[Info-vax] Unable to install freeware

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] from the HP Freeware site [...]

   Ok, I'll guess that you downloaded
      ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/openvms/freeware/vtfm/vtfm.zip
unpacked it on some non-VMS system, and transferred these
results to the CD-R using some CD-maker program or other.

   In general, when the ultimate destination is a VMS system,
a zip archive should be unpacked on the destination VMS
system, not on some intermediate, non-VMS system.  There are
too many ways to corrupt/lose whatever file attributes might
be stored in the original archive if the files are extracted
on a non-VMS system.  The effect (damage) is commonly
observed on BACKUP save sets, or on files with exotic,
VMS-specific record attributes (indexed, fixed-length, ...),
but even what looks like a simple text file can suffer
line-ending corruption, especially if it started life on VMS
as a variable-length record file.  (And especially if the
non-VMS unzip program doesn't know how to deal with those.)


> [...] UnZip executable [...] easy to find, [...]

   For example (Alpha -- others are nearby):

      ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/vms/unz552xv-axp.exe
      ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/vms/unz552xv-axp2.exe