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2. What are CIX, Ameol and Wine?

2.1 What is CIX?

CIX is the service provider for an on-line conferencing system. The name CIX is short for "Compulink Information eXchange".

For rather obscure reasons, the CIX pages have moved to the parent company's website, Nextra UK.

You'll need an account. As CIX is a commercial service, you'll have to pay to signup and for the time that you're logged in. CIX charges are by the minute, with monthly billing.

2.2 What is Ameol?

Ameol is the offical offline reader (OLR for short) for CIX. Working offline allows you to create, read, reply to conferencing/email messages, while not connected to the Internet.

This will minimise time connected to CIX, and so reduce the size of your CIX bills. Since the introduction of CIX offline line readers, in the early 1990s, OLRs have become very popular on CIX.

The sourcecode to Ameol isn't available. Until that changes, which is unlikely, only Ameol binaries will be available.

The name is short for A Most Excellent Offline Reader.

2.3 What is Wine?

Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing unmodified Windows 3.1/95/NT binaries to run under Intel Unixes. Wine works on most popular Intel Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. Wine comes with complete sources, documentation and examples and is freely redistributable. (The licensing terms are similar to X11.)


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