The nightview package is a server-client application. This means that, in principle, minimally two programs must run: The server program on computer with camera connected and some client program. We recommends use different computers for its due to increase efficiency during down-loading image over parallel port. Both server and client can run on the same machine, of course.
Our configuration on MonteBoo is an old P90 computer as server and (de)Celeron 433 as a platform for client. Both run the Debian. The server don't need massive hardware support. It run only server and a few operational system utilities. I believe that 386 with 8Megs of memory and 50M disc will be OK, but I recommends at least 486 with respect to the higher speeds of image downloading over parallel port. The more than P90, 16M memory and 100M disc is un-warranted luxury and it don't operate faster because limited by the parallel port and net speed. The server needn't extensive use of disc space. Only the clients saves images. The server-client framework is equipped to use in TCP/IP environment. Than the utility will be work for example over intranet with ethernet, serial or radio link. The Monte Boo camera operates on one ethernet segment of the Masaryk University, so the our camera is directly connected to Internet. Note, that server part not needs some expensive libraries except libsbig, cfitsio and standard system libraries.
The nightview package contains two kinds of clients: GUI for GTK+ and shell utilities. The GTK+ front-end is usable for interactive control of the CCD. It's useful for focusing, temperature regulation or telescope pointing.
The shell client are developed for non-interactive control of CCD. They are contains all functions of the GUI package and all functions of the CCD camera. With this utilities the camera is controled over a extremely slow communication lines (telephone) and for the batch processing. There is a shell front-end - night_control - for acquiring of image series with arbitrary combination of the exposure timeouts and filters.
In principle, there is no problem for implementation of clients on other platforms or in others languages or environments. So, the windows users can connect to server with fully transparency as the linux clients for example. Moreover, I suppose that the implementation of the on-line http server with full control of the camera will be developed in the near future.
Simple block schema of nightview package.