72.2 Getting GAP

GAP is distributed free of charge. You can obtain it via ftp and give it away to your colleagues. GAP is not in the public domain, however. In particular you are not allowed to incorporate GAP or parts thereof into a commercial product.

If you get GAP, we would appreciate it if you could notify us, e.g., by sending a short e-mail message to gap@dcs.st-and.ac.uk, containing your full name and address, so that we have a rough idea of the number of users. We also hope that this number will be large enough to convince various agencies that GAP is a project worthy of (financial) support. If you publish some result that was partly obtained using GAP, we would appreciate it if you would cite GAP, just as you would cite another paper that you used. (The copyright page of the manual gives a sample citation.) Again we would appreciate if you could inform us about such a paper.

The current release of GAP is version 4.2.

We distribute the full source for everything, the C code for the kernel, the GAP code for the library, and the TeX code for the manual. So it should be no problem to get GAP, even if you have a rather uncommon system. Of course, ports to non UNIX systems may require some work. Note that about 16 MByte of main memory (though at least 32MByte is desirable) and about 30MB of disk space are required to run GAP. A full GAP installation, including all share packages and data libraries can use 200MB and more of disk space. GAP will compile on pentium (586) processors, though a faster machine is recommended.

(If you already downloaded an installation archive, you may ignore the rest of this section.)

The easiest way to get GAP for most users is probably via the World Wide Web. The main GAP Web site is found at http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/gap

There are three mirror sites updated automatically each night, at: http://www.math.rwth-aachen.de/~GAP http://www.ccs.neu.edu/mirrors/GAP and http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/research.groups/algebra/GAP/www/

At these sites you can browse this manual, download the system and contributed extensions, read past postings to the GAP forum, and find out about authors of and contributors to GAP, publications that cited GAP and GAP related events.

GAP can also be obtained by anonymous ftp from (at least) the following servers.

ftp-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk:

Institute of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK. Directory /pub/gap/gap4/.

ftp.math.rwth-aachen.de:

Lehrstuhl D für Mathematik, RWTH Aachen, Germany. Directory /pub/gap4/.

ftp.ccs.neu.edu:

College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, USA. Directory /pub/mirrors/ftp-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/pub/gap/gap4.

pell.anu.edu.au:

Mathematical Sciences Institute, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Directory /pub/algebra/gap4/.

ftp to the server closest to you, login as user ftp and give your full e-mail address as password. Remember when you transmit the files to set the file transfer type to binary image, otherwise you will only receive unusable garbage. Those servers will always have the latest version of GAP available.

The WWW page for the GAP distribution and the ftp directory contain the following files. Please check first which files you need, to avoid transferring those that you do not need.

INSTALL, INSTALL.WIN, INSTALL-MAC.TXT:

Installation files, one of which you are currently reading.

FILES:

More detailed description of the available files.

gap4r2.zoo:

This file contains the complete distribution of GAP version 4.2.

basic4r2.zoo:

This file contains a minimal distribution of GAP version 4.2. (There are further archives with which you can ``upgrade'' it to the full version.)

gappc4r2.zoo:

This file contains a complete distribution for 32-bit Windows. It includes a precompiled binary.

gapmac4r2.zoo:

This file contains a complete distribution for Macintosh under MacOS. You will also need to obtain the binaries separately from the bin subdirectory.

allshare4r2.zoo:

This file contains all accepted share packages as of the release date.

submitshare4r2.zoo:

This file contains all submitted, but not accepted, share packages whose authors wish to make them available, as of the release date. They should be viewed as analagous to preprints.

util/unzoo.c:

A simple zoo archive extractor, which should be used to unpack the distribution. The bin subdirectory contains precompiled executables for common systems.

More files are in the following subdirectories:

bin:

This directory contains executables for systems that do not come with a C compiler or where another C compiler produces a faster executable.

split:

This directory contains the complete distribution of GAP 4.2 in several smaller archives.

share:

This directory contains all accepted share packages in case you don't want to load the comprehensive allshare archive.

deposit/psh:

This directory contains all submitted but not accepted share packages whose authors wish to make them available, in case you don't want to load the comprehensive submitshare archive.

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