IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR THIS MONTHLY CD-ROM (Updated 11-12-93) This file contains important information that applies to this particular CD-ROM. For general information about the Amiga Library CD-ROM's, infor- mation about the contents of this particular CD-ROM, and other important information, read the various files in the "Information" directory. Also be sure to read the LEGAL-NOTICE, COPYRIGHT, WARRANTY, and SHAREWARE files. This is the second production run of the first CD-ROM in my "monthly" series. It represents the efforts of two people working almost full time for about six weeks, as well as a couple other people working part time for a couple weeks, or about 500 person-hours effort total. I hope the effort that went into gathering, testing, and organizing all this material shows. The first production run inadvertently included a virus on disk 919, which has been removed in this production run. There have been a few other minor cosmetic type changes as well. Much of the work that went into producing this CD-ROM will not need to be duplicated for the second CD-ROM, but there are still lots of things to do for the second CD-ROM that we just did not have time for on this first one, like finding and installing easy to use browsing tools to make finding things easier, CD32 support, creating more individualized icons and in general polishing up the "look and feel" of the CD-ROM, improving support for the BBS/On-line sections, etc, etc. So it may take about another six weeks before the second CD-ROM is ready. After that, I'm hoping that we truly can get on a monthly schedule for this CD-ROM, by building on the efforts that went into previous CD-ROM's. This CD-ROM contains approximately 84Mb of new material, 150Mb of useful tools including gcc 2.4.5, emacs 18.59, PasTeX, etc, and 404Mb of material from old floppy distributions. All of the source to the supplied GNU binaries is provided and I have personally built all the supplied binaries from the supplied source (except GNU emacs) using the GNU C compiler on this CD-ROM, both to verify that the compiler is solid and to verify that the binaries are in fact recreatable from the supplied source code. For more information about the contents of the CD-ROM see the files in the "Information" directory. INSTALLATION This CD-ROM contains lots of utilities that are ready to run directly off the CD-ROM. This will be slower than running off of disk, but CD-ROM drives are improving constantly, so if you have one of the newer double or quad speed drives, this should not be too painful. You may be able to save as much as a 100Mb of disk space by running directly off the CD-ROM. For this first disk all of the setup necessary to run most things off the CD-ROM is for you to run the script FFMCD01:Useful/s/FFCD-Startup from your S:User-Startup file, like this: if exists FFMCD01:Useful/s/FFCD-Startup echo "Running FFMCD01:Useful/s/FFCD-Startup..." execute FFMCD01:Useful/s/FFCD-Startup endif If you want a more customized environment, you can look at what the FFCD-Startup script is doing and use appropriate bits and pieces in your own S:User-Startup or S:FFCD-Startup. Future disks may have a more sophisticated method of customizing the environment to allow things to run off the CD-ROM. *** IMPORTANT *** Some of the GNU utilities, gcc in particular, require a very large stack. You need to arrange that the CLI/Shell or whatever you run these programs from has a large stack set. In a CLI you can set this with a command of the form "stack 100000" (100000 is what I use). You can also put this command in your S:Shell-Startup file to get large stacks for all CLI/Shell startups, without having to remember to manually set the stack each time. Really huge compiles, like recompiling the compiler itself, may require even more stack space (like 300Kb or more). GNU UTILITIES * This CD-ROM contains ports of various GNU utilities that are in various stages of stability. See Useful/dist/gnu/README for further information. * Because of various time pressures, I was unable to get as much on this first CD-ROM as I had hoped. In particular, because I am very picky about adhering completely to the conditions of the GNU Public License, I wasn't able to get as much GNU code included as I intend to ultimately include, since tracking down the source for the Amiga ports, rebuilding them from that source, and testing the resulting executables, was much more time consuming than anticipated. Expect this portion of the CD-ROM to continually grow each month as more GNU ports are added. * I was able to include the CBM 3.0 include files and libraries at the last minute, but because it was last minute, I wasn't able to arrange for the libraries to be found automatically by gcc when needed. This will be fixed in the next release. For this release you have to add the following arguments to your link command line if your program uses any Amiga library entry points: -L/gcc/os-lib -lc -lamiga I was able to successfully compile and run a number of the CManual examples using commands of the form: gcc -o example1 example1.c -L/gcc/os-lib -lc -lamiga The "-lc" is required so that the linker will search the standard C library first and then only resolve the necessary Amiga library entry points from /gcc/os-lib/libamiga.a. SAS C INCOMPATIBILITY * The assign of lib: used by this CD-ROM conflicts with Lattice/SAS C, which wants to use the same assign. I don't have a recommended way of dealing with this conflict yet. I have some ideas though, and hopefully this won't be an issue for the next CD-ROM. * The simplest solution for now may be to patch your SAS C executables to look for SLB: instead of LIB:. However this will cause problems with Makefiles and other such files that reference LIB:. USER FEEDBACK NEEDED * I am always interested in hearing about things that might make this CD-ROM more useful for users. It is particularly important at this stage that I get feedback from users about problems that need fixing, or suggestions on how to make the CD-ROM more useful. * You can FAX your comments to me at (602) 917-0917, however please understand that I may not be able to respond to, or even acknowledge receipt of, every problem report and suggestion that arrives. -Fred Fish ><>