Modified 2005-02-07 09:01
TT-News (Tick-Tick News) is a program that displays headlines (a news-ticker, or Nachricht-Börsentelegraph as babelfish would have it in German :-)) fetched from various news sources such as www.torget.se,www.slashdot.org, www.bbc.co.uk, www.freshmeat.net, and more. The program is written in C/C++ and QT, but the actual news-fetching is done using lynx (thou it can be done using any method). The headlines are displayed in a window that sits in a corner of the screen or, alternatively, a user-selected place. The main window can be configured to have (or not have) window-decorations. The program can display an article, if it exists, in a separate window as seen below.
You can download sources as well as binaries here. Note that the version for QT 1.44 uses BMP-images instead of PNGs, which takes a lot more space. If you have binaries for other platforms, please contribute them to my mail address below.
ttnews-1.0.4.tar.gz (Source, 112 kb).
NOTE: These are OLD versions, don't run them if you don't really have to!
ttnews-1.0.3.tar.gz (Source, 111 kb).
ttnews_1.0.3-1_i386.deb (Debian binary package, 234 kb).
ttnews-1.0.3-1.src.rpm (Redhat Source RPM package, 114 kb).
ttnews-1.0.3-1.i386.rpm (Redhat 6.2 binary RPM package, 262 kb).
ttnews-1.0.2-1.mipsel.rpm ("Redhat 6.1" binary RPM package, 207 kb). This is a binary build against QT 2.0.1 on my DECstation 5000/120, please report success or failure with this package, especially for MIPS'es other than DECstation 5000/120s. A debian version may be coming soon. Some documentation (the .ps-files) are missing in this distribution.
ttnews-1.0.1.src.tar.gz (Source, 90 kb). PNGs for the skins. QT 2.0 is needed.
ttnews_qt144-1.0.0-1.i386.rpm (Binaries for i386 with QT 1.4X, 495 kb). If you have RH 6.0 or less this is what's needed (has BMPs instead of PNGs). Note that this is NOT the latest release. The newest one does not support QT 1.44.
The documentation for TT-News is now available online as a HTML document, see here.
Some screen shots of TT-News follows below.
This is how it looks if you place the mouse pointer over it, as you can see it displays the news article in a separate window. TT-News uses "skins" so that you can change the look (almost) as you like. This next shot features the program in "docked" mode, in this case it has been docked by FvwmButtons (which I support, your mileage with other panels may vary). This shot shows the new docked look, soon to be released. You can also see a part of the improved news selector.
If you have installed it, but try to run it from the source-directory, the program will exit with failure. This is because it finds the ttnews.conf-file in the current directory and uses that one (which might not be entirely correct). Moving to a different directory should fix that one.
TT-News can be configured to use keyboard-shortcuts in the same way as GQMPEG does. That is, it reads a file in the users .ttnews/ directory to which you can echo commands (like show the article, show next headline an so forth). To use these "shortcuts", you bind commands like "echo next > $HOME/.ttnews/command" to certain keys in your window-manager config (I use SHIFT-META-F11 for this particular example) . The README describes how to do this for fvwm2, which is my favourite window-manager.
There might be a problem with viewing URLs in TT-News on some systems. TT-News complains about Unable to execute binary file. This is solved by creating a wrapper-script around the browser and run that instead. For instance, you may create a script /usr/local/bin/ttnews.browser which looks like:
#!/bin/bash /usr/bin/galeon $1 $2 $3If galeon is your browser. Then, in your ttnews.conf (usually in /usr/local/share/ttnews/ttnews.conf or your home directory under ~/.ttnews/ttnews.conf), change UrlBrowser to:
UrlBrowser = /usr/local/bin/ttnews.browser
And this should hopefully work. Thanks to Lou Afonso for pointing this out.
readConfig.c: In function `ConfigStruct *readConfig (char *)': readConfig.c:279: cannot convert `int *' to `size_t *' for argument `2'
I've searched through the source and removed the warnings, and TT-News as of 1.0.5 (unreleased yet) shouldn't have these problems. Thanks once more goes to Lou Afonso!
Some things need to be changed in order to compile TT-News for QT3. Thanks to Michael Prokop (see www.michael-prokop.at) for this:
"What I had to do:
change options in all the Makefiles from /usr/share/qt [IIRC] to /usr/share/qt3 because I of using qt3 [well - the old path-entry could be a symbolic link, right ;-)]
I had to change "SYSCONF_LIBS_QT" in Makefiles from "-lqt" to "-lqt-mt".
And last but not least I had to change the following entry:
#include
Due to the Qt-Documentation "the QList class has been renamed QPtrList in Qt 3.0".
So I changed the includes to:
#includeJust to summarize, I changed qtlist.h to qptrlist.h in the following files:
$ grep -nr qptrlist.h ../ttnews-1.0.4/ ../ttnews-1.0.4/newsTable.h:5:#include../ttnews-1.0.4/newsTable.cpp:10:#include Then your programm is ready for Qt3 :-)"
Publicity
TT-News was mentioned in the August-2000 (paper) issue of Linux Journal. I quote the article (hmm.. not quite article. Well.) by David A. Bandel:
"This news ticker is for those who crave information overload. Even I couldn't handle all the news it gave me with a default install, and that's a lot of news. Fortunately, ttnews comes with information on how to configure it, and it's not difficult to do. It requires libqt2, libX11, libXext, libstdc++, libm, glibc, bash and Lynx."
TT-News has also been reviewed at Tucows / Linuxberg, where it got four penguins. I thank the linuxbergians.
Help needed
There are some known bugs in this program, and a lot of features are still missing. I plan to swat/implement them continuously, but I'd appreciate any help I can get. A list of ideas follows:
- Make new and nicer skins.
- GUI configuration.
- Use GNU Autoconf.
- Binaries for other platforms than Linux/i386
- Perhaps add direct support for downloading RSS'es from TT-News. This would make the program a bit sleeker, and also facilitate the adding of a GUI news site selector.
Of course, I need YOUR help with this program. This IS open source after all, and I would greatly appreciate help with things like the configuration-part and writing servers for different news-sources. It would also be nice if someone with more graphical talent than I could draw some nice skins :-) (thanks Tommy!). You will get credit for that!
The program should compile for just about anything that has QT installed (and Lynx, so far). Feel free to contribute binaries for platforms such as *BSD.
To contact me, mail to the following address (decrypted):You can click here to see some statistics on the page.
