						2002-02-10
						Emil Brink

			gentoo v0.11.19

INTRODUCTION
gentoo is a graphical file managment program, written from
scratch in C. It uses the GTK+ toolkit for its interface.
gentoo is developed and tested primarily under Linux, but is
known to compile and work on many other Unix-like operating
systems as well.
	One of the design goals with gentoo has been to provide
extensive customization and configuration abilities, and to do
so from an integrated, graphic, interface. The user should not
have to edit the configuration file directly "by hand", and
especially not have to restart the program for changes to take
effect.
	gentoo features a fairly complex and powerful system
for file type recognition, coupled to an object-oriented style
system, which together give you a lot of control over how files
of different types are displayed and acted upon.


LICENSING
This software is Copyright (c) 1998-2002 by Emil Brink.
	You are free to distribute this software under the terms
of the GNU General Public License, version 2. You should have
received a copy of this license together with the software (in a
file called COPYING). If not, and you have web access, check
<http://www.gnu.org>.
	It is important to realize that this software comes
without any form of warranty.


THE AUTHOR
gentoo was written by Emil Brink. It is my first program to use
GTK+, my first major Linux application, and my first program
released in source form under the GPL, but it's absolutely _not_
my first program. ;^) I've been hacking since the late eighties,
and am currently a studying for a Master of Science in computer
science at the Royal Institute of Technology ("RIoT") here in
Stockholm, Sweden. I've recently filed a request to graduate.
	Work on gentoo started in May 1998, when I decided it
would be fun to learn the GTK+ interface toolkit. The first
actual release of gentoo was called version 0.9.0, and made
its public appearance back in September 1998.
	Please send questions, answers, bug reports, praise (?)
and critique straight to <emil@obsession.se>. I am listening.
Also, please do try to include the word "gentoo" in the subject
of your e-mail, to help me manage my e-mail. Thank you.


RELEASE NOTES
Again, this release brings nothing major. gentoo is more or
less in a maintenance state, and I guess I should bring it up
to a stable version number some day... Unfortunately, I do feel
that important things are missing, mainly the menu editing. It
turns out to be far more tricky than I thought, which keeps me
from attacking it.
	I expect the GTK+ team to release the next major version
of the toolkit (2.0) soon. That will be a really major change,
and will require large parts of gentoo to be completely rewritt-
en. Don't hold your breath for that one, please.
	See the NEWS file for details of what changed in this
version; there's really nothing much though.


FOR MORE INFORMATION...
* Information about system requirements and instructions about
  how to build an executable are provided in the file INSTALL,
  as usual.
* For (sometimes very technical and close-to-the-source) notes
  on exactly what's happened in this release, check out the
  NEWS file. I recommend reading it on each new release.
* Details about gentoo's support for GUI customization through
  the use of GTK+ RC files are in the README.gtkrc file.
* For information about known problems, quirks and general
  developer headaches, please see the BUGS file.
* There is a TODO file, containing a few major things I have
  planned/want to see implemented.


DOCUMENTATION
The documentation that is available is incomplete and sort of
out of date. I'm sorry about that. Hopefully, I will find the
time and energy in the future to do a complete rewrite of the
documentation, since much has changed and been added since it
was written.
	There is a short manpage that touches the bare essentials,
in "docs/gentoo.1x". Please read it.
	There is some reasonably modern documentation in plain
text format in some files in "docs/scratch/". Read those, too.

/Emil
