This documentation is a revised edition of the
MICE documentation of
National Support Centre London
Revision by Jens Elkner (elkner@irb.cs.uni-magdeburg.de).
User Guide to wb
wb is the shared whiteboard tool developed by Van Jacobson and
Steven McCanne (both of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of
California, Berkeley, CA.) to provide a shared display function for
teleconferencing over the Internet.
It is the current standard shared whiteboard tool for MICE conferencing.
What does it do for you?
While wb is used as an independent shared whiteboard, it is more
frequently used in conjunction with video and audio tools in a full
videoconference. For meetings, it provides a normal shared whiteboard
on which participants may write, draw and type with all contributions
visible to all participants. In a seminar it can be an OHP by
using its capacity to import PostScript pages.
In this mode there is a support tool from the same authors called
wbimport.
If you intend to use it as a conferencing tool, you are advised to review the
Guide to Multi-media Conferencing.
The use of this tool for conferencing depends on the existence of a facility
to multicast from each participant to all others without having to
broadcast to every workstation on the network.
This facility is known as the Multicast Backbone or
Mbone
To use wb you will need to install the correct version of the multicasting
software for your workstation.
You should use the LBL Session Directory
to publish and monitor network multicasts.
How do you use wb?
Known Problems
The following are known problems with wb. If you know of any others
please let us know.
- Running IRIX 5.2 on an Indy wb crashes the 4Dwm window manager.
- A workaround for this problem is to run xpsview before running
wb. xpsview does something to initialize display
postscript that is not done in wb. It should be in
/usr/bin/X11
- You will need to start xpsview only once after every reboot.
Maybe starting the program somewhere in /etc/rc*.d or
/etc/stdlogin
I put the following line in my
$HOME/.login so that I will not forget to run
xpsview before running wb.
xpsview& ; sleep 20 ; killall xpsview
Warning
the killall command will kill all your xpsview
processes. You may want to check first to see if there
is a running xpsview by:
if (`ps -u $USER | grep xpsview | wc -l` < 1) then
xpsview& ; sleep 20 ; killall xpsview
endif
We would also like to hear from you regarding your experiences in
using this documentation.
Comments of any kind and all technical enquiries should be addressed to:
mice-nsc-uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Acknowledgement
The development of wb, vat, and sd was supported by the Director, Office of Energy Research, Scientific Computing Staff, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098.