
Copyright (c) 1999, Akopia, inc.

Welcome to Tallyman.  This is the second public release, version
2.0b5.  Well over a thousand people downloaded the first release, and
we received much positive feedback.  

Tallyman-2.0b5 contains several major bug fixes; all 2.0a3 users
should upgrade.  See the 'Upgrading' file in this directory for
information on how to upgrade from 2.0a3.  See the 'Changes' file in
this directory for a summary of changes.

Tallyman is Free Software, and as such comes with no warranty.  (But
contact Akopia at information@akopia.com for information on commercial
support) It's not guaranteed to do anything, especially work
completely or reliably.  That said, we should add that we use the
software in production environments, and it works well for us.

The very first thing you should do is go to www.tallyman.com and play with
the online demo.  Our software is web-based, and so we've set up a fully
functioning demo that you can use without installing anything on your 
system.  www.tallyman.com is also the best place to go for Tallyman 
documentation, since development is currently happening very rapidly,
and docs go out of date very frequently.

Also consider checking out your copy of Tallyman from our anonymous cvs
server.  This will let you follow the development of Tallyman as we work
toward a public full release.  See www.tallyman.com for details.

Tallyman has been successfully installed under Linux, HP-UX and
FreeBSD, although it should work under most other flavors of Un*x.
Our web site has installation notes for specific platforms.  Please
contact us if we can help get Tallyman working on your favorite
operating system.

Following is the short version of the installation requirements for
Tallyman.  There are specific things you should be aware of when 
installing each of the packages listed here.  Since testing is still
underway for various operating systems and distributions, you'll have
to go to www.tallyman.com for the latest info.

Tallyman requires: 
	Apache
	HTML::EmbPerl (perl module)
	DBI (perl module)
	Oracle or PostgreSQL (database)
	DBD::Oracle or DBD::Pg (perl module)

You'll need to have these installed and working on your system before 
attempting to install Tallyman.  doc/apache_include.conf has a sample
section of an httpd.conf file which will need to be placed near the
end of Apache's httpd.conf to correctly configure Embperl and set up
the environment properly so that Tallyman can find its libraries.

When you're ready to install Tallyman itself, you can run the installer script 
from your favorite shell.  Typing "help" at any prompt will give you 
context-sensitive help.  To run the installer:

[ jason@lunkwill /usr/local/tallyman ]$ cd tools
[ jason@lunkwill /usr/local/tallyman/tools ]$ ./install.pl

Once Tallyman is successfully installed, the install script will give
you the URL of Tallyman's back office, from which you can begin
administration of your store.

We would love to hear from you.  Email us at information@tallyman.com,
or join the tallyman-users email list:

http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/tallyman-users

To receive occasional news and information about Tallyman, consider
joining the tallyman-announce list:

http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/tallyman-announce

Contact information@tallyman.com for information on the tallyman-dev
list if you'd like to work on the Tallyman internals.

You can always go to http://www.tallyman.com/ for the latest version
of documentation and help.

