OpenSource WishList

[Ibrahim Hakeem]

Just throwing in my wish here, as per Martin's recommendation:

This quote is from a post I made on a new release of QEMU for ArcaOS on May 2021 - I've edited it to reflect my new views on the matter, chiefly that a good build of QEMU should be able to totally replace VirtualBox as our main virtualization solution.
My reasoning for QEMU is Arca Noae's desire to appeal to retro gamers. DOS and WINOS/2 may cover their bases fairly well, but without Windows 9x (and possibly Win2k/XP to a limited extent) - we're missing a lot of bases.

Note: A couple of QEMU builds for OS/2 and Ecomstation are floating around but do not work on ArcaOS

>Stable enough for everyday use
>Smooth Windows 95/98 emulation
>Audio, preferably SB16 compatible emulation
>3D acceleration support (Running something like Flight Simulator 98 at mid-high settings at around 50FPS should theoretically be easy to achieve, especially with 5.1's new VEFI driver)
>A reliable GUI for configuring and launching VMs
>Networking support

Effectively, something that's going to be solid for mid-high range Win9x gaming.

I have a hunch this will most likely be 2.4.x or earlier. Once again like others have said, there's no need to build a newer version that's going to have more compilation related headaches - especially when modern Linux distros are still going off 2.4.x code without any complaint. I understand this will require more effort than a simple compile n' go situation especially with the desired specifications listed, but I believe there to be very viable use-case for a new and reasonably stable release of Qemu for our platform

From what I've read - QEMU, especially the slightly older builds, should not be too difficult to port. My personal take on the matter is that Arca Noae could support it and could go as far as to make it a product. A lot of ArcaOS users could reasonably rely on the platform more if Windows emulation was improved.

[Martin Iturbide]

Let's make the summary of the OSS wishlist of this thread:

- The GIMP.  Photo edition tool
   - To port this it is required to port GTK+ first.
- Inkscape. illustration tool
- Audacity. Sound recording editing tool
- QEMU. Machine emulator and virtualizer.
- Openscad . The Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller.
- QCAD. 2D CAD
- R - Statistics, 3-D and dynamic graphics
- TeX live. Recent version of the TeX typesetting program, successor to teTeX.
- Kate. Text editor.
- Notepad++. Text Editor
- Peazip. Archiver tool
- OBS. Video streaming, desktop recording.
- KDevelop. Development IDE.
- Lazarus. Development IDE.
- wxWidgets.  C++ library GUI API (Update it)

Regards

[Craig Miller]

How about LibreOffice, I think Openoffice is on a small crawl of progression.

[Eugene Tucker]

Libre Office is from Star Office like Apache Open Office. I believe that Libre got rid of all the OS/2 code years ago. So I don't think you will get that wish

[Fahrvenugen]

From what I understand, Libreoffice is not going to happen.  Not long after they split the code base off from OpenOffice to create Libreoffice, the Libreoffice folks stripped out all the OS/2 specific code which would have been required to get it to compile under OS/2.  From what I understand, it would be a huge amount of work to put that code back in.

[Dave Yeo]

Putting the code back in is as simple as finding the commit(s) that removed it and reversing them. The hard part would be then bringing the code base up to date. It's been years of active development and who knows what choices they made that would make it very hard.
As it is, it seems only one person has the environment required to compile OpenOffice, some requirement that most of us are missing, so problems jsut compiling the codebase when they stripped OS/2, then trying to fast forward to current in steps and seeing if it compiles. No one with the skills is interested in doing the work and quite likely there's requirements that we can't meet like Rust.

[Dave Yeo]

Revisiting trying to get qemu 2.4.1 to compile, it will take a lot of work. It stopped for me with missing daemon support, which cold be ported from squid for example. Looking at that part of the code is an expectation of ptty support, which also could be worked around then other potential problems needing a skilled OS/2 programmer,
Network working, requires a TAP driver
Support for physical devices, at least CD's and ideally floppies too. Not sure if HD also should be included
USB, our libusb might be good enough
kernel mode driver, kqemu
perhaps stuff like the virtual box additions for clipboard, mouse etc
Sure there is more, then there's making it stable.

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi

About the development IDE. We have an older version of QTCreator ported, which looks very fine to me (yum install qtcreator qtcreator-doc). There were some tries to produce a newer version with Qt5, but it does not work yet. But I think it is worthy to try for people looking for an IDE. Maybe putting some more effort to update it will be good too.

Regards

[Jochen Schäfer]

Hi

About the development IDE. We have an older version of QTCreator ported, which looks very fine to me (yum install qtcreator qtcreator-doc). There were some tries to produce a newer version with Qt5, but it does not work yet. But I think it is worthy to try for people looking for an IDE. Maybe putting some more effort to update it will be good too.

Regards

Yes, it would be nice, but QtCreator is not a generic IDE. It's tailored to Qt development.

[Martin Iturbide]

Yes, it would be nice, but QtCreator is not a generic IDE. It's tailored to Qt development.

Thanks Joche, I guess you are right. I download it and I don't see any generic Non Qt project on the list.

I guess if we are dreaming we should aim for the Eclipse IDE and/or Apache Netbeans, right?

Regards

[Mentore]

Yes, it would be nice, but QtCreator is not a generic IDE. It's tailored to Qt development.

Thanks Joche, I guess you are right. I download it and I don't see any generic Non Qt project on the list.

I guess if we are dreaming we should aim for the Eclipse IDE and/or Apache Netbeans, right?

Regards

Well, from a non-commercial POV this is probably the best solution one can seek imho. On the "abandonware" side the best editors for OS/2 are the VAC 4 IDE and (AFAIK) Visual SlickEdit, together with I seem to remember VisualAge for SmallTalk.

There was some talk about how to retrieve at least Visual SlickEdit, but nothing more.
Mentore

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

...There was some talk about how to retrieve at least Visual SlickEdit, but nothing more.
Mentore

I hit them up some years ago about releasing the OS/2 version, and while the person I was conversing with was generally ready to do so, ultimately the legal/higher ups did not give it the "thumbs-up".

[Eugene Tucker]

I imagine that it too much to want Audacity ported.

[Jochen Schäfer]

Yes, it would be nice, but QtCreator is not a generic IDE. It's tailored to Qt development.

Thanks Jochen, I guess you are right. I download it and I don't see any generic Non Qt project on the list.

I guess if we are dreaming we should aim for the Eclipse IDE and/or Apache Netbeans, right?

Regards

I don't know about that, we still have no newer Java runtime.
IMO, kdevelop seems to be the more likely option, but I don't know the infrasstructure needed for that.