Mail Archives: djgpp/1995/04/15/02:20:30
Hey, Eli! For the FAQ, maybe? You'll want to get Appleyard's
original post, also the one about 2m30, too.
From: "A.Appleyard" <A DOT APPLEYARD AT fs2 DOT mt DOT umist DOT ac DOT uk>
which I managed to fit onto 7 floppies. But the various
alternatives seem to run into difficulties:-
[... alternatives deleted ...]
You missed one: get Tony Helm's EZ-GCC package, 3 1.44MB floppies for
the minimum C system, additional floppies contain G++, GDB, and
something else, I forget the exact organization. It's available by
anonymous FTP at the URLs in my .sig. And so are the sources (unless
I've screwed up the updates---Tony's internal usage doesn't violate
CopyLeft, we think, so he doesn't provide the source package, but my
public distribution clearly requires source), in which case somebody
*please* tell me before the FSF lawyers show up :-)
Less floppy handling load, but it runs into the Gnu Public
Licence, which says that djgpp must be distributed complete.
No, it says it must be available in the same way. On demand. For the
price of media. (I'm not sure about this last, I think that's
implied---you can charge as much as you want for the original
distribution, but if the sources are not included you can only charge
for the media, shipping, and nominal handling if they are requested.)
So make up 1 source distribution per dozen sets of binaries. Or
whatever the demand is.
May I suggest another way, cheaper than setting up a FTP server?
Um, what's cheaper than free? Get Linux. OK, if yer runnin' Maxen
you can't run Linux (or *BSD, is that right?) (yet ;-)---but then what
*are* you doing on the DJGPP list, which is targeted at them same iAPX
architecture boxes as Linux? :-) OK, it cost me 2 work days, one to
get and configure Linux, the second to get and configure wu-ftpd. If
a professional---I'm not---can't do both in one work day, fire him ;-)
Let the site (university or whatever) keep djgpp etc on a notebook
PC, already unzipped if there is hard disk room for it; and also
LAPLINK. If Mr.X wants djgpp (or whatever), someone takes the
laptop, and a laplink connecter cable, and a floppy with LAPLINK
When I first looked into LapLink, I believe it had the standard
idiotic licensing, which required you to buy LapLink for each computer
you wanted to transfer to. Have they fixed this bug? I don't know
for sure, it wasn't a plain language license, but I think that's what
it meant. Obviously, I didn't buy it.... The people I know who have
it use it for the application you suggest all the time; they are also
miscreants who don't bother to respect idiotic aspects of licenses, so
that proves nothing.
Norton Desktop includes this functionality, specifically permits
temporary loading of Norton Desktop to a computer for the purpose of
file transfer (it will even do this automagically over a null modem
serial cable), but does not include the funky parallel cable required
for really fast transfers. Approximately the same price as Laplink,
and the cable costs $15 in US materials, $30 if you have a good shop
make it, $50 and it's broken at a bad shop.
DESQview/X allows you to do this by FTP over a null modem if you use
SLIP/PPP. Twice the price of Laplink, plus buy a cable. Linux allows
you to do it by SLIP, PPP, or PLIP. Free, but you pay for the cable.
They do, of course, take up a lot of disk space (10MB for DV/X if you
don't want Oriental fonts ;-), 100MB (including swap space) for Linux
without X but with TeX, Emacs, etc. Actually, the Slackware Linux
boot floppy + root floppy combo will give you enough Internet
capability to do this. Free!! plus the price of a cable.
on, to Mr.X's office, and thus copies in as much or little of djgpp
(or whatever) as Mr.X wants. A file server in a backpack!
If "someone" isn't on call within the same amount of time as for the
original installation to provide Mr.X with the sources, this is a
copyright violation. Don't forget that aspect in applications,
please. (I think that's what Anthony meant by "as much" above; I just
want to make it absolutely clear what the CopyLeft requires here IMHO.)
Laplink is far faster than floppies: I saw it being used to copy
120 meg of files from my old PC to my new PC (both desktops), and
it went FAR faster and easier then copying in floppyfuls.
That it is. So you can recycle all those floppies for storing those
GIFs that the boss doesn't want on the machine's HDD....
Have we beaten this horse to death yet? I'm sure I can come up with
more ways to do it....
--
Stephen Turnbull / Yaseppochi-gumi / <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/ anon FTP: turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
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