Baslinux mailing list

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On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> Message from Steven
> ===================
> Sindi wrote:
> > Ftpget is usable instead of busybox wget
>
> Really?  How exactly do you use ftpget to grab http pages?

I use links to get web pages.  Obviously I don't follow what you are 
doing.  Can you give a specific example?

> > > I often use a wget script to grab a web page containing
> > > a steaming-audio URL, strip out the URL and feed it to
> > > mplayer.
> >
> > How?
>
> By grabbing the page and parsing it.
>
> > We are also on dialup, but wget repeatedly failed
>
> I'm on dialup and use wget a lot.  It works fine.

Several files would not download from sdf - they kept stopping at the same 
spot.

> > Would ftpget script similarly?
>
> I don't know (I don't use it).  Is it possible to
> pipe the output from ftpget or does it simply deposit
> the file?


I have a script to fetch files from my grex account:

ftpget -u login -p password ftp.grex.org $1 $1
I cannot pipe this to less.  I only see (END) and no text.

xwget http://www.grex.org/~keesan/resume.txt | less
also gives me only (END).

|pico puts the Connecting to... message into PICO but not the file.

How do you pipe from wget?

The full wget lets you specify login and password for non-public sites. 
Can busybox wget do this?  I need a way to download from my own sdf and 
grex shell accounts.  ftpget works.  dbclient or scp is larger and it 
would be complicated to set it up so as not to give password each time.

ftpd on my computer would work in this case (instead of ftpget) and is 
small.  With ftpd.conf set correctly it should be possible to prevent 
anonymous anything but downloads. It can also be used to transfer files to 
(and from) other (Windows) computers that have ftp but not ftpd.

ftpget is simpler and quicker - no need to start a daemon.

But is there already a way to fetch files from non-public directories with 
BL3 busybox? (no ftpget, wget does not appear to authenticate)


> > Does 2-floppy BL3 take longer to boot on slower
> > computers, because of the need to uncompress the
> > .gz and .tgz files?
>
> (1) BL3 was designed to boot a loopfile (not compressed)
>    or an ext2 partition.  The floppy version was an
>    afterthought and was released several months later.
>
> (2) Booting from floppies will always be slow no matter
>    how the filesystem is stored.

Does BL3 loop boot more slowly on older computers because it uncompressess 
fs.gz?  Would a upx'ed gzipped executable unpack any faster or slower than 
a non-upx'ed one?

I understand that once it has booted, it will run faster if the 
executables are not compressed.  Do you know how much faster?


upx dates from 1996.  It claims to decompress typically better than gzip 
(which is not the case for ftp).

'very fast decompression: ~10 MB/sec on an ancient Pentium 133, ~200 
MB/sec on an Athlon XP 2000+'.

How fast would a 33MHz 486 decompress?  1MB/sec?  I have a 75MHz 486 
laptop with linux (and a bad ; key) to test on, some place.

The advantage of UPX would be if you are short of hard disk space (in a 
20MB loop that you don't know how to enlarge) or for floppy disk if you 
want to include more programs.

I might try it on one laptop with loop BL3 to shrink Opera and Kermit 
and Lynx.  Kermit shrinks from 2.1MB to 760K.  It took about 2 sec to load 
(longer to type).  Non-upxed kermit loaded perceptibly faster (instant) 
but perhaps it was already in cache from loading the upx-ed version.
This is on a very fast (1.2GHz) computer.

Sindi