55.1 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@math.rwth-aachen.de, 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. Specifically, please refer to

[S+ 97] Martin Sch"onert et.al.  GAP -- Groups, Algorithms, and Programming.
        Lehrstuhl D f"ur Mathematik, Rheinisch Westf"alische Technische
        Hochschule, Aachen, Germany, sixth edition, 1997.

We distribute the full source for everything, the C code for the kernel, the GAP code for the library, and the LaTeX code for the manual, which has at present about 1600 pages. 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. We already have ports for IBM PC compatibles with an Intel processor under MS-DOS, Windows, or OS/2, for the Atari ST under TOS and Apple Macintosh using the CodeWarrior compiler. Note that about 8 MByte of main memory and about 20MB of disk space are required to run GAP. A full GAP installation, including all share packages and data libraries can use up to 100MB of disk space.

The easiest way to get GAP 3.4 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/LDFM/GAP
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/mirrors/GAP and
http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/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 andGAP related events.

GAP 3.4 can also be obtained by anonymous ftp from the following servers.

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

School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences,
University of St Andrews, Scotland
directory /pub/gap/gap/.

ftp.math.rwth-aachen.de:

Lehrstuhl D fur Mathematik, RWTH Aachen, Germany,
directory /pub/gap/.

math.ucla.edu:

Math. Dept., Univ. of California at Los Angeles,
directory /pub/gap/.

wuarchive.wustl.edu:

Math. Archives, Washington Univ. at St. Louis,
directory /edu/math/source.code/group.theory/gap.

dehn.mth.pdx.edu:

PSU Mathematics Department, Portland State Univ.,
directory /mirror/gap/

pell.anu.edu.au:

School of Mathematical Sciences, Australian National Univ., Canberra,
directory /pub/algebra/gap/.

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 ftp directory contains the following files. Please check first which files you need, to avoid transferring those that you don't need.

README:

the file you are currently reading.

gap3r4p4.zoo:

This file contains the complete distribution of GAP version 3 release 4 current patchlevel 4. It is a zoo archive approximately 18 MByte large.

unzoo.c:

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

More files are in the following subdirectories:

bin:

This directory contains executables for systems that dont come with a C compiler or where another C compiler produces a faster executable. The KERNELS file tells you which executables are here.

split:

This directory contains the complete distribution of GAP 3r4p4 in several archives. This allows you to get only the parts that you are really interested in. The SPLIT file tells you which archive contains what.

utils:

This directory contains several utilities that you may need to get or upgrade GAP, e.g., unzoo and patch. The UTILS file tells you which files are here.

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