Obtaining Assistance

Since GNO was reclassified as freeware in the fall of 1997, Procyon no longer provides direct support to users, other than those that had paid the full price for GNO prior to the reclassification.

There is, however, a group of programmers and users of GNO who are able to render assistance on a volunteer basis. Some of these programmers are also actively involved in upgrading the base GNO distribution.

If you require assistance, the following two methods of contact are preferred:

• Post a message to the USENET news group, comp.sys.apple2.gno. Remember that messages usually take at least a few hours to propagate around the world. Answers also take time to propagate.

• Ask a question on the Delphi Apple II Programmers' Forum. There are subject areas set up for GNO under “third party technical support”. Delphi is accessible via http://delphi.com. (Delphi is recommended for discussion of programming topics in general and has, for the most part, taken over from Genie as the center of online Apple II communication. Some packages are available free of charge. Visit Delphi for more details.)

  Unlike USENET, on Delphi you should try to continue existing threads. The current ones for GNO are:

  • Message 1045: GNO: System Installation and Configuration
  • Message 1046: GNO: References and Users' Manuals
  • Message 1047: GNO: Manual Pages
  • Message 1048: GNO: The Kernel
  • Message 1049: GNO: Shells
  • Message 1050: GNO: Libraries and System Header Files
  • Message 1051: GNO: Interfacing with ORCA
  • Message 1052: GNO: Networking and Telecommunications
  • Message 1053: GNO: General Discussion

• Also on Delphi, there is a regularly scheduled GNO Programmers' Conference on Monday and Thursday evenings from 10pm to midnight EST/EDT. Devin is usually around those evenings, although he sometimes misses the conference. If you don't catch him the first time, be sure to try again another day.

As a last resort, you can contact Devin Reade (one of the GNO development team) at gdr@trenco.gno.org. Please don't use this method unless absolutely necessary, as Devin is not always available. More importantly, asking questions in an open forum provides for peer review; if an answer is wrong, it can be corrected by other developers.

Finally, for those who paid for GNO before it was reclassified, Jawaid can still be contacted at bazyar@hypermall.com. Written correspondence should be directed to Procyon at:

        Procyon, Inc.
        PO Box 641
        Englewood, CO 80151-0641 USA
        (303) 781-3273