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Topic: AOL Dialer, DSL with an AOL dialer already installed

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cbagger01

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Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Oct. 15 2005,05:36

Luckily,

AOL doesn't force their users to upgrade the core software as often as AIM. And when they do publish upgrades, they often are to add new eye-candy and features and leave the older functionality intact.

So penggy may very will still work fine with AOL.

The only way to know for sure is to try it. I don't use AOL so I'm out.

lub997

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Joined: July 2005

Posted: Oct. 15 2005,05:40

The sourceforge page for Penggy is 2 years old, but Penggy is still being developed it just isn't through sourceforge anymore. I accidentally ran into it's new page the other day when I was looking at .pm.rpm files for my desktop running SuSE 9.1. I don't remember what the new URL is, but I know it's in Germany now, because I remember the URL ending in .de I do remember that there was a link to it from the SuSE pacman rpm file download site. I'm sure I could find it again if I looked hard enough for it. My main question is merely would it pose a legal threat to include it in .dsl since AOL has made it clear they do not want to further Linux or Linux users in any way? As long as it doesn't include their name in it though, I'm not sure if there is really anything AOL could do, since essentially all it is is a tunnel driver anyway, and AOL cannot control who has the right to use tunnel drivers on their personal computers. After all, it's not like AOL invented the tunnel driver; they just use it. On another thought, you can enable a tunnel driver as a module or as part of the kernel when compiling a custom kernel. I wonder if that would allow you to use AOL or if there is more to it than that. In my experience though, Penggy has worked very well once it is installed; getting it installed was the hard part as I remember it.

cbagger01

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Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Oct. 15 2005,06:03

My guess is that it is not illegal to distribute source code or compiled binaries that were not part of products that were made by the TW/AOL corporation itself.

However, if an AOL user decides to download the program and actually USE it, the AOL user MAY be violating his TERMS OF SERVICE and could theoretically have his account canceled. In reality, AOL is unlikely to drive away paying customers by canceling their service merely because they want to use AOL on their Linux PCs. And in fact, it may not even be a TOS violation but since I have never read the AOL TOS so I don't know.

But since the source or binary code distributors have no TERMS OF SERVICE with AOL, they are free and clear here.

But I am not a lawyer, so what do I know.

lub997

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Joined: July 2005

Posted: Oct. 15 2005,06:12

I found it. The page I saw is at:

http://pengisnotaol.piranho.de/

and there is a link to it from the pacman page:

http://packman.links2linux.de/?action=307

The pacman page provides Penggy for modern SuSE versions (as recent as SuSE 9.0), and I'm sure this package could be adapted to work with DSL. For instance, the .pm.rpm file could be extracted into a directory recursively and then that directory could be tar.gzipped into a .dsl file. Or I could go another route, and actually compile it from source on my laptop running DSL, which I think would be the better option since it would compile it specifically for DSL. Milkshaw was right that the project hasn't been updated in 2 years. It turned out the reason I had thought it was still being developed was just because the pacman site was providing rpm's for it for modern versions of SuSE and not far outdated versions of SuSE. If you actually look at the Penngy page though, it hasn't been touched since 2003 even on the German site, so the German site and the sourceforge site both probably stopped development at the same point 2 years ago. I still think Penggy would work though, because my laptop that runs DSL is ancient and it is dual booted with IBM PC-DOS 7 and Damn Small Linux. The PC-DOS 7 partition has Windows 3.11 for Workgroups installed on it, and I installed and used a version of AOL so ancient that it runs on Windows 3.11 and successfully used it to connect to my parents' AOL account not more than a few months ago. What does this mean? It means that as a previous posting suspected, AOL very rarely if ever changes their means of connecting to their internet service. The version of AOL I used to connect has to be near 7 to 10 years old to even be able to run on Windows 3.11 and it connected fine. It of course wasn't capable of doing anything once it connected because the internet has changed so much in the last 10 years (java for example), but as far as getting connected, it connected fine. What this means is that AOL has not changed their means of establishing a connection within the past 10 years and that means if Penggy worked 2 years ago, it should still work today, and I know it worked 2 years ago because I used it.

lub997

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Posts: 26
Joined: July 2005

Posted: Oct. 15 2005,06:28

Cbagger, I think you probably have the right idea about the Terms of Service and legal aspect. I think what you said makes a lot of sense. I think you are probably right.

11 replies since Oct. 14 2005,20:12

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