GNUspool Release 1.5
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  Copyright 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
  are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
  notice and this notice are preserved.

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Welcome to GNUspool. This is a product formerly known as Xi-Text
written by John Collins who has a company called Xi Software Ltd in
the UK. This is a GNU package as of 17 August 2008.

The intention is to provide a comprehensive spooling system for UNIX
systems and GNU/Linux with transparently shared jobs and printers
across the network.

The first version of the product was written in 1984 and it has been
added to and refined ever since. However please read TODO regarding
future ideas for the product.

This has been edited so as to talk about GNUspool rather than Xi-Text
and names suitably changed. It should be able to talk to other
machines running Xi-Text although the port numbers are different and
will have to be changed on one.

To build and install the product, please see INSTALL first.

Please also see the manuals in subdirectories of "doc", which were in
OpenOffice 1 format, but have been rather hastily edited and converted
to ODF in OOManuals. Please send bug reports as you find them. I
haven't altered the pictures which currently talk about Xi-Text and Xi
Software rather than GNUspool and FSF. I've also put some rather
out-of-date man pages (done in Perl POD) in poddoc. Prominent in the
TODO list is translating this to TexInfo format.

Also included is the MS-Windows sources for the MS Windows client
software using MFC and on MS Visual C++ which needs converting to Free
Software. This does actually work and people use it but MFC is about
as far from Free Software as you can get so I want to use something
Free PDQ. Also it's vastly inferior to the standard C++ library which
is available as Free Software.

I also include the web interface software which does work using Free
Software but I concede needs rewriting probably using PHP.

I hope you will find this useful and help develop the product beyond
what I imagined.

John Collins
August 2008

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Update March 2009: Added CUPS emulation package using Python CUPSPY
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