From:	Richard Dawe <richdawe AT bigfoot DOT com>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: QUESTION: interest in a DJGPP version of the GNU Privacy Guard
Date:	Sun, 17 Dec 2000 11:35:04 +0000
Organization:	Customer of Energis Squared
Lines:	54
Message-ID:	<3A3CA4E8.C3931AA8@bigfoot.com>
References:	<91fh43$url$1 AT news5 DOT isdnet DOT net>
NNTP-Posting-Host:	modem-28.neilsborium.dialup.pol.co.uk
Mime-Version:	1.0
X-Trace:	news5.svr.pol.co.uk 977053018 27411 62.136.73.156 (17 Dec 2000 11:36:58 GMT)
NNTP-Posting-Date:	17 Dec 2000 11:36:58 GMT
X-Complaints-To:	abuse AT theplanet DOT net
X-Mailer:	Mozilla 4.51 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.17 i586)
X-Accept-Language:	de,fr
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Reply-To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com

Hello.

Ronald Landheer wrote:
> The question is, whether or not there is any interest in a DJGPP version
> of the GNU Privacy Guard
[snip]
> If there is such an interest, I will pay closer attention to sticking -
> as much as possible - to the original, and documenting what changes I
> make (probably by using diff).

I would be interested in a port of GPG. I want to use it in/from zippo, a
package manager for DJGPP [1], to sign & verify DJGPP packages.

GPG requires a source of random numbers. This can either be /dev/random or
an entropy-gathering daemon (egd) [2]. Finding a good source of entropy
for GPG may be tricky.

egd is a Perl program that uses Unix or TCP sockets to communicate with
GPG. This would not be very helpful on DOS, but might work on Windows -
use ActivePerl for Windows to run egd and build GPG with libsocket [3].

There is a device driver for DOS that provides a source of random numbers
- NOISE.SYS. There is a link to its source from this page has some
randomness links:

    http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/rnd/

The link to its home page is broken. I don't know if NOISE.SYS works under
Windows. It may not be possible to load NOISE.SYS with Windows ME - I
don't think they support loading device drivers in CONFIG.SYS,
AUTOEXEC.BAT anymore in Windows ME.

Anyhow, you could write a File System Extension for NOISE.SYS, that
supports /dev/random. You can go straight to the page in the info docs
using:

    info libc func file file

[1] http://www.phekda.freeserve.co.uk/richdawe/zippo/
[2] http://www.lothar.com/tech/crypto/
[3] http://libsocket.tsx.org/

> I will also keep an eye out for newer versions of the GNU Privacy Guard,
> and let Network Associates - the creators of gpg and pgp - know about
> the DJGPP version

GPG was not written by Network Associates. It's a GNU program maintained
by Werner Koch <wk AT gnupg DOT org>.

HTH, bye,

-- 
Richard Dawe
[ mailto:richdawe AT bigfoot DOT com | http://www.bigfoot.com/~richdawe/ ]

- Raw text -