MINI-POPLOG FOR MINI-LINUX
NEW VERSION 3 Nov 2003

Added 3 Nov 2003

Subject: Re: New poplog with bug in Pop-11/Poplog back-end compiler fixed
Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2003 13:29:44 +0000

There is now a new version of the reduced, libc5, poplog package available from either http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/~stepheni/poplog or ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/stepheni/poplog

In both cases, you have a choice of two files

poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.3.tar.bz2 or
poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.3.tar.gz

As before, the only difference between the compressed archives is the program used to compress them, and the uncompressed tar files are identical. The one compressed with bzip2 is about 20% smaller and fits on two standard floppy disks.

The difference between this reduced package and the previous version is that it was rebuilt (on my mighty 25MHZ Dell 486!) using the new vm_conspdr.p and following Aaron's rebuilding instructions. The resulting pop11 passes the if true then not(true or 77) else 88 endif => test.

Stephen Isard

[Now also installed by A.S. in this directory: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/mini-linux-pop/
poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.3.tar.bz2
poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.3.tar.gz
See also AREADME ]

Stephen Isard posted a message to comp.lang.pop


Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 11:52:11 +0000
Organization: HCRC or CCS, University of Edinburgh

In case there are any users of the libc5 package, I've recompiled it with the new aarith.s which prevents crashes when you try to address an out of bounds array entry.

I've taken the occasion to package it both as a gzip and bzip2 archive, named poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.2.tar.gz and poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.2.tar.bz2 respectively. The two are identical after decompression. The bzip2 one is ~20% smaller, and will fit on two floppies.

The files are available via ftp from
ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/stepheni/poplog/ and via http from
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/~stepheni/poplog

Stephen Isard

Note by Aaron Sloman:


I have copied the above two files to the Birmingham site.
poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.2.tar.bz2
poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.2.tar.gz

The change notes are in this file CHANGELOG.txt

See also Steve's notes AREADME

PREVIOUS VERSION July 2001

The following information was provided on Mon 16 July 2001 by Stephen Isard, Edinburgh University, S.IsardDeleteThis@ed.ac.uk

I have made a new version of the poplog distribution for small linux systems. It is available at ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/stepheni/poplog/poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.1.tar.bz2

In the original version (below), exload worked, but did not automatically include the standard libraries, as specified on lines 391-393 of REF EXTERNAL: "the Poplog external library '$popexternlib/libpop.olb'. and the C default library '-lc' are added automatically".

The problem went away when I relinked everything under a pure libc5 linux system, instead of using a cross-compiler on a libc6 system. There are no changes to any source files. Thanks to Andrzej Ritz for pointing out the problem and helping to find the solution.

For reasons that I haven't yet tried to investigate, the new pop11 binary is smaller than the original. That means that more files could be added and it would still all fit on two floppies. The extra room is equivalent to approximately three copies of the ved manual. If anyone has suggestions for what to add in, let me know.

Stephen Isard


NOTE added by Aaron Sloman, 4 Jan 2002


For those who do not recognize the file extension '.tar.bz2', this is an indication that the tar file was compressed using the utility bzip2. This is available by default on many unix and linux systems, and the command man bzip2 should provide information about it.

If your system doesn't have bzip2, you can get it from http://sourceware.cygnus.com/bzip2/

In particular, the command bunzip2, or bzip2 -d can be used to uncompress the file.

It is not necessary to produce an uncompressed version of the file in order to extract the contents of the tar file. The following should work (if done in the directory in which the new files are to be installed):

bunzip2 -c .../poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.1.tar.bz2 | tar xf -
where "..." stands for the directory path to the compressed tar file.

There has been some discussion of this mini-linux Poplog system in the comp.lang.pop news group. (Dec 2001/Jan 2002).


OLD VERSION (RETAINED FOR INFORMATION)

The following information was provided on Fri Apr 06 2001 by Stephen Isard, Edinburgh University, S.IsardDeleteThis@ed.ac.uk


He writes:
I have put two files:

ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/stepheni/poplog/README

and

ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/stepheni/poplog/poplog1553.linux.libc5.nox.tar.bz2

in the directory at ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/stepheni/poplog

The README is also included at the top level in the archive in the other file.

The size of the archive file is 2815730 bytes, though that may change. It should fit on two 1.44Mb floppy disks.

The archive is a subset of the linux poplog 15.53 distribution, recompiled for linux libc5 and intended particularly for mini-linux distributions that run on small machines with older Intel processors.

Libc5 is older and smaller than libc6, and many mini-linux distributions, such as muLinux, Monkey Linux and Tomsrtbt are based on it. Current "real" linux distributions are based on libc6, but many, e.g., RedHat 7.0, are backwards compatible. I've run this poplog under both RedHat 6 and RedHat 7, as well as on a 25MHz 486 under muLinux.

I have not compiled X into this poplog (hence the `nox' in the filename) on the grounds that X is often not practical on the sort of machines that run mini-distributions.

Further details in the README.

I'd welcome reports from people who try it out.

Regards,

Steve
S.IsardDeleteThis@ed.ac.uk


This file maintained by Aaron Sloman
A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk
Updated: 14 Jan 2003