This program simulates bouncing balls in a window. You create the balls in a variety of ways, and can set the gravity, elasticity, whether balls collide or not, etc.
Young children enjoy watching the balls bounce around the screen and are fascinated by the program. This is an ideal program for teaching rudimentary mouse skills to very young children.
To run the 14 included demo scripts, open a console terminal and type 'run_demos' to see each demo one after the next.
This program was created in 1989, and Debianized from an older SuSE 8.0 and maintained by Debian until about 2017 when it became an Orphan package. Lacking SVN history, this version makes an approximation of where it left-off, and continues from there to this version - 3.1.0 - original home page is https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/xball
What's been updated here:
- Debian Orphaned xball brought up to date and is buildable with current PCs.
- Dropped Debian packaging and reworked xball to be built with configure make.
- 'make dist' builds package that can be built by user using ./configure make.
- xball.pc package file added.
- freedesktop configuration added and improved to include *.xball to be seen
as xball scripts. You click demo.xball and it automatically runs xball demo
Also added desktop files for 64x64, 128x128, 256x256 icon files. - run_demo is installed in same directory as xball and demo scripts are kept
in xball data directory. - Corrected COPYING from boilerplate to what appears to be ISC license.
- xball manual is installed as xball.6 in games manual directory.
- rgb.txt now searched and found in /usr/X11 directory.
- Due to the upgrades, bumped minor value from 0 to 1, making this ver 3.1.0
Developers who want to develop this further will want to fetch a git clone.
Regular users will likely want to fetch xball-dist-3.1.0.tar.gz since you do not need autoconf/automake and can go directly to running ./configure and make