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The HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre was established in August
1992 in the
Department of Computer Science
at Liverpool University in
the United Kingdom,
but has been run by Liverpool-based
Connect Internet Solutions Limited since 1995.
Its primary aim is to make public domain, freeware and Open Source
software more readily available to users of Hewlett-Packard UNIX
systems.
The archive began with an initial collection of 150 packages,
all of which had been successfully compiled and tested locally
by staff at the Liverpool centre before being installed and
made available on the archive. The centre continues to act as
a porting body as well as an archive site - all software held
in the archive has been verified to run successfully on
HP-UX PA-RISC (and now Itanium) systems.
As of March 2007, the Centre held over 2,000 packages!
Initially, all software was distributed as source code only, but
now, all packages added to the system are available in both
source code and binary formats. By providing high-quality binary
distributions of free software, the Porting and Archive
Centre makes the tremendous body of useful free
software available to the wider public (not just those gurus
capable of configuring and compiling software) and dramatically
increases the appeal and utility of the archive.
The archive centre has a close cooperative relationship with
national and regional HP user groups: e.g. HP/Works (UK),
DutchWorks (The Netherlands) and Interex (US).
It is the objective of the Centre to encourage users
to join their appropriate user organisation, as user groups
and their members have an essential role in bringing software
to the attention of the Centre.
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