Geruva Publications - 4programmers.org

Software Home Page

Software CD's

A department of Geruva Publications is dedicated to making publicly licensed and public domain software available on CD. These CD's can be purchased online at modest prices at this online store or the eBay store

Public Licenses

This software is distributed persuant to the terms of various licenses. The most important is the GNU General Public License (GPL), but there are others. You can find out more about license terms from this page.

About Compressed Archives

In most cases, the software packages that are distributed on these CD's are in the form of compressed archive files. Archives will need to be expanded before the programs can be used or installed. You must copy the archive file to your hard disk; it is a good practice to create a new directory (folder) for each package.

Different archive programs tend to be used in different system environments. It is assumed that you will have or be able to obtain the file utilities relevant to your system. The table below shows the file types, by conventional filename extension, that you are most likely to see.

.tar Uncompressed tar archive. Common for UNIX/Linux. Use somethink like "tar -xvf".
.tar.gz Compressed tar archive. The gzip, or equivalent, program has been used to compress the tar archive. Use gunzip to uncompressed.
.tgz Same as .tar.gz
.tar.bz
.tbz Like .tar.gz, except that the bzip program was used to compress. Use bunzip or bunzip2.
.tar.bz2
.tbz2 Like .tar.gz, except that the bzip2 program was used to compress. Use bunzip2.
.Z the file was compressed with the compress program. Run uncompress.
.tar.Z a tar archive was compressed with the compress program. Run uncompress and then run tar on the result.
.zip
This suggests an MS-DOS or Windows file. There are many programs that produce files of this type. The most common are WinZip and PKZIP. On UNIX and Linux systems, use unzip.

If you find that you don't have what you need, there are many resources available on the Internt. One of them is http://home.hiwaay.net/~pittman/archive/

Sources

Here are a few of the resources used to compile our software collections:

Sourceforge
The Free Country
The Free Software Foundation
The GNU Project
Bitsavers.org

There are many others. Most of the material you can find yourself and download if you like. However, hundreds of client every year find it convenient to save their time and effort by purchasing on CD.

Contact

If there is something that you have been looking for, maybe I would be interested too. You can tell me about it via admin@geruva.com