-\versionid $Id: faq.but,v 1.57 2004/02/12 18:28:00 simon Exp $
+\versionid $Id: faq.but,v 1.61 2004/02/23 19:10:43 jacob Exp $
\A{faq} PuTTY FAQ
portability problems such as BSD-style ptys or different header file
requirements are expected.
+\S{faq-unix-why}{Question} What's the point of the Unix port? Unix
+has OpenSSH.
+
+All sorts of little things. \c{pterm} is directly useful to anyone
+who prefers PuTTY's terminal emulation to \c{xterm}'s, which at
+least some people do. Unix Plink has apparently found a niche among
+people who find the complexity of OpenSSL makes OpenSSH hard to
+install (and who don't mind Plink not having as many features). Some
+users want to generate a large number of SSH keys on Unix and then
+copy them all into PuTTY, and the Unix PuTTYgen should allow them to
+automate that conversion process.
+
+There were development advantages as well; porting PuTTY to Unix was
+a valuable path-finding effort for other future ports, and also
+allowed us to use the excellent Linux tool
+\W{http://valgrind.kde.org/}{Valgrind} to help with debugging, which
+has already improved PuTTY's stability on \e{all} platforms.
+
+However, if you're a Unix user and you can see no reason to switch
+from OpenSSH to PuTTY/Plink, then you're probably right. We don't
+expect our Unix port to be the right thing for everybody.
+
\S{faq-wince}{Question} Will there be a port to Windows CE or PocketPC?
It's currently being worked on, but it's only in its early stages yet,
clearly be a useful thing, so in the long term I hope it can be
brought up to release quality.
+There's a also third-party port at
+\W{http://pocketputty.aleq.cz/}\c{http://pocketputty.aleq.cz/}.
+
\S{faq-win31}{Question} Is there a port to Windows 3.1?
PuTTY is a 32-bit application from the ground up, so it won't run on
\S{faq-psftp-slow}{Question} PSFTP transfers files much slower than PSCP.
-We believe this is because the SFTP and SSH2 protocols are less
-efficient at bulk data transfer than SCP and SSH1, because every
-block of data transferred requires an acknowledgment from the far
-end. It would in theory be possible to queue several blocks of data
-to get round this speed problem, but as yet we haven't done the
-coding. If you really want this fixed, feel free to offer to help.
+The throughput of PSFTP 0.54 should be much better than 0.53b and
+prior; we've added code to the SFTP backend to queue several blocks
+of data rather than waiting for an acknowledgement for each. (The
+SCP backend did not suffer from this performance issue because SCP
+is a much simpler protocol.)
\S{faq-bce}{Question} When I run full-colour applications, I see
areas of black space where colour ought to be.
right place is \c{/etc/sysconfig/i18n}, but this shouldn't be
necessary.
+\S{faq-screen}{Question} Since I upgraded to PuTTY 0.54, the
+scrollback has stopped working when I run \c{screen}.
+
+PuTTY's terminal emulator has always had the policy that when the
+\q{alternate screen} is in use, nothing is added to the scrollback.
+This is because the usual sorts of programs which use the alternate
+screen are things like text editors, which tend to scroll back and
+forth in the same document a lot; so (a) they would fill up the
+scrollback with a large amount of unhelpfully disordered text, and
+(b) they contain their \e{own} method for the user to scroll back to
+the bit they were interested in. We have generally found this policy
+to do the Right Thing in almost all situations.
+
+Unfortunately, \c{screen} is one exception: it uses the alternate
+screen, but it's still usually helpful to have PuTTY's scrollback
+continue working. The simplest solution is to go to the Features
+control panel and tick \q{Disable switching to alternate terminal
+screen}. (See \k{config-features-altscreen} for more details.)
+
+The reason why this only started to be a problem in 0.54 is because
+\c{screen} typically uses an unusual control sequence to switch to
+the alternate screen, and previous versions of PuTTY did not support
+this sequence.
+
\H{faq-secure} Security questions
\S{faq-publicpc}{Question} Is it safe for me to download PuTTY and
We already have some, thanks.
+\S{faq-link}{Question} Would you link to my web site from the PuTTY
+web site?
+
+Only if the content of your web page is of definite direct interest
+to PuTTY users. If your content is unrelated, or only tangentially
+related, to PuTTY, then the link would simply be advertising for
+you.
+
+One very nice effect of the Google ranking mechanism is that by and
+large, the most popular web sites get the highest rankings. This
+means that when an ordinary person does a search, the top item in
+the search is very likely to be a high-quality site or the site they
+actually wanted, rather than the site which paid the most money for
+its ranking.
+
+The PuTTY web site is held in high esteem by Google, for precisely
+this reason: lots of people have linked to it simply because they
+like PuTTY, without us ever having to ask anyone to link to us. We
+feel that it would be an abuse of this esteem to use it to boost the
+ranking of random advertisers' web sites. If you want your web site
+to have a high Google ranking, we'd prefer that you achieve this the
+way we did - by being good enough at what you do that people will
+link to you simply because they like you.
+
+If you have software based on PuTTY, or specifically designed to
+interoperate with PuTTY, or in some other way of genuine interest to
+PuTTY users, then we will probably be happy to add a link to you on
+our Links page. And if you're running a mirror of the PuTTY web
+site, we're \e{definitely} interested.
+
\S{faq-sourceforge}{Question} Why don't you move PuTTY to
SourceForge?
~mdw / sgt / putty / blobdiff