OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Programming

Closed source parts of eComStation

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Paul Smedley:

--- Quote from: ivan on December 27, 2013, 11:43:53 pm ---Neil, if you can get SAMBA and/or CUPS to print over the network to a NAS based print server that requires a username and password to log in I would love to know the necessary incantations and what must be sacrificed to do so.

--- End quote ---

To be honest - I thought this was possible with cups - I would expect specifying the printer queue as smb://username:Password@ip_address in CUPS would do this (but I could be wrong)

ivan:
Thanks Paul.  I will give that a try on Monday when I go into work although I seem to remember trying something like that before and getting no response.

Is there any thing special I should be looking for?  Since all the printers are HP CLG 3500 I have your hplip installed with CUPS on my test machine.  Now all I have to do is work out what to do.

dbanet:

--- Quote from: Roderick Klein on December 28, 2013, 12:48:58 am ---As to reimplementing the OS2KRNL. WHat features would you like to have of the kernel ?

Roderick

--- End quote ---

For sure, the very huge and very important part that really needs to be reimplemented is the stuff that do memory management.
Memmanagement is known to be very poor (two arenas, continous troubles with shrmem) on OS/2. Also the 4 GiB for all the processes limit surely should be overcamed.
With the latest development of Phoenix team -- PAE ramdrive, you can use up to 64 GiB of memory on OS/2 (with any kernel, any version of OS/2 from Warp 3 to eCS *nextVersion), but even with swapfile placed on the ramdrive, the limit of 4 GiB/all processes still remains.

This will not remove the limit of 4 GiB per ONE process, but for sure will be a great move forward for OS/2, because you, of course, can just "write another videodriver", but the 4 GiB of RAM limitation for all the system is now a fundamental barrier, which SHOULD be overcamed as soon as possible.


Another big trouble, a bottleneck of Operating System/2, is the graphics subsystem and some parts of WPS.
While the most annoying defect of WPS -- instability -- really needs attention, the Presentation Manager and the graphics subsystem itself inhibits the development of eComStation very much.

PM and the graphics subsystem is a huge bunch of code, and its reverse-engineering and (preferably) opensourcing should became the next long-term goal of the whole eComStation community in general and Mensys in particular.
While WPS improvement (making it usable as a light filemanager -- copy/move dialog replacement, file open container (opensource it!), etc) may be performed relatively easy, in view of XWP, which is a very good start (or even the half of a distance), PM and the graphics subsystem need a lot more work, and should became the primary target.
Its defects are: inability of on-the-fly resolution change, no support of multidisplay configurations (one stretched desktop (!) on many monitors with different resolutions (!!) connected to a number (!!!) of different (!!!!) videocards ran by different videodrivers (!!!!!) -- this is fully possible on Microsoft Windows and impossible on OS/2), and no support of transparency (=>non-square windows, shadows).
Consider, that Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X do support all these features.


Also, if I started to whine here, I am also gonna note a few problems, no one of which are also encountered on other OSes, and which are easy to fix.

First. USBCOM driver. It just is not suitable for anything. USBCOM devices should be plug and playable (no need to preconfigure the amount of usbcom devices in the config.sys), three or five more chips support should be added.
Ubuntu 12 supports USBCOM hardware very well -- I've tryied three devices which didn't work with OS/2, on Ubuntu -- worked well out-of-the-box, no additional drivers needed.
The problem may be easily fixed (look at the usbserial module sources of the linux kernel).
There is no attention paid to this problem.

Second. USBMSD with SCSI-Transparent command set support should be implemented. Chris Wohlgemut once did this, but his driver does not work for my device, the driver's source code is not opensourced.
Windows XP with no service packs support these hardware w/o any additional drivers needed, out-of-the-box.
The problem may be easily fixed (look at the usbmsd module sources of the linux kernel).
There is no attention paid to this problem.


I suppose, that's all :)

Fr4nk:

--- Quote ---the 4 GiB of RAM limitation for all the system is now a fundamental barrier
--- End quote ---

Could you please name one OS/2 application or one use case where we need more than 4 GB RAM?

Of course it would be nice to have but there is no priority for this from a point of a user. I understand that people buying windows machines and then wonder if they eCS work on it. But for me as an real user (I'm working 8h each day with eCS) there are about 100 things more important than >4GB RAM. As the fairy said: don't waste wishes if you have only three. ;)

I agree to get things solved like shared memory problem or USB-issues.

Michaelhz:

--- Quote from: Fr4nk on January 14, 2014, 10:10:12 am ---Could you please name one OS/2 application or one use case where we need more than 4 GB RAM?

--- End quote ---
Well, darktable and rawtherapee would be my candidates. Using eCS on daily base becomes more and more difficult to meet the requirements of digital photography.

Furthermore storing large video files (4K) for NAS-services like mediatomb is a real pain with the 2TB fize limitation for file systems.

The foregoing discussion increasingly resembles that of the transition from 16 to 32 bit operating systems. For a long time Microsoft had denied the need of 32 bit systems. We as eCS-users don't even have the possibility to use tools like dos-extenders to utilize all the available memory on our hardware.

BR
Michael

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