk changed quite a few times, unfortunately! Originally, I programmed the whole program using Perl and the Perl/Tk widget set, but soon the code started to get really messy and more and more errors popped up!

Still in the assumption that Perl/Tk would solve all my problems, I rewrote the whole program. It helped little, as I just could not get the main user interface right (in other words: simple to use). So, again, I threw it all away! This time I concentrated mostly on the 'Share browser' and used a HTML widget to connect with DCSE (using the webpage). As this widget only had bindings for Perl/Gtk, I needed to rewrite all of the 'share browser' to Gtk, and soon I realized that this was a LOT simpler than Perl/Tk.

So, for this release the requirements are set to the following:

• Samba, anything above version 2.2 will do;
• Perl, all versions >= 5.5 will do;
• Perl/Gtk, I am using version 0.7002 at this moment. For a quick “how to install” Perl/Gtk, see the FAQ.

Installation instructions can be found in the (still sparse) documentation.

Documentation ⇑

Some very sparse documentation is included with dTk version 1.1! You can read it online if you want. It is also included with the program...

Below you can find a very sparse manual. It covers just the bare minimum: the installation and usage of dTk.

Installation ⇑

Although most Perl programmers think differently, I have decided to keep the complete source in one file. This has the advantage that the end-user can install it very easily and almost everywhere!

So, how do you install? Just copy the script to a place your PATH environment variable covers. For instance, when copying it to /usr/local/bin, you should run the following command (assuming you have unpacked the package in the current directory):

cp dtk /usr/local/bin

Note that you should presumably be root to do this!
The installation is finished now, and you are ready to use dTk.

Usage ⇑

Assuming you have installed dTk in a suitable directory, you have installed Samba correctly, and that you are running X, running dTk is simply a matter of issueing:

dtk

You should see a window like the one showing on the screen shots page. In fact the program is separated into two parts: an interface for DCSE and a share browser.

The DCSE interface is completely written in Perl and is not depending on any external program. In contrast, the share browser uses the <b>smbclient</b> and nmblookup programs from the Samba package in order to obtain access to and information from the share.

To search, type in the search terms in the entry bar and hit “search”. If DCSE comes back with a result, it will be displayed in the “large box”. The results are displayed in a form similar to the Dance site. Each directory and/or file is presented like a link and when pressed will open the share browser. There you can search the share and download one or more files or directories.

More documentation should come here...

Frequently Asked Questions ⇑

Ok, so you decided to give dTk a try, you downloaded it from either this site or its mirror, you unpacked it, started it and ... NOTHING!? What went wrong? Did perl spawn a message? What, what, what...?

In this section I will give you a couple of hints that should help to successfully run dTk. Any additions to this section are welcome! Mail me your additions!

This section will hopefully grow when people actually starting to use dTk, but for now I will just give some usefull tips I think could be usefull.

• How do I install Samba?
  I am not going to explain this process in detail, because the Samba development team has excellent support documentation about this. Go to the SAMBA documentation for more information.
• How do I check wheter Perl/Gtk is installed?
  By issuing the command: perl -MGtk -e 'init Gtk'. If nothing is returned (a string, message or whatever), you are fine and can savely assume Gtk is installed.
• How do I install Perl/Gtk?
  Make sure GTK is installed, you can check this by issuing: gtk-config in a
  1. If you see some text about using GTK, you are fine. If not, check out the GTK site, or your distribution, to install GTK
  2. Assuming GTK is installed, you can issue the following command as root: perl -MCPAN -e 'install Gtk'. Perl starts working and, in case you did not use/initialise CPAN before, could ask you some questions. After the initialisation of CPAN, it will install Perl/GTK and end with a message stating that the Perl/GTK package is successfully installed.

Screen shots ⇑

So, you're interested in the looks of dTk? Well, I've two screen shots for you at this moment, feel free to send me new ones if you like!

Main window ⇑

The main window, i.e., the DCSE interface, looks like this:

At the top, you see the menu bar and search entry; below that, you see the results for a search on “dtk” (hey, the program was not released when making this shot! :-). Each line represents a 'hit', it shows just some basic info, like the status of the share (the green and red dots), the type of hit (the first column, all files) and the size of the hit (the number in parenthesises).

Browser window ⇑

The browser window looks like an “explorer” window (no, will not make any jokes about that):

As you can see, the interface is really simple, a button row, a directory window and a file list. The button row contains of five buttons (from left to right): "back", "forward", "multiple copy", "single copy" and "exit".

Downloads ⇑

You have two options for downloading dTk, either do it locally, or from one of its mirrors. You can also check out the latest CVS version. For instructions, you should go to the SourceForge project page of dTk.

The latest version of dTk at this moment is: 1.3.

• dTk version 1.3   (mirror), released 07-03-2002;
• dTk version 1.1   (mirror), released xx-02-2002;
• dTk version 1.0   (mirror), released 07-12-2001.