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Path: portal.com!svc.portal.com!decwrl!lll-winken.llnl.gov!uop!csus.edu!new s.ucdavis.edu!toadflax.cs!not-for-mail From: fnf@fishpond.amigalib.com (Fred Fish) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.announce Subject: Fishing Report - Jan 95 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Date: 18 Jan 1995 01:48:37 GMT Organization: none Lines: 283 Approved: zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu Message-ID: <3fhs1l$bkb@mark.ucdavis.edu> Reply-To: fnf@fishpond.amigalib.com (Fred Fish) NNTP-Posting-Host: krakatoa.cs.ucdavis.edu Message-Number: 1033 Portal-Origin: Usenet Portal-Type: text Portal-Bytes: 13691 Portal-Location: 17258.3.1175.1 T H E F I S H I N G R E P O R T by Fred Fish Amiga Library Services Jan 10, 1995 ====================== FLOPPY DISKS 1001 & UP ====================== When we stopped doing floppy distributions last April, we thought we had made suitable arrangements for the floppy library to be continued by a third party. However, after almost 9 months and not seeing any floppies, we have decided to give this responsibility to someone else. The new "Keepers of the Floppies" are Martin Schulze and Thomas Strauss. As before, the plan is that selected new material will be taken from each FreshFish CD and organized into floppy sized chunks, and made ready for distribution before the release of the next FreshFish CD. We expect an average release rate of around 20 floppies per month. One thing that hasn't changed in our plans though is that we will continue to only distribute material on CD-ROM. Martin, Thomas, and certainly other interested third parties, should have no trouble supplying the demand for copies of the floppy distribution. =============== MKISOFS UPGRADE =============== It has recently come to our attention that some people using mkisofs to master CD-ROM's using RockRidge extensions have experienced problems with the resulting CD's interoperating with non-Amiga systems. This may be due to bugs in the RockRidge support in the current mkisofs port, which is based on version 1.00, released almost a year ago. There is also the possibility that there are other latent bugs in the generated ISO images that may cause problems under certain circumstances. In a marathon hacking session yesterday, I not only upgraded our internal version to the current 1.01 baseline, but leapfrogged ahead to the current prerelease 1.02 test version. In the process, about 800 lines of source code changes were merged, which represents about 25% of the total mkisofs source code. Of these 800 lines, a very large percentage was in the RockRidge support, so I suspect that many bugs have been fixed by the mkisofs author and other developers. These fixes should automatically appear in the next release of the Amiga version, sometime in early February. We urge anyone that has suggestions for improvements or details about possible bugs to submit them now, so they can be considered in time for the next release. We will also incorporate other useful changes as they become obvious to us, possibly including a graphical user interface that should make the program more user friendly. One useful new feature in our current internal test version is the capability of the CD-ROM creator to specify the precise name mapping between ISO level 1 names in the regular ISO data structures, and the names used in the RockRidge section. We are also investigating whether it is feasible or not to use RockRidge attributes to preserve all the normal AmigaDOS filesystem attributes, such as the script bit, pure bit, etc. We are still looking for someone to port cdwrite, a tool for writing ISO images to a specific CD-R recorder, or else write an AmigaDOS specific equivalent. ============ FRESHFISH CD ============ As we write this we are hard at work on FreshFish Volume 8, which is expected to go into production in the last week of January and start shipping the first week of February. The major piece of news about the FreshFish series is that it will be expanding to a 2-CD set, starting with Volume 8, with no anticipated increase in price! For the last couple of issues we have been cramped for space (I never thought I'd say a CD is too small), and the only way we can continue to provide an increased flow of new material and updates to the useful tools portion is to either expand to a 2-CD set, or change the structure. Rather than reducing the usefulness of the CD's by eliminating the BBS section or only supplying some material in archived form, we have decided to expand to a 2-CD set. We expect future issues to continue to be released on a two month cycle. For this one release cycle, the extra month between Volume 7 and Volume 8 gave us some time to expand the base set of material on the CD by including more useful tools, programs, libraries, documentation etc that will continue to be updated with each release. We have also expanded the "GNU" tree to include more non-GNU tools and utilities, all with full source and binaries built directly from that source, to the extent that it now takes almost 24 hours to recompile the binaries on an A4000 equipped with a 40Mhz WarpEngine, 50 Mb of memory, and several 8ms seek time Seagate Barracuda drives! If things proceed as we expect and this section of the CD expands by a factor of 4 or more, we may have to seriously consider building a cross development environment on a Risc machine just to get reasonable recompilation turn around times, with a final compile being done on the Amiga as a cross check, right before release of the CD. We could also hope for fast 68060 accelerators to appear soon. ============ GOLDFISH CD ============ GoldFish Volume 1, a 2-CD set released in April of 1994, provides a complete archive of the 1000 "fish disk" floppy library, with all the disks provided in both archived and ready-to-run form. It can be used to produce master floppy disks for further duplication and distribution, using a simple to use program that is provided on the CD-ROM. It can also be used by BBS or anonymous ftp sites to provide convenient electronic access to all the material from the floppy library. GoldFish Volume 2, a 2-CD set released in December of 1994, includes all the new submissions included on the first 7 volumes of the FreshFish CD series, with all the material updated to the latest available version as of the date of completion of the GoldFish CD. As with Volume 1, all of the material is included in both archived and unarchived form. It also includes the latest versions of the "useful tools" included on each FreshFish CD, such as the GNU utilities, reviews of hardware and software, etc. Future plans call for GoldFish releases at approximately six month intervals. ============ LIGHT-ROM CD ============ In cooperation with Lightwave artist Michael Meshew, we now offer a new CD called "LIGHT-ROM". This is a 647 Mb CD dedicated to 3D artists all over the world, and contains Lightwave objects, scene files, textures, bump maps (JPEG, IFF, & TARGA), fonts, thumbnail renderings, and text files with advice from the rendering pros. It also contains a "Showcase Directory", displaying the talents of selected Lightwave artists from all over the world. LIGHT-ROM will be updated at approximately 6 month intervals. Contributors will be eligible for a free copy. The retail price is $39.95 plus $3.95 for shipping and handling. ============= FRESHFONTS CD ============= In cooperation with fonts enthusiast Daniel Amor, we published a new fonts CD in early November. This CD was published as an experiment under conditions similar to the Meeting Pearls CD, whereby users that find the CD interesting and useful are expected to make a shareware like donation to the creators of the CD. Thousands of these CDs were distributed free of charge at the Computer '94 show to customers at Stefan Ossowski's Schatztruhe booth. We have also distributed almost all of the CD's that we had allocated for our customers that receive other CD's during November and December. So far the results have been quite disappointing, with at most a few hundred dollars in donations received. We will declare the experiment with the share compilation version officially over on February 1st, 1995, and provide a summary of the results at that time. Since there does appear to still be a good demand for this CD, with Daniel's approval we plan to do another production run in late January. However these CD's will not be given away free, instead they will be sold at prices comparable to our other products. ============== TURBOCALC V2.0 ============== We are an authorized U.S. distributor of TurboCalc V2.0, a very powerful Amiga spreadsheet program. TurboCalc has extensive formatting options, supports many different font formats, more than 40 different number, time, and date formats, more than 100 functions covering arithmetic and financial needs, more than 120 ARexx and macro instructions, integrated database, and more. TurboCalc retails for $115 plus $6.95 for shipping and handling. ========= AMINET CD ========= We are an authorized U.S. distributor of the new Aminet CD. Both the Aminet Gold and the Aminet Share are available. Subscriptions for both CD's are also available, at $59.95 per year for the Gold version and $44.95 for the Share version. There are expected to be four releases per year, so the subscription is actually for 4 CD's, regardless of when they actually end up shipping. The only physical difference between the Aminet Gold CD and the Aminet Share CD is the front cover artwork. Built into the price of the Aminet Gold CD is an automatic contribution to the creators of the CD and sufficient margin to make the disk attractive to low volume resellers and retail sales outlets. Users who purchase to the Aminet Share version are expected to make their own contributions directly to the creators if they feel that the CD is worthwhile and wish to support creation of future Aminet CD's. We currently have Volume 4 (Nov 1994) in stock. The next volume is expected to arrive in early February. ================= MEETING PEARLS CD ================= We now have the second pressing of the Meeting Pearls CD in stock. This CD contains about 150 high quality and high resolution fractals, a ready to run version of PasTeX which includes fonts for FAX and 600 DPI printers, a ready to install version of the Amiga NetBSD port, and many other ready to run applications including UMS, DaggeX, a lot of utilities, games, etc. Because the version of NetBSD included on the CD-ROM includes encryption code that is restricted for U.S export, all imported CD's will only be available for resale within the U.S. ================================= SPECIAL BBS VERSION OF FROZENFISH ================================= By special request from BBS operators, we are issuing a limited number of a custom version of the April 1994 FrozenFish CD, updated with some new material, and called "FrozenFish-PC". This CD has the complete contents of each floppy disk 1-1000 in a single archive and all directory and file names are ISO-9660 level 1 compliant (8.3 format, uppercase only, etc). This means that the CD is completely compatible with IBM-PC based systems, unlike our regular Amiga CD's which are closer to ISO-9660 level 2. For at least the next month or so, each copy of this CD is an individually created CD-R "gold disk", which is completely compatible with mass production CD's and CD-ROM drives. Sometime soon we expect to do a small production run of this CD and people who received the CD-R versions can upgrade to the production version for $5 plus shipping costs. The price of this CD is $24.95 for either version, because of the lower volumes and thus higher production costs per CD. ===================== ATTENTION ALL AUTHORS ===================== Amiga Library Services is actively looking to expand our CD-ROM offerings. If you are an Amiga user with a good idea for an Amiga specific CD-ROM, please consider letting us act as your publisher. We will handle all details concerning actual production of the CD-ROM, advertising, sales, and distribution. All you have to do is have a good idea and to be willing to spend the necessary time to create a ready-to-publish master file tree for the CD. ====================== ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS ====================== Material for inclusion in the CD-ROM distribution can now be submitted electronically via anonymous ftp. Please upload your submissions as an lha archive, one archive per submitted program, to the ftp incoming directory on ftp.amigalib.com. Please include a "Product-Info" file in the lha archive. This file describes the material using a standard format that is recognized by the new version of KingFisher and by tools that we use to automatically generate information about the CD contents. If you don't have a copy of the Product-Info specification, it can be retrieved via anonymous ftp from ftp.amigalib.com, in directory pub/amiga. If you do not have access to anonymous ftp, you can still submit material electronically by mailing a uuencoded lha archive to "submissions@amigalib.com". ================= ELECTRONIC ORDERS ================= You can email orders to be paid via credit card (VISA or MasterCard only) to "orders@amigalib.com". All such orders must include the full name of the card holder, the card number, the expiration date, and a daytime phone number which can be used to verify the order. We will attempt to acknowledge all such received orders via return email, and to verify an unspecified percentage via phone calls. Please note that it is considered to be somewhat risky to send credit card information via electronic mail without encrypting it. We are not currently ready to start receiving encrypted orders, but may be able to do so in the future. We cannot be responsible for any fraudulent use of credit card info that is intercepted by a third party during it's transmission. For an electronic copy of our order form send mail to "orders@amigalib.com". -- Read all administrative posts before putting your post up. Mailing list: announce-request@cs.ucdavis.edu. Comments to zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu. MAIL ALL COMP.SYS.AMIGA.ANNOUNCE ANNOUNCEMENTS TO announce@cs.ucdavis.edu.