From: Richard Dawe Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: QUESTION: interest in a DJGPP version of the GNU Privacy Guard Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2000 11:35:04 +0000 Organization: Customer of Energis Squared Lines: 54 Message-ID: <3A3CA4E8.C3931AA8@bigfoot.com> References: <91fh43$url$1 AT news5 DOT isdnet DOT net> NNTP-Posting-Host: modem-28.neilsborium.dialup.pol.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: news5.svr.pol.co.uk 977053018 27411 62.136.73.156 (17 Dec 2000 11:36:58 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: 17 Dec 2000 11:36:58 GMT X-Complaints-To: abuse AT theplanet DOT net X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.17 i586) X-Accept-Language: de,fr To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Hello. Ronald Landheer wrote: > The question is, whether or not there is any interest in a DJGPP version > of the GNU Privacy Guard [snip] > If there is such an interest, I will pay closer attention to sticking - > as much as possible - to the original, and documenting what changes I > make (probably by using diff). I would be interested in a port of GPG. I want to use it in/from zippo, a package manager for DJGPP [1], to sign & verify DJGPP packages. GPG requires a source of random numbers. This can either be /dev/random or an entropy-gathering daemon (egd) [2]. Finding a good source of entropy for GPG may be tricky. egd is a Perl program that uses Unix or TCP sockets to communicate with GPG. This would not be very helpful on DOS, but might work on Windows - use ActivePerl for Windows to run egd and build GPG with libsocket [3]. There is a device driver for DOS that provides a source of random numbers - NOISE.SYS. There is a link to its source from this page has some randomness links: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/rnd/ The link to its home page is broken. I don't know if NOISE.SYS works under Windows. It may not be possible to load NOISE.SYS with Windows ME - I don't think they support loading device drivers in CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT anymore in Windows ME. Anyhow, you could write a File System Extension for NOISE.SYS, that supports /dev/random. You can go straight to the page in the info docs using: info libc func file file [1] http://www.phekda.freeserve.co.uk/richdawe/zippo/ [2] http://www.lothar.com/tech/crypto/ [3] http://libsocket.tsx.org/ > I will also keep an eye out for newer versions of the GNU Privacy Guard, > and let Network Associates - the creators of gpg and pgp - know about > the DJGPP version GPG was not written by Network Associates. It's a GNU program maintained by Werner Koch . HTH, bye, -- Richard Dawe [ mailto:richdawe AT bigfoot DOT com | http://www.bigfoot.com/~richdawe/ ]