LEGAL STUFF:
Copyright Renaud Olgiati 2013.

The program Ship-Bells 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 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. (see file COPYING)

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; 
without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  
See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You have received a copy of the GNU General Public License Version 3 along with this program.  
If you have misplaced it, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.


SHIP-BELLS

A Linux program to strike the bells every half-hour

OVERVIEW :
Ships-Bells is a program that, once installed on a computer running Linux, will strike the bell at each turn of the glass, during the watches of the day and night.


INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION :
This program depends on utilities which are part of the alsa-utils package; if this is not installed on your system, you will first need to install it from your usual repository.

As user, download the shipbells archive, and extract it; this will create a shipbellstmp temporary directory from which you will run the setup script; so open a console, move to the shipbellstmp directory just created in your download directory, and launch the installation with the command sh setup.sh

This in turn will create the ~/Music/shipbells directory, copy there the relevant files, and add the necessary lines to the user's crontab.
4
During the installation, you will be asked whether you want the bells struck in the US Navy style or the Royal Navy style, and at what level to set the sound volume.  Those settings can be changed later by running again sh setup.sh in a console from the ~/Music/shipbells directory.

Once installed, you will no longer need the Ship-Bells .tar.gz archive, nor the shipbellstmp temporary directory, and can safely remove them both.

Warning: Ship-Bells will not install as root, it needs to be installed and run as user to avoid complications.

REMOVAL :
As user, run sh setup.sh in a console, from the ~/Music/shipbells directory, and answer Y when asked if you want to remove Ship-Bells.

After which you can safely remove the ~/Music/shipbells directory.

TROUBLESHOOTING :
- You may get an error message similar to: "pulseaudio[4645]: [pulseaudio] server-lookup.c: Unable to contact D-Bus: "
Some systems have problems with the aplay program from Alsa-utils; in this case, a possible work-around is to install Sox ("the Swiss-knife of sound manipulation") and edit the strikebells file in ~/Music/shipbells , replacing "aplay" with "play" on line 12.

PLANNED IMPROVEMENTS :
None for now.

CHANGELOG :
	0.9.1 2013/11/10	Original release
	0.9.2 2013/11/10	Restore the sound volume setting after striking bells
				Gives a warning if installing under Android (no cron)
				Removes temporary directory once the initial setup is finished.

CONTACT :
If you have any queries, questions, problems, ideas for improvement, or want to send a huge donation, I can be reached at renaud@olgiati-in-paraguay.org.

Last revision 2013/11/10



