Setting up various versions of Kermit

I recently (February 2024) rediscoverd the Kermit Project, after being a serious user in the 1980's-90's.

Initially I wanted to be able to use kermit on my recently purchased AgonLight2. The CP/M version was included with the version of CP/M made available with the AgonLight2. But it was unable to configure the serial port used. The new ZINC (Zinc is not CP/M) wrapper does appear to allow this to be configured. But I haven't managed to get it working yet.

I also got my BBC Master working again (after 40 years) with the PiTubeDirect and wanted to be able to install kermit on the various processors (so far without sucess). The following ought to be available:

BBC Kermit [1.46] MOS (Native confirmed working)

MS-DOS Kermit [3.16] DR-DOSPlus

Kermit 80 [4.11] Z80 CP/M

C-Kermit [4C(057)] PANOS (this may be upgradeable to the current Beta 10)

So I wanted to get something working and decided to test compile the new C-Kermit Beta 10. As Frank da Cruz says on the C-Kermit 10.0 Beta-Test Builds 2021-24 page; I provided a large percentage of the recent x86_64 Linux, BSD & Solaris builds in VirtualBox and most the of the ARM builds using a Raspberry Pi 4. C-Kermit 10 Beta 11 was released on 8 August 2024 and has bee built sucessfully for 175 systems; including various BSD, Linux, & Solaris systems. With gcc, clang and ssl.

C-Kermit is available via github.com at ckermit, and the customised Windows version can be found at ckwin.

It was particularly interesting building under the BSD and Solaris flavours, as I hadn't used either of these systems before.

There are a few systems that SHOULD compile C-Kermit, but haven't been built for decades! These include the following: Coherent 4.2, BeOS 4.5 (Haiku), OpenStep 4.2 & Plan9, I haven't managed to get C-Kermit on any of these working yet.

C-Kermit will compile without any aditional libraries / dependancies in a few OS instances, (ie all the requisite libraries were preinstalled). However for most Debian derivitives the follwing are needed:

make (if not installed) or cmake

gcc (if not installed)

clang (as an alternatve to gcc)

libc-dev or glibc-dev (if not installed)

libssl-dev (to add ssl)

libpam-dev (to add ssl)

libz-dev (to add ssl if not installed)
For non Debian distros the following library names are used

openssl-devel

pam-devel

zlib-devel

libc-devel or glibc-devel

So far I've build C-Kermit on over 40 different systems running under VirtualBox and 20 systems on a Raspberry Pi 4.

The following OSes require non standard make commands to compile (once all the dependancies are installed)

Minix 3.4 RC6 - make netbsd

Open Mandriva - make LIBS=-lcrypt linux

Gentoo Linux - make LIBS=-ltinfo linux