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Messages - Tuure Linden

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76
Article Discussions / Re: Translating ArcaOS to local languages
« on: October 01, 2018, 12:47:28 pm »
The modified VIEW.EXE sounds quite useful to me. What do the others think?

77
Marketplace / Re: eComStation 1.01 and 1.1 German for sale
« on: October 01, 2018, 12:42:42 pm »
Is eCS 1.01 still available? If its German language version I might be interested in it.

78
Marketplace / Re: Books and software clearout
« on: October 01, 2018, 12:38:39 pm »
Quite a collection I would say! I'm also interested in almost everything. But shipment to Finland would costs as much as 140 euros?  So maybe I don't want the whole collection... But are you also willing to ship individual items if I wrote you a list of what I'm most interested in?

79
Events / Re: Announcing Warpstock Europe 2019!
« on: October 01, 2018, 12:27:14 pm »
I'm very much interested in attending BUT: when will be a more accurate schedule available? I'm planning to take my family with me (there seems to be a lot of sights near Soest and the hostel seems child-friendly) and the flights from Finland to Netherlands and back aren't cheap. A family room at the hostel has also its price. So it's most likely that I would attend Warpstock only for one day and that's why it's important to know what presentations are planned for each day so I could choose the better day for my intrests.

80
Applications / Re: My experience with ArcaOS & problems I've faced etc.
« on: September 30, 2018, 11:17:41 pm »
At the moment I use ArcaOS 5.0.3 with ThinkPad T60 and the setup works great. It even seems like that 5.03 functions better than 5.0.1 did and Firefox 45.9.0 seems to be quite stable with functioning uBlock Origin and LastPass plugins. However a newer and better browser for the future is absolutely needed.

An old T60 is a perfect ArcaOS machine because the hardware is so well supported. Ofcourse the machine shows its age and Firefox and Thunderbird take some time to load. I've tested the os with newer hardware but my hardware have been partially incombatible and there's been problems with unsupported display resolutions and wireless network adapters and that's why I've sticked with the T60. I also bought a Thinkpad E540 some time ago that I haven't tested ArcaOS on a bare metal installation yet. It might be compatible or not.

81
Article Discussions / Re: Translating ArcaOS to local languages
« on: September 30, 2018, 11:00:29 pm »
As I have written before, I've been volunteering to translate ArcaOS into German, Swedish and Finnish. I became a member of the ArcaOS translation team some while ago and have translated a few lines into Finnish, German and Swedish. I've been quite busy lately with a variety of projects and my work so I haven't had the time for translating OS/2. The main focus of the translation team has been on German which is the most difficult of the languages I know. So, I haven't done much for the project lately. It takes a lot of time to check and double-check that there's no mistakes in grammar etc in my German translations. I'm very sorry for my absence and I'll do my best to help out when I just could find the time...

Finnish is my native language and Swedish is the the other official language here in Finland and that's why those two are the easiest ones for me. I like the German language a lot and I used to be quite fluent with it 10-15 years ago but at the moment my German is a bit a bit rusted and that's why it takes a lot of time for me to translate into it. I've only used OS/2 Warp Finnish and English language versions and the German OS/2 jargon is also not so familiar and that brings also it's own challenge. But I like challenges and as I promised, I'll get back on the translating as soon as I'll have the time. It really would be great to have a finished German translation when ArcaOS 5.1 comes out.

82
A Qt based browser sounds a good solution because if I understood right, when Qt is ported to OS/2, the porting of available Qt based browsers is reasonably "easy" at least compared to Firefox. And when Qt5 is available for OS/2 it's also possible to port other Qt5 based software as well.

But porting Qt5 takes a long time. Is there any predictions how long it will be supported after Qt6 comes out? I've used a Qt based KDE desktop in Linux since 1998 and during these years Qt libraries and the KDE have seen many updates and usually older KDE version has become unsupported after the newer Qt version has been released. I was just wondering would it be wiser to port upcoming Qt6 instead?

83
Hi Roderick and thanks for the reply!

I've had an email discussion with Lewis Rosenthal and of course I opened tickets on Arca Noae site on two of the most important bugs. The fact is that Arca Noae is quite a small company and unable to support all the exotic hardware available - my "trash picked" cheap 5-10 year-old consumer laptops are not most likely to be the most important hardware to support.

I'm on a tight budget and have a reliable vendor of second-hand hardware (have had a good relationship for about 15 years now) and I buy the models available through this company because they have 3 months warranty for all the products and the prices are reasonable. It's quite certain that I'll get a newer ArcaOS compatible Thinkpad when one comes available for a cheap enough price. At the moment the available T540p models cost ca 600-700 euros and I'm in no hurry because the usb3 and wlan support for the model is not available yet.  There is a T450 with a minor crack on the display assembly available for quite a reasonable price but I still don't want to waste over 300 euros for a laptop that's not guaranteed to work with ArcaOS. Actually that's something I wrote to Lewis about: a better list of supported hardware is needed - it would help choosing a suitable laptop.

It's frustrating because they change the Linux kernel driver API too often, sure. The latest news have been that BSD variants are most likely to die out in a long run and Linux will dominate the open-source Unix clone market. Linux would have the best hardware support but if porting the drivers is too much work for a company size of Arca Noae I completely understand why they have chosen the BSD path. The BSD's hardware support has always been much worse than Linux's. But could be there be a solution for OS/2 similar to ndiswrapper that allows Windows WLAN drivers to be used in Linux? If I understand right, modern NT based Windows versions have still things common with OS/2 and they might even share some source code.

84
The LastPass 3.3.4 has security issues so I didn't install it. The newest version from lastpass.com installed fine but it doesn't work anyway. Well, it's possible to access My LastPass Vault via theri WWW site so missing plugin isn't a disaster. The browser itself works quite well and it's even faster than the former version I tried.

However, is Seamonkey also using Rust in newer versions and making an OS/2 build from newest 2.49 branch is therefore impossible? 2.42 is an ancient version - of course it doesn't matter for now because every site I need to visit seems to work.

85
Great! Thanks, Dave. I'll check the new build out.

86
Thaks for the tips!

Seamonkey really works much much better than Firefox... It seems to even load a bit faster than Firefox on my T60 and Youtube videos play reasonably well. After installing the h264ify plugin for Firefox Youtube videos didn't load at all anymore and there was an error message that my browser doesn't support the video formats available. But I'll start using Seamonkey for now on. The only set back is that Lastpass and uBlock origin extensions are missing - I've so used to having them around. Mozilla's own password manager is all but safe and in today's world it's always a good idea to block annoying adds and tracking... And this T60 of mine shows it's age: having multiple tabs open even without adds slows down the system quite a lot.

My old software is mostly for DOS and Windows 3 so that's why a working audio driver is needed. However, I already found a newer one: the problematic one was from 1998 and this newer one is from 2001 and seems to work a bit better. The help files states that DOS session setting 'EMS_MEMORY_LIMIT' has to be set to ZERO for all WinOS/2 sessions from which one wishes to generate sound. I haven't done so yet (and the information where this setting can be found was also missing from the help file) but the sound seems to work for now - but I would also like to have midi support for a music notation software. ArcaOS doesn't seem to have any midi drivers at the moment.

Even 20 years ago there were driver problems with OS/2 Warp 3 - so the situation hasn't changed much. For example my Creative Labs CD-ROM drive did'nt work and I had to switch to a Mitsumi one.    So that's something I need to just live with, I guess.

The Gimp I've tried was from hobbes: http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/h-browse.php?dir=/pub/os2/apps/graphics/gimp and the latest version available there. I also was quite sure that I had installed all the libraries required, but trying to run Gimp only opened the preferences for gimp.exe.

edit: some typos corrected

87
And of course I forgot something... I haven't been able to install Gimp. Is there a working build for ArcaOS available? VLC Media player and OpenOffice were easy to install and they work flawlessy. Same goes with installing Firefox 45.9.0 (besides the Youtube issue). And when I tried Virtualbox for OS/2 it complained about missing kernel driver. I haven't found a solution for that either.

88
Applications / My experience with ArcaOS & problems I've faced etc.
« on: April 07, 2018, 02:20:19 pm »
Hi All!

I didn't find a suitable thread for discussion about these matters so I picked up the courage to create my own. Hopefully this was the right topic.

A little bit of history first... I used OS/2 Warp 3.0 back in 1996 to ca 2000. However, the first time I saw it in action was in 1994 at a local computer store where they demoed the newest OS/2 alongside Windows 95 beta. Here in Finland, when Warp 4.0 was introduced, the local IBM dealer aggressively promoted the os by practically giving away red spine Warp 3.0 boxes. So, I ended up buying one Finnish floppy version costing only 100 FIM (about 16 US $). Some time later I also got a copy of  English CD-ROM version. My first install experience was on a Nokia 386 with 4 Mb of RAM - it worked but the system was very slow. The next step was a Digital DEC pc Lpv 433sx (a 33MHz 486sx with 8 Mb of RAM and S3 graphics) and finally I ended up using  Warp 3 on A Microtech 100MHz Pentium (also with 8 Mb of RAM and ATI Xpression 3D). I loved the fact that I could run alongside DOS and 16-bit Windows applications and that time the DOS part was even better than native DOS environment because of the multitasking and amount of memory available (always full 640k RAM / application). I never upgraded to Warp 4 because the price was far too high for a high school student that I was back then. So I slowly migrated to Linux that seemed much more complicated multi-user operating system than Windows/DOS/OS/2. Luckily I was a swift learner and soon I was able to use and maintain Linux systems quite well. I ended up using Linux as my only operating system for almost 15 years. My main profession is a comprehensive school teacher but as a side-job I've provided tech support and system maintenance since a was a university student (I still do it for a little amount). So I've dealt a great deal with Windows and in 2013 I got involved with Macs. (In fact, the first computer I ever used as a kid was a neighbor's Macintosh Plus back in 1989 and in 2001 I helped solving some issues that a fellow student was having with her iMac G3, but besides that I had not been interested in Apple products. Things change... Now I own several Macs and have fixed and even sold bunch of them and even installed Windows 10 on them and used it as a daily-driver for a while. Windows has become much more stable that it has been before but the UI is a terrible mess. And macOS is getting worse because the utilities are being stripped down (i.e. Disk Utility) and Apple is focusing more on iOS. Linux is getting more complicated and automated (one doesn't have to edit files like XF86Config anymore and there's no need to build one's own kernel and many of the old familiar conf-files are managed via daemons etc.) So I miss the old good times.

Luckily OS/2 isn't dead and haven't changed that much! I've always been a bit sad that IBM abandoned OS/2 and I've been always interested in checking the situation of the platform from time to time... Maybe there are nostalgic reasons and I'm missing the way to easily run old DOS and 16-bit Windows applications that current Windows versions don't run anymore. And I've had very good memories using the OS. So, I've sometimes checked the status of eComstation and even downloaded a live-cd test version some years ago... But finally when I saw Bryan Lunduke interviewing Lewis Rosenthal on his Youtube channel last year, I decided to buy an ArcaOS license. The future looks brighter than with eCS. The effort to be able to use OS/2 with modern hardware and support for newer software was something I wanted to get involved with. I volunteered to translate ArcaOS to German, Swedish and Finnish some time ago to help the project the way I'm able to.

After purchasing the license, I tested ArcaOS within VirtualBox under Windows 10 and it worked quite well. I didn't have so much luck with the pile of older consumer grade laptops I had laying around BUT an older Lenovo ThinkCentre C2Duo desktop was my first almost completely succesfull installation. The only issue was with the integrated graphics: panorama didn't work at all, it only resulted a blank screen. Snap Graphics worked but didn't support wide-screen resolutions. The cpu was also far from up to date. So, I decided to buy an older Thinkpad as my ArcaOS machine. I sold my old T400 a couple of years ago when I switched to Apple laptops so I needed to get a new one. The first Thinkpad my vendor had to offer was a T410s that wasn't a complete success because the WLAN wasn't supported and there was an issue with graphics: windowed DOS or Win/OS2 sessions didn't work even with the suggested CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT modifications. So, I decided to sell the T410s. I really liked the specs and appearance of the machine BUT getting ArcaOS to run perfectly was the goal. Next I got a bigger pile of older and cheaper machines: T60, T61, T400, X200 and X201. According to Neil Waldhauer the T60 would be a perfect ArcaOS machine and X200 would also work but the WLAN card has to be changed a specific Intel one. I've tested T60 and X200 and the information seems to be correct. On T60 everything works out-of-the- box and with X200 everything works except for the WLAN. I also wanted to have a fast ArcaOS desktop (I have two licenses) so I bought a used Lenovo all-in-one: ThinkCenter M90z, however there are issues with the integrated graphics.

So what's my experience so far? The os itself is stable and runs very fast compared to modern Windows or Linux distributions. Driver support is something like it was with Linux about 20 years ago: you'll have to choose your hardware carefully. The FAT32 driver and USB memory sticks can cause system to lock up. Unfortunately the Firefox port seems to be garbage. It's quite unstable and SLOW. When the system itself runs blazingly fast, loading the browser takes a long time. The 38 version has a nasty bug when viewing Youtube videos full-screen and supports only 360p resolution. The 45 version doesn't like to play videos at all (it plays for 1-2 seconds and then stops), the full range of resolutions is available there but it doesn't help much because the videos refuse to load. The future of web browsing in ArcaOS is a bit uncertain... What would be the best browser in the future? I don't have very high hopes with the Pale Moon browser because of the bad experiences with current Firefox builds which it's most likely based on. Maybe something Webkit based would be better in the future? Some more in-depth documentation is also needed. For example, I didn't find any way to switch the graphics driver from SNAP to Panorama or vice versa and the only solution I came up with was to reinstall whole ArcaOS. Printing works with CUPS but not from 16-bit Windows applications. The sound in WinOS/2 doesn't work either. I tried an UNIAUD WinOS/2 driver but it does't work. Sometimes the "tada.wav" can be heard when individual 16-bit Windows program is started but that's all.

But still I like using ArcaOS very much and I'm looking forward for future versions. I'm sure that the current issues will be fixed in time and I like to do what I can to support the effort. Or am I the only one having the issues mentioned? Or might it be the case that I've missed something in documentation or in forum posts?

Edit:
I corrected a big bunch of typos and made my long story more readable. And I also added some more details...

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