Author Topic: qpdfview  (Read 34622 times)

Michaelhz

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #15 on: March 05, 2015, 09:34:09 pm »

Thanks for the nice "because it appears that you don't even know whats going on." You can be sure I KNOW WHATS GOING ON!!!!

When I read such comments I really wonder why I invest sooooooooooooo much time in porting any software for free. But so it goes.
And I didn't even say you should contribute in yum or whatever. I only mentioned the readme/install text files.

So instead of writing IMHO usless stuff about how you dislike yum, send me a changed install.os2. I personally like yum and it works like a charm here. And of course you are free to dislike yum, we don't urge anyone to use it.

regards
Silvan

Dear Silvan,

I think it's now time to say a big thank you to you (and all the others involved in this development)  for all your efforts.  :)
A system like rpm/yum for keeping all the depended software up to date is highly appreciated. I have always looked enviously at the Linux users. Now it is very easy to keep all my OS/2 systems (Currently 4)  up to date. Its easy just to tell the system "yum update".
Additionally it was never so easy to get an aligned build system with gcc and all the important libraries.

Looking forward to have all the remaining libs (and progs?) included into the yum-system. 

Best regards
Michael

Doug Bissett

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #16 on: March 06, 2015, 12:03:44 am »
Quote
Thanks for the nice "because it appears that you don't even know whats going on." You can be sure I KNOW WHATS GOING ON!!!!

I hate to have to say this, but if you do actually know what is going on, you should be ashamed to admit it. I have to believe that you honestly do think you know what is going on, but I will suggest that somebody had better take a MUCH closer look at the quality of the products that are being distributed by YUM (including YUM itself). If I had performed like that, when I was working, I would have been fired.

Quote
When I read such comments I really wonder why I invest sooooooooooooo much time in porting any software for free.

I know why you do it (and my comments are not directed at you personally). What I don't understand is why you don't take a bit more time, and port things so they work like an OS/2 user expects them to work, rather than half way between *NIX and OS/2. You could leave out some of the more useless programs to free up some time. Personally, I use Firefox because that is really the only viable alternative. I use AOO4, because Lotus SmartSuite has developed far too many problems, and I suspect that a lot of them are caused by updates to make Firefox work. Now, if I try to run Firefox, and AOO4 together, one, or the other, always crashes, often messing the system up so badly, that I need to reboot. And, I use QPDFView, simply because it is better than Lucide, which seems to be the only other option (I suppose there is always GhostView, but it is also a terrible kludge). I would use CLAMAV, if CLAMD.EXE would not eat up all of my shared memory space, and using CLAMSCAN, without CLAMD.EXE takes "forever". CUPS is another, very important program, but it is also becoming such a kludge that it is very difficult to get it to work. SAMBA seems to be necessary to communicate  with anything other than OS/2, and it is finally starting to work reasonably well. RSYNC is one of the few ports that actually works well enough to depend on it. I can't think of anything else that I use.

Quote
PTHREAD doesn't break AOO 4.1.1.1 here.
Installed Packages
pthread.i386                        20140814-16.oc00

It breaks every system that I try it on, whether I install it using YUM, or manually. AOO4.1.1 either hangs, spontaneously reboots, or hard (black screen) crashes when I try to start any part of it.

Quote
QPDF works like a charm too. The last 2 versions work better than the previous ones because they don't need the 3 qpdf dll's in the path anymore for qpdfview to work in any way I choose to open it  (command line, FC/2 association, wps, firefox).

The ONLY way that I can get the latest QPDFView to work, is to install it on the boot drive. If it is not on the boot drive, it can't find the plugins. I have no idea why that is the case, but it is not acceptable. I have temporarily installed it on the boot drive, to see if it is worth putting up with that major inconvenience, but it looks like I am going to go back to the older version, which does work.

Quote
Now it is very easy to keep all my OS/2 systems (Currently 4)  up to date. Its easy just to tell the system "yum update".

Are they up to date? It took more than 4 months for LIBC066 to show up in YUM, after it was available as a WarpIn archive on HOBBES. Now, it appears that the PTHREAD package, that just recently showed up on YUM, was built last August. It also seems that GhostScript 9.10 is current on YUM, and apparently it contains something that GhostScript 9.15, from Paul Smedley, doesn't have. So what is "current"? Then, GCC1, and associated parts, suddenly showed up, and got installed, without being announced (at least I never heard about it before it was installed on my system). I haven't confirmed it, yet, but I am suspicious that GCC1 is responsible for the odd 5 second freeze, once or twice per day, that is happening on all of the systems where I have it installed (but it could be something else, and it could be more often). FWIW, you never know what is going to happen when you say "YUM UPDATE", and trying to figure out what it actually did is not as easy as it sounds. BTW, even Linux is moving away from YUM because it just doesn't work very well. The main difference is, that they have lots of people working on it.

The main Porting problem seems to be that Quality Control is minimal, product testing is minimal, problems are slipping through, and that is impacting the users. The main cause seems to be trying to do too much, with too few people. The other main problem, is that too few users are stepping forward to help out (and, they are often rejected, or ignored, by the programmers when they do step forward). The other main problem is that most programmers are so busy trying to port things, that they have forgotten how to write native OS/2 programs, or drivers. In times past, OS/2 was the source of many great programs (PMView is about the only one that is left). Now, OS/2 is limping along on other peoples work, patched together to make it run, and it shows. Of course, the same is true of the whole OS.

I don't know what the answer is. WIndows 7 seems to work pretty well, after you find a lot of the "helpful" things to turn them off.

I have been playing with Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon 64. That seems to work okay, after I found out how to turn off about 80% of the requests for a password (absolutely insane to ask for a password 3 times in 20 seconds). Then there is a steep learning curve that I really don't need (permissions, new commands, security, etc.). On the other hand, Linux seems to be following the lead of Windows, and it is becoming a bloated mess. Now, that is being reflected in the programs that get ported to OS/2.

I have no direct experience with Apple, but I have heard horror stories about trying to get something as basic as networking to go. Of course, windows is just as bad, or worse.

Now, I have an Android phone, that is probably capable of doing about 90% of what I use a computer for. Unfortunately, it is annoying to use, mainly because there is no real keyboard, and the screen is too small, not to mention the learning curve, and the fact that is is tied to Google (for better, or worse).

Where to next? Well, we are on a road. Nobody seems to be sure where it is going, but we are following it.

mickhead

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #17 on: March 06, 2015, 01:31:54 am »
I think it's now time to say a big thank you to you (and all the others involved in this development)  for all your efforts.  :)
I thank also the developer of the small OS/2 community. We say keep up efforts all around.

guzzi

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #18 on: March 06, 2015, 02:28:25 am »
Quote
Thanks for the nice "because it appears that you don't even know whats going on." You can be sure I KNOW WHATS GOING ON!!!!


I know why you do it (and my comments are not directed at you personally). What I don't understand is why you don't take a bit more time, and port things so they work like an OS/2 user expects them to work, rather than half way between *NIX and OS/2. You could leave out some of the more useless programs to free up some time. Personally, I use Firefox because that is really the only viable alternative. I use AOO4, because Lotus SmartSuite has developed far too many problems, and I suspect that a lot of them are caused by updates to make Firefox work. Now, if I try to run Firefox, and AOO4 together, one, or the other, always crashes, often messing the system up so badly, that I need to reboot. And, I use QPDFView, simply because it is better than Lucide, which seems to be the only other option (I suppose there is always GhostView, but it is also a terrible kludge). I would use CLAMAV, if CLAMD.EXE would not eat up all of my shared memory space, and using CLAMSCAN, without CLAMD.EXE takes "forever". CUPS is another, very important program, but it is also becoming such a kludge that it is very difficult to get it to work. SAMBA seems to be necessary to communicate  with anything other than OS/2, and it is finally starting to work reasonably well. RSYNC is one of the few ports that actually works well enough to depend on it. I can't think of anything else that I use.

Quote
PTHREAD doesn't break AOO 4.1.1.1 here.
Installed Packages
pthread.i386                        20140814-16.oc00

It breaks every system that I try it on, whether I install it using YUM, or manually. AOO4.1.1 either hangs, spontaneously reboots, or hard (black screen) crashes when I try to start any part of it.

Quote
QPDF works like a charm too. The last 2 versions work better than the previous ones because they don't need the 3 qpdf dll's in the path anymore for qpdfview to work in any way I choose to open it  (command line, FC/2 association, wps, firefox).

The ONLY way that I can get the latest QPDFView to work, is to install it on the boot drive. If it is not on the boot drive, it can't find the plugins. I have no idea why that is the case, but it is not acceptable. I have temporarily installed it on the boot drive, to see if it is worth putting up with that major inconvenience, but it looks like I am going to go back to the older version, which does work.

It's interesting to note that quite a lot of programs don't work on your computers. These same programs work on mine. AOO and Firefox run concurrently without problems, QPDFView runs not from the boot drive, I keep on eye on the various bug trackers and i haven't seen similar issues as you seem to be having. It could be that you have some basic thing wrong in the way you set up your system.


Quote
Now it is very easy to keep all my OS/2 systems (Currently 4)  up to date. Its easy just to tell the system "yum update".



Are they up to date? It took more than 4 months for LIBC066 to show up in YUM, after it was available as a WarpIn archive on HOBBES.

True. Then again, there were very few programs released that actually needed it in that timeframe. The real lag was more like 4 weeks.

Now, I have an Android phone, that is probably capable of doing about 90% of what I use a computer for. Unfortunately, it is annoying to use, mainly because there is no real keyboard, and the screen is too small, not to mention the learning curve, and the fact that is is tied to Google (for better, or worse).

I don't have an Android phone, nor an Apple one. Still use Symbian and like OS/2 the benefits still outweigh the disadvantages.

As for Linux stepping away from Yum, do you mean DNF? afak only Fedora is moving over. DNF btw is a fork of yum that solves quite a few problems yum seems to have and, like any new software, introduces a fair number of new ones.

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #19 on: March 06, 2015, 06:23:34 am »
Is there some way to get more information about the error "could not load plug-in for type 'PDF'"?
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Dave Yeo

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #20 on: March 06, 2015, 06:59:30 am »
Perhaps open a ticket, I'd guess at QT netlabs.

Doug Bissett

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #21 on: March 06, 2015, 07:54:10 am »
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It's interesting to note that quite a lot of programs don't work on your computers. These same programs work on mine. AOO and Firefox run concurrently without problems, QPDFView runs not from the boot drive, I keep on eye on the various bug trackers and i haven't seen similar issues as you seem to be having. It could be that you have some basic thing wrong in the way you set up your system.

I have been setting up my systems pretty much the same way, for many years (long before eCS existed). I do have a number of background programs running (about 20), which tends to use up shared memory, and I have had to quit using a few of them because of that (CLAMD.EXE was the worst offender). Now, there are unexplained issues with some programs (QPDFView) being unable to locate DLLs, which should be easily found. I think there is a general lack of resource checking, when programs request memory, and they don't handle running out very well. I expect that that is because *NIX programs rarely have a problem like that, so they don't bother checking. It is also possible that whoever ported the program missed something that needs to be changed.

I will note, that I have a number of very different systems (including virtual machines), all set up very much the same, and they all have the same problems, so it isn't hardware. Most of them don't have as many background programs running, so that is not likely the cause. There is nothing unusual about my basic setup. It is pretty much the way that OS/2, or eCS, installs it (except where YUM is installed). I do clean up my INI files regularly (two weeks), but I notice that some problems get worse just before I do the cleanup.I will also note, that my system started running a little better after I installed LIBC066 (using WarpIn), but recently, it has been going down hill again.

I am open to any suggestions.

Paul Smedley

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #22 on: March 06, 2015, 08:36:00 am »
Hey Neil,

Is there some way to get more information about the error "could not load plug-in for type 'PDF'"?

I would use pmdll or something similar to ensure all dependent DLL's are present and can be loaded. I'll wager you have a DLL missing somewhere..

Pete2

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #23 on: March 06, 2015, 03:55:13 pm »
Hey Neil,

Is there some way to get more information about the error "could not load plug-in for type 'PDF'"?

I would use pmdll or something similar to ensure all dependent DLL's are present and can be loaded. I'll wager you have a DLL missing somewhere..
I also get this error, but pmdll shows no missing dlls.

 Install.os2 includes the following:

"If you have tried to open a file and not all requirements have been there at this try, Qt screwed his plugin cache.
To overcome that delete %HOME%/.config/Trolltech.ini. It will be created again when a Qt app starts."

I've tried this and still get the error. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Batchheizer

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #24 on: March 06, 2015, 04:48:00 pm »
I also get this error, but pmdll shows no missing dlls.

 Install.os2 includes the following:

"If you have tried to open a file and not all requirements have been there at this try, Qt screwed his plugin cache.
To overcome that delete %HOME%/.config/Trolltech.ini. It will be created again when a Qt app starts."

I've tried this and still get the error. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Try to delete all poppler-files in ecs/dll and install only the newest ones.

vrwp

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #25 on: March 06, 2015, 06:05:44 pm »
Is there some way to get more information about the error "could not load plug-in for type 'PDF'"?
Had the same problem. Do you have by any chance installed epdf? In the epdf i had a tiff.dll which lead to the problem, renamed that dll an now all is working fine (tiff.dll is installed by yum)

Andi B.

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #26 on: March 06, 2015, 07:22:14 pm »
qpdfview0.4.14 works fine here as the older versions did.

I do not have it on the boot drive and it works. But I do not have %UNIXROOT% pointing to the boot drive too. Maybe that's different to Dougs setup.

Printing works via cups. Although I would prefer if it would work via native pscript.drv it's not a big problem.

It seems qpdfpdf.dll must be in qpdfview directory (included in qpdfview-0_4_14-ga.zip anyway). That one in %UNIXROOT%\usr\lib\ is not found.

While I write this in Seamonkey qpdfview displays a 2.6MB pdf. Chatzilla and SMs email/news client is open as always. One AOO spreadsheet and one AOO text document is open. VBOX is running a XP guest at the same time. OpenFire (Java) runs in the background. PSI, ZOC, two LarsenCommander instances and a few other apps run too. Astonishing that this all is even possible with that old base OS.
« Last Edit: March 06, 2015, 08:28:13 pm by Andi B. »

Paul Smedley

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #27 on: March 07, 2015, 12:16:41 am »
 
Quote
Thanks for the nice "because it appears that you don't even know whats going on." You can be sure I KNOW WHATS GOING ON!!!!

I hate to have to say this, but if you do actually know what is going on, you should be ashamed to admit it. I have to believe that you honestly do think you know what is going on, but I will suggest that somebody had better take a MUCH closer look at the quality of the products that are being distributed by YUM (including YUM itself). If I had performed like that, when I was working, I would have been fired.

You hate to say it, but you say it anyway? Note that Silvan isn't getting paid by anyone for doing what he's doing for yum - neither are the other guys working on it, so how can they be fired. You have a choice, if you don't like what's on offer, don't use it. There is no need to denigrate the people who are doing stuff to try and help OS/2.

OS/2 users often don't provide feedback on software, which makes it hard for developers to fix issues, or if they do provide feedback, it's along the lines of 'it doesn't work' which makes problem solving difficult. If you want to be critical about the 'quality' of ports, direct your criticism at the community - many of whom don't care enough to report issues in an appropriate manner.

The few remaining developers don't have huge resources available to extensively test things - would it be better if they simply didn't release updates?

Note that I personally aren't a huge fan of rpm - I love the concept - but feel it does contribute to DLL hell given the limitations of OS/2 8.3 file system and the clashes with EMX or whatever DLL's that are already existing on user's systems, however that doesn't mean I go around making snarky remarks about the developers working on it.
« Last Edit: March 07, 2015, 12:19:57 am by Paul Smedley »

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #28 on: March 08, 2015, 03:02:21 am »
Hey Neil,

Is there some way to get more information about the error "could not load plug-in for type 'PDF'"?

I would use pmdll or something similar to ensure all dependent DLL's are present and can be loaded. I'll wager you have a DLL missing somewhere..

OK, with PMDLL, running against qpdfpdf.dll, I see png16.dll is missing. I'm not sure what package gives that. I did rerun all the yum commands, but it didn't actually find png16.dll

Running PMDLL against qpdfview.exe, I see cups.dll won't load. But cups.dll is on the libpath. Running PMDLL against cups.dll shows no problems.

Any idea what to do?
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Dave Yeo

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Re: qpdfview
« Reply #29 on: March 08, 2015, 05:20:17 am »
I have libpng-devel installed for png, there's also libpng-tools which might work (they conflict here). Png depends on libz.
There's been a few different releases of cups.dll, which you need...