Picture Elements, Inc.

Software

Herein find miscellaneous software that Picture Elements Inc. chooses to make freely available. Please direct bug-reports/praise to the authors of each package.

Please respect copyrights as appropriate.

Note that some items, while made available in source code form, are stated to require a license for commercial use or for run-time binaries.

Files with the extension .tar.gz are UNIX tar files compressed with the GNU gzip program, available (uncompressed) at ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/gzip-1.2.4.tar. Gzip generally gets better compression that native compress programs, and is unencumbered by patent restrictions.

Files with the .patch extention are patches to some named package, which must be retrieved seperately. Get the source to the patch program from ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/patch-2.1.tar.gz.

Files with the .rpm extension are RedHat Package Manager format and are intended for install on RedHat distributions of Linux. Files ending with .src.rpm are source packages, .i386.rpm are precompiled Linux/Intel packages and .alpha.rpm are precompiled Linux/alpha packages.

Package List

uCR

uCR is an embedded operating system suitable for targets that need a practical, portable and light-weight runtime environment. uCR supports C and C++ development, including support for threads, and source line debugging through the PCI bus. Source code is available under the terms of the GNU Public Licence (GPL). The GNU compilation toolchain is supported, including gcc and gdb, and instructions for building the necessary tools are included in the uCR documentation.

The source code available for FTP is free under the terms of the GNU Public License. Help yourself, although the author would appreciate a note if you download it. Binary distribution licenses are available from Picture Elements, Inc., for a modest fee. Details are included with the source distribution.

The current released version of ucr (and associated tools) are available in the directory ftp://picturel.icarus.com/pub/ucr/, where ucr-X.X.tar.gz are the tagged releases. Also find in this directory the current compilation tools.

Documentation is available at http://www.picturel.com/ucr/uCR.html. The online documentation covers only the most recent release of uCR.

For the current status of uCR, contact the author, Stephen Williams, directly at steve@picturel.com, or send e-mail to bugs@picturel.com.

The work reflected in the ucr distribution has also led to a paper that has been accepted by the COOTS'97 conference commitee for publication. An HTML version of the paper, as published in the conference proceedings, is here.

uCR/Tcl

This is a port of The popular Tcl scripting language to uCR. The port includes the interactive interface and the C programming interface, allowing programmers to extend the interpreter to perform application specific tasks. The port was done and is maintained by Stephen Williams (steve@picturel.com)

To get TCL to work, you need uCR loaded and installed, and you need to download ftp://picturel.icarus.com/pub/source/tcl7.6p2.tar.gz (the pristine tcl source) and the ucr/tcl package from ftp://picturel.icarus.com/put/source/ucr_tcl-current.tar.gz.

IKIT

This is an interactive and batch image processing kit. Included are Tcl extensions for performing detailed image processing, and IKIT, a Tk program that uses the entensions to implement an interactive image manipulation tool. The Tcl extensions also have a C interface, allowing further extensions to be written that take advantage of existing IKIT capabilities. Further image processing functions will be added from time to time, possibly as seperate packages.

Ikit source uses GNU autoconf, and should be pretty portable. It is known to work on Linux/SPARC, Linux/Intel, Linux/alpha and other common UNIX variants. It is also known to work (with some limitations) under Windows NT. The author is Stephen Williams (steve@picturel.com). The software is provided as is under the terms of the GPL included in the distribution packages.

IKIT is also available in the same directory in precompiled forms, for RedHat Linux an Windows NT. The .rpm files are rpms for the specified architecture, and the .zip files are images of install disks for NT.

jpeg-6a NT DLL

The Independent JPEG Group software comes ported to various windows platforms. This distribution is a further modification that links the library into a DLL under Microsoft Windows NT operating system. The forthcoming NT port of IKIT uses this. The port is done by Stephen Williams (steve@picturel.com), while the original authors are the Independent JPEG Group.

zlib-1.0.4 NT DLL

The zlib compression technique is used by both gzip and the PNG graphics file format standard and experimentally as a lossless compression by TIFF. The home page for the library is at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/zlib/. The source stored here has additional files so that it compiles into a DLL on Windows NT.

libpng-0.96 NT DLL

The PNG image file format is a replacement for GIF that is unencumbered by Unisys patent issues. It also by the way performs better, including excellent lossless compression that tends to outperform the LZW compression covered by the Unisys patent. The copy of the PNG source stored here add support for NT DLLS. The unaltered PNG library can be retrieved from the PNG home page at http://www.wco.com/~png.