2 Jan
2004
2 Jan
'04
7:16 p.m.
Kenneth Stailey <kstailey(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
When I purchased my copy of _The
CSRG Archives_ CDROM set I was told in E-mail by McKusick that I did not need
to sign any license agreements. I am assuming that this is due to Caldera
proclaiming that V32 sources and binaries could be redistributed by the public
legally.
Yes, this is correct, this is the same reason why Warren was able to remove the
password system from his UNIX Archive and make it completely open.
In the CDROM set is a fully encumbered 4.4BSD source
tree which
includes the learn(1) source code.
Yup, I have it too (the whole CD-ROM set). learn(1) is far older than 4.4BSD
though, and goes way back. 4.3BSD-Quasijarus has it too.
I also have yet to
get the vi lesson data which the source code that I do have says came on a
separate user-contributed tape.
I just looked and 4.3BSD-Quasijarus has the vi lesson data as part of the
standard system.
I got here because I have newbies in my life now and I
need UNIX online
courseware.
Hear hear. I sometimes get into this situation too, usually when dating and
getting faced with the need to teach a prospective female how to use a real
operating system, since the one woman who finally makes it would absolutely
have to use 4.3BSD-Quasijarus on my VAXen.
I looked into learn, but one thing it disappointed me with is that it's
woefully outdated. It starts by setting the tty erase and kill chars to '#'
and '@' respectively and teaching you how to edit the command line on a
hardcopy tty. Well, OK, some would see this as good educational value, but the
problem is, if you don't actually *have* a hardcopy tty, and most of us don't,
it doesn't work too well. It prints out lessons longer than 24 lines and they
scroll off the top of the VT terminal. It was definitely written with the
assumption that one has a hardcopy tty with a long roll of continuous paper,
and it expects the student to grab the paper coming out of the teletype and
look at what's been printed, but it just doesn't work on a VT terminal. Not to
mention that in the end the lessons give the student little practical learning
that would actually be useful when using UNIX on a CRT terminal. (For example,
it would be very practical to explain to the student the difference between ^H
and ^? and teach him/her how to deal with it.)
I'm wondering about distributing the results of
my porting effort once it
matures enough to be worth doing so.
Well, as a I said 4.3BSD-Quasijarus contains learn and all other "encumbered
code" and it is freely available via anonymous FTP from ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG,
so... BTW for those who missed it I released 4.3-QJ0b on 2003-12-07.
MS