Downloading

Introduction

You can download the entire site as long as :

you use a computer that handles long filenames (e.g. Unix based computers)
you have gzip and tar installed on this computer (or unzip)

I can prepare a version compressed with the compress program but as it is far less efficient than gzip, I'd prefer not to do it.

I will never prepare a MS-DOS or a Windows 3.x way to download this site. I have no reason to work with ineffective, limited and expensive operating systems: I use Linux which is powerful, fast and free.

If you use a system produced by Microsoft (such as Windows 9x or Windows NT), perhaps should you consider switching to a more effective one (see the Boycott Microsoft Site in order to understand why). Anyway, I've decided to produced a zip version of the site which can be installed on a Windows 9x/NT system (has they handle at last long filenames). You should be aware that standard Unix tools such as bash, tar, gzip, etc. are available for free for Windows 9x/NT systems and therefore you should be able to install the unix version of this site on such a system. Latest versions of WinZip are able to install tar and gzipped files. So you can download this version if you own this software.

Downloading

In order to download the site, you just have to use on of the following links:

Content format size link

Complete archive tar.gz 900 ko darkover.tar.gz

Complete archive zip 1.6 Mo darkover.zip

French pages (no image) tar.gz 230 ko darkover.fr.tar.gz

French pages (no image) zip 520 ko darkover.fr.zip

English pages (no image) tar.gz 250 ko darkover.en.tar.gz

English pages (no image) zip 550 ko darkover.en.zip

Images tar.gz 370 ko darkover-images.tar.gz

Images zip 380 ko darkover-images.zip

Additional files tar.gz 18 ko darkover-other.tar.gz

Additional files zip 32 ko darkover-other.zip

Additional files are only useful for complete mirrors. They are included in the complete archives.

In order to install an archive, you just have to uncompress and untar it with the following command:

gunzip -c archive.tar.gz | tar xf -

This will create a darkover directory in the current directory.

In order to install an archive under Windows 9x/NT, you should use your preferred unzipping utility (or install Linux).

Copyright

This site is protected by international copyright laws. In order to know what you are allowed to do with its documents, you should read the copyright page.

A complete mirror

The only condition to satisfy in order to become an official mirror site is to mirror ALL the pages (in all languages) in an unmodified version. Send me an email (rossi@ceremade.dauphine.fr) to be included in the official mirror list.

The site uses content negotiation, which is a way to allow users to choose between different versions of a document in an automatic way. The additional files archive (and also the complete archive) contains index.var files (one in each directory). These files are used by the content negotiation engine of the apache web server. In short, when an user ask for site, she or he will obtain the site/index.fr.html or site/index.en.html, depending on the settings of her/his web browser (in Netscape Communicator for instance, you can choose your preferred language).

In order for this to work, your apache server must have been configured to include a type-map handler (with the .var associated extension). Moreover, the DirectoryIndex directive must specifies index.var as a correct index.

If your server does not handle content negotiation, you can remove from your mirror the index.var files. In order to allow direct access to subdirectories of the Darkover site, you can add an index.html to each directory. This file should be a link to index.en.html or index.fr.html.

If you don't understand a word in the preceding discussion, don't worry. It is mainly intended to system administrators.

source file (Last modification: Wed Apr 21 17:21:45 1999)