Welcome to Eagles BBS 3.1 BETA-2

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version. See the COPYING file for further information.

Eagles BBS 3 is a standalone, screen-oriented bulletin board package. 
It is the successor to Eagles BBS version 2, which was built upon Ed Luke's
Pirates BBS package. The user interface from those programs has been kept
intact for the most part, and some code has been reused. For the most part
this is a complete rewrite though, to correct some basic limitations and
inefficiencies present in Pirates and Eagles 2.x. 

This software has a fairly full-featured message posting and private mail
system, its own IRC-like chat system, and private talk facility. It has
configurable menus allowing custom arrangement of the builtin functions 
and any external programs you care to hook in.

One thing Eagles BBS is not suited for quite yet is as a fancy shell. 
All BBS users run as a single user, so things like shell access and
news do not integrate very well. You should probably look elsewhere if
BBS users are to be anything more than guests on your system.
(Update: This will be changing soon. Maybe not in 3.1, but I will make
 some mods very soon that allow the bbs to run as any user listed in
 the system passwd file, thus eliminating the need for the 'bbs' user
 and the dual logins. Watch for it.)

One improvement over Pirates and old Eagles is much greater runtime
configuration. A lot of stuff you used to have to recompile to change is
now in config files read in at runtime. All of these files are ASCII so
they may be patched with an editor if needed. The stock config files are
in the config directory and reside in ~bbs/etc at runtime.

IMPORTANT:
If you are already using an earlier version of EBBS 3, be SURE to read the
ReleaseNotes and ChangeLog to see what has changed before continuing!!!

All documentation has been moved into the EBBS-Guide. Please consult it
for installation and configuration instructions, examples, and technical
information. 

The Linux binary distribution, ebbs-3.1BETA2-Linux.tar.gz, was built with 
gcc 2.5.8. You should have Linux 1.0 or later, the GNU shared C library 
version 4.5.19 or later, and the dynamic loader ld.so. Earlier versions 
of the kernel and shared C library may or may not work.
(Update: I probably won't provide a binary dist of the BETA...ignore this)

The source distribution, ebbs-3.1BETA2.tar.gz, should build under recent 
versions of Linux, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, OSF/1, NextStep, A/UX, Unixware, 
Ultrix, MachTen, HPUX, and FreeBSD. You should go through the Makefile and 
osdeps.h to set up the conditional defines for your operating system -- 
see EBBS-Guide under "Building the Source" for details. 

If you have an operational EBBS 2.x that you want to convert to version 3,
you'll need the source distribution and the conversion package, cvtpkg.tar.gz.
It should be available at //ftp:/seabass.st.usm.edu/pub/EaglesBBS or
other sites. Get it and see the enclosed README for the scoop on getting 
your existing BBS converted to version 3.1.
   
Add-on packages (useful scripts, safe editors, etc.) are under development.
Check the EaglesBBS directory on seabass mentioned above to see what's there.


The TODO list
-------------

These features aren't there, but might be one day:

-- Mail clean program (will be released as an add-on package)
-- Tagging of messages in mail, for deleting or forwarding.
-- Reading lists that allow each user to specify the order to scan the
   boards during a new message scan.
-- The big TODO: A split into client and server, with which the client 
   can run on a different machine and do things like editing, menu movements,
   shell escapes, job control, etc. locally.
   (Update: I have a client/server pair that has all the regular features
    except talk working. It's really slow though. As soon as I have time
    to correct the speed problem and write documentation for the bbslib
    functions I'll put it out as an alpha)


Known Bugs
----------

-- On the File Menu, the "Current Board" is shown is not the currently
   selected File board. It is correct on the Download read-menu.
   (The fix isn't worth the trouble)
-- On Solaris, lbbs processes have a habit of hanging around as zombies
   after they exit. It is unclear whether Solaris or the bbs is at fault.
-- The file-based user table is reported to have some problems. This is
   only an issue if you do not have a shared memory facility.


Credits
-------

Thanks to these people for helping code, test, debug, and port EBBS 3!
Ed Luke
Ray Seyfarth
Bill Schwartz
Xabier Vazquez Gallardo
John Salmi
Paul Snow
Mark Roe
Andre Schmidt
Jon Stevens
Thanh Ma
Alex Schubert
Jiri Randus
Rob Woodard
Mike McCallum
Randy Austin
Alexis Yushin
Everyone at the Eagle's Nest and Auggie BBS

Additional tip of the hat for assistance with previous versions of EBBS:
Guy Vega, Dominic Tynes, Jim Morton, Carey Chou

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Good luck, and happy BBSing!

TheRock
In real life:  Ray Rocker
On the air:    WQ5L
Internet:      rocker@datasync.com
CompuServe:    72673,2105