Note that Unix PuTTY has mostly only been tested on Linux so far; portability problems such as BSD-style ptys or different header file requirements are expected.
A.3.3 What's the point of the Unix port? Unix has OpenSSH.
All sorts of little things. pterm is directly useful to anyone who prefers PuTTY's terminal emulation to xterm's, which at least some people do. Unix Plink has apparently found a niche among people who find the complexity of OpenSSL makes OpenSSH hard to install (and who don't mind Plink not having as many features). Some users want to generate a large number of SSH keys on Unix and then copy them all into PuTTY, and the Unix PuTTYgen should allow them to automate that conversion process.
There were development advantages as well; porting PuTTY to Unix was a valuable path-finding effort for other future ports, and also allowed us to use the excellent Linux tool
Valgrind
to help with debugging, which has already improved PuTTY's stability on all
platforms.
However, if you're a Unix user and you can see no reason to switch from OpenSSH to PuTTY/Plink, then you're probably right. We don't expect our Unix port to be the right thing for everybody.
A.3.4 Will there be a port to Windows CE or PocketPC?
We have done some work on such a port, but it only reached an early stage, and certainly not a useful one. It's no longer being actively worked on.
However, there's a third-party port at
http://www.pocketputty.net/
.
A.3.5 Is there a port to Windows 3.1?
PuTTY is a 32-bit application from the ground up, so it won't run on Windows 3.1 as a native 16-bit program; and it would be very hard to port it to do so, because of Windows 3.1's vile memory allocation mechanisms.
However, it is possible in theory to compile the existing PuTTY source in such a way that it will run under Win32s (an extension to Windows 3.1 to let you run 32-bit programs). In order to do this you'll need the right kind of C compiler - modern versions of Visual C at least have stopped being backwards compatible to Win32s. Also, the last time we tried this it didn't work very well.
If you're interested in running PuTTY under Windows 3.1, help and testing in this area would be very welcome!
A.3.6 Will there be a port to the Mac?
There are several answers to this question:
•The Unix/Gtk port is already fully working under Mac OS X as an X11 application.
•A native (Cocoa) Mac OS X port has been started. It's just about usable, but is of nowhere near release quality yet, and is likely to behave in unexpected ways. Currently it's unlikely to be completed unless someone steps in to help.
•A separate port to the classic Mac OS (pre-OSX) is also in progress; it too is not ready yet.
A.3.7 Will there be a port to EPOC?
I hope so, but given that ports aren't really progressing very fast even on systems the developers do already know how to program for, it might be a long time before any of us get round to learning a new system and doing the port for that.
However, some of the work has been done by other people; see the
Links page of our website
for various third-party ports.
A.3.8 Will there be a port to the iPhone?
We have no plans to write such a port ourselves; none of us has an iPhone, and developing and publishing applications for it looks awkward and expensive. Such a port would probably depend upon the stalled Mac OS X port (see
question A.3.6
).
However, there is a third-party SSH client for the iPhone and iPod Touch called
pTerm
, which is apparently based on PuTTY. (This is
nothing to do with our similarly-named pterm, which is a standalone terminal emulator for Unix systems; see
question A.3.2
.)