Pdmenu, a simple menu program: By Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> This program is Copyright 1995-1999 by Joey Hess, and may be distributed under the terms of the GPL. What is Pdmenu? Pdmenu is a menuing system for Unix. It is designed to be easy to use, and is suitable for a login shell for inexperienced users, or it can just be ran at the command line as a handy menu. Pdmenu features color support and GPM mouse support at the linux console. It compiles on most varieties of Unix. See Pdmenu's man pages for information about the format of the pdmenurc file, and how to use the program. I was prompted to write Pdmenu when I took a look at a shell script that used dialog to generate similar menus. The shell script was huge, complicated, and ugly, and had to be modified manually to add anything to the menu. I hope that Pdmenu is better. :-) For more info, visit Pdmenu's home page at: http://kitenet.net/programs/pdmenu/ Please see INSTALL for building and installation instructions. Precompiled binaries: rpm: If you use RedHat Linux, a pdmenu rpm is available. You'll find it on RedHat's ftp site, or at http://kitenet.net/programs/RPMS.cgi#pdmenu These may be a little out of date, I don't update them with each version. You can also build your own rpm using the redhat/pdmenu.spec spec file. deb: If you use Debian Linux, a .deb of pdmenu is available from ftp.debian.org or a mirror in the usual location. The pdmenu source tree will also build a .deb on its own on a debian system, just run "dpkg-buildpackage". Or you can download the latest .deb from http://kitenet.net/programs/debs.cgi#pdmenu A few sample uses of Pdmenu: Here are a few ways I've used Pdmenu: * Just a menu which users can get by typing pdmenu at the prompt. (Suprise..) * As a login shell. (Just change their shell, it works fine.) * A neat trick is to put something like #!/usr/bin/pdmenu on the top line of a pdmenu config file, and make the file executable. * As a menu displayed when the system boots, or as a system monitor menu. There are several sample pdmenurc files that show off the features of Pdmenu in the examples/ subdirectory. Note that you try these at your own risk. If you put in a command that lets a user get root, it's your own fault, not mine. Thanks go out to: Rob Lesan, who builds RPMs of pdmenu for me, since I don't have a redhat machine. Randolph Chung, who helped me learn C and Linux, and who has put up with all my questions to this day. And he threw together mouse support for Pdmenu in no time flat one night, too. Christiaan Keet, who asked for a menu program, and got it, and who helped me with beta testing. John E. Davis, creator of the S-Lang library, who's been willing to answer questions about the less-documented parts. Lassen Software, Inc, whose dos-based Program Manager Plus software was the inspiration for this program. Please, send me feedback. I welcome any comments, feature requests, or bug reports. Send them to joey@kitenet.net. Please include the version number of pdmenu, slang, and your operating system in bug reports. If you are interested in becoming a Pdmenu beta tester, and/or being notified of new releases, please mail me about it, and I'll add you to the announce list. Joey Hess, <joey@kitenet.net>
