[avahi] Announcing Avahi 0.1 "Guten Tag!" - Multicast DNS Service Discovery Framework

[Trent Lloyd]

The Avahi team would like to announce the immediate availability of 
Avahi 0.1 "Guten Tag".

Avahi is a fully LGPL framework for Multicast DNS Service Discovery.
It allows programs to publish and discover services and hosts 
running on a local network with no specific configuration.  For 
example you can plug into a network and instantly find printers to 
print to, files to look at and people to talk to.

Avahi is designed to be compatible with the mDNS/DNS-SD specification 
and boasts the following features

 * Fully open source and freely available under the LGPL
 * Full IPv4 and IPv6 support
 * An embeddable mDNS stack
 * Dynamic adjustment to network reconfiguration
 * Daemon with DBUS API for desktop applications
 * C library to interface with the DBUS API
 * Compatible with other mDNS/DNS-SD implementations such as
   Howl and Apple Bonjour (previously Rendezvous)
 * Ability to correctly "reflect" mDNS between two or more LAN segments
 * Ability to configure DNS servers based on mDNS/DNS-SD published
   information, a feature that is very usefull on IPv6
   which has no other mechanism for this.
 * Combined with nss-mdns, allows hostname lookup such as 
   'laptop.local' without the configuration of a DNS server.
   http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/nss-mdns/
 * Easy integration into GLIB, GTK other mainloop applications.
 * Documentation and examples of both developer APIs and utilities.

mDNS/DNS-SD is part of a larger set of specifications for easy 
configuration of networking known as "ZeroConf" 
(http://www.zeroconf.org/), with the aim of allowing you to plug into 
a network and instantly be able to interact with it's services.

Avahi was designed to be a fully free implementation, and is 
available under the LGPL.  Many other implementations of the mDNS/DNS-SD 
specification were previously non-free, restricting their use in many 
platforms such as the GNOME desktop and many distributions.

While Avahi is a 0.1 release, we feel it is feature complete and 
available for immediate use, developers can make use of the Avahi 
client library to provide above mentioned functionality in their 
programs.

We unfortunately do not have a logo yet! We would love if someone 
could suggest ideas for a logo or even design us one.  If you think 
you can help us out, you can contact us on our mailing list or by 
emailing Trent Lloyd on lathiat at bur.st.

If you would like more information or help, you can subscribe
to our mailinglist, goto
    http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/avahi

You can download Avahi 0.1 here
    http://bur.st/~lathiat/avahi/avahi-0.1.tar.gz

You can also find out more information from our homepage
    http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/Avahi

We would like to thank the following people for their
contribution to Avahi 0.1.

    Lennart Poeterring
    Trent Lloyd
    Sebastien Estienne
    Ross Burton
    Tommi Vainikainen
    Joe Shaw
    Ikke
    Steev

Cheers,
The Avahi Team