Messages

1

Multimedia / Re: TUF Gaming X570 PRO (wifi)

« on: December 01, 2024, 09:02:28 pm »

Unfortunately ArcaOS 5.1 is unstable with this mobo, often it crashes with module exceptions e.g. "GOTCHA" OR "XWPDAEMN" after 5 secs after the desktop appears

These crashes are *highly* unlikely to have anything to do with the motherboard. Both apps hook the global message queue to intercept various keystrokes. This is almost certainly a pure software problem that doesn't involve any hardwre other than the CPU and memory.

Have you installed any 3rd-party software (other than the webcam driver) that you could remove/disable?  If the problem persists, file a bug report with AN since they installed both of these (I maintain 'xwpdaemn", so I'm curious to see what's going wrong).

2

Internet / Re: Dooble releases-Qt6

« on: December 01, 2024, 08:37:35 pm »

The problem to overcome is that Cloudflare has become the gatekeeper of much of the internet with it's "Are you human" checks.

I think I found an underlying cause for at least some of these Cloudfare checks: the UserAgent string.

A news website I read daily had become unusable because every time I clicked on a link to an article, I got Cloudflare. Casting about for solutions, I reset my UserAgent to the default. Since then, I haven't gotten the Cloudflare page on that site even once (or anywhere else, IIRC). I have to assume that it compares the capabilities that _should_ be present for a given UA with the capabilities the browser itself reports. If they don't match, it assumes something is fishy.

BTW... I'm going to take my titlebar activities to PM/email (at such time as I have something to report or try). Meanwhile, it might be better to put your titlebar tweaks on hold since they'll likely have to be rolled back if my efforts are successful. For the time being, seeing raw UTF8 is unlikely to cause users grievous psychological damage.

3

Hardware / Re: Mouse, Trackpoint, Trackpad, Touchpad - I2C Question

« on: December 01, 2024, 12:09:16 am »

The usual way make undetectable devices known to an OS is to mention them in the ACPI tables

'testlog acpi' should give you everything you need to find out - its just a matter of figuring out what it means

4

Internet / Re: Dooble releases-Qt6

« on: November 30, 2024, 11:52:08 pm »

Dave / Paul,

OMG! I've been out of the loop too long! It's going to take me a while to figure out the plumbing on this thing.

The goal is to use whatever info is available within Dooble to get back to a window's native handle (hwnd), then use that to trigger an update. All this info is available in 'qos2window.cc' but getting there programmatically looks like it will require a steep learning curve.

One good thing I've found: if I set the CP on the splash screen, the main window's titlebar displays UTF8 correctly. I assume this means it only has to be done once per session.

Dave... it appears that the new-style cast for
#define HMQ_CURRENT  ((HMQ)1)
is
#define HMQ_CURRENT  (static_cast<HMQ>(1))

5

Internet / Re: Dooble releases-Qt6

« on: November 30, 2024, 09:38:59 am »

Well, I've tried adding the code in various places that seemed early enough in the process, mostly in dooble_main.cc and even right after QApplication::processEvents(); in dooble.cc and no luck.
Guess going to have to read up on how Qt initializes unless Paul has an idea.

I'm sorry to see that this isn't the slam-dunk I hoped it would be. After the splash screen and before the main window is created should have worked. I've attached 'cppal030.zip' so you can confirm that changing the codepage manually works for you.

OK... just noticed something odd: using CpPal to drop the new CP on the main part of the window has no effect. I have to release MB2 while over the titlebar to get it to change. I looked at my notes for CpPal and discovered that it requires a bit more hack-ery to get this to work. CpPal has to fake a font-change in the window where you dropped to get it to notice and do an update.

Let's put this on hold for a bit while I figure out how and where to do this stuff. I'm quite certain that once we get the kinks worked out, just a few lines of code will give us a titlebar that isn't filled with question marks and wierdness

Meanwhile, Dave, can you give me a URL that points to your dooble_main.cc?

6

Internet / Re: Dooble releases-Qt6

« on: November 30, 2024, 05:12:13 am »

How to set this up?

OK, if HMQ_CURRENT resolves to the number '1', try plugging in a '1' for now, i.e.:  WinSetCp(1, 1208);

(I should know how to do a new-style cast but that bit of knowledge escapes me currently.)

7

Internet / Re: Dooble releases-Qt6

« on: November 30, 2024, 03:41:25 am »

I have NFI about this stuff.

Let me be immodest and tell you that I _do_ have an idea about this stuff - and a solution.

The basic issue is that the browser's titlebar should be able to correctly display thousands of different characters - just like the browser itself - but that ain't going to happen if the titlebar is using a codepage that's limited to 256 codepoints. Screwing around to get it to display a question mark rather than the 3-byte UTF8 encoding for a typographic dash accomplishes virtually nothing.

The solution is to set the codepage for the browser's primary thread to CP1208, i.e. UTF8, so the titlebar can render the untranslated UTF8 bytestream correctly. The attached screenshots demonstrate this (for the Chinese example, I had to change the titlebar font from WarpSans to one that includes Chinese glyphs).

Using CP1208 is something I would never otherwise recommend because it normally slows PM text handling down to a crawl. However, in the case of Dooble, the titlebar and system menu are the only places in the entire app that PM renders the text itself. In my limited testing, it appeared to have no noticable impact on performance.

Given all this, I would strongly, strongly recommend implementing this fix in Dooble itself and *not* in QT6 since other QT6-based apps may handle their titlebars differently. To do so, add the following code to Dooble early in its processing: probably right after it initializes the QT6 framework and no later than after it creates its first window (the primary thread's message queue has to exist for this to have any effect). This should only be used on the very first thread.

Code: [Select]

WinSetCp(HMQ_CURRENT, 1208);

FYI... to create my examples, I used my 'CpPal' util to switch the CP to 1208 on the fly. If you have it, set the CP to 1208, then drag from the "Set" icon and drop on the browser.

8

Internet / Re: Dooble releases-Qt6

« on: November 26, 2024, 09:45:03 pm »

I'll enable the tests for qtbase and see if maybe there's an issue with text conversion in https://github.com/psmedley/qt6-base-os2/tree/main/src/corelib/text

This appears to be a codepage problem: titlebar text is not being handled correctly. See the attached screenshot of Dooble/QT6.

The first line is the source for the <title> tag - it includes an HTML entity for the hyphen.

The second line is the same text when rendered as part of a page - the entity is converted correctly.

The third line is the exact same text you see in the screenshot titlebar - the entity has been converted to UTF8. It is rendered correctly by the page because UTF8 is the native codepage for HTML but not by the titlebar because the titlebar expects CP850.

In short, before setting the titlebar text it must be converted from UTF8 to the current _native_ codepage (which may not be CP850 for some users).

9

Applications / Re: XWP 1.0.17: any availability date ?

« on: November 06, 2024, 08:45:33 am »

Let me offer a generic response to the feature suggestions above. No

These days, I only consider new features that have very broad appeal and require little if any configuration (e.g. "Text Size").  I also shy away from features that don't need to run in the WPS process and could be implemented as standalone utilities. Finally, I avoid grandiose schemes that are likely to deliver more bugs than benefits. Some examples:

* Win keys (Martin): in these days of mobile phones where it all "just works" with almost no configuration required, how many users are still willing to go to the effort to configure stuff like this? My sense is "almost none". As it is, I doubt many people use _any_ of XWP's hotkey features, much less add to or change the existing defaults. If you want to pursue this, why not talk to Styler's maintainer?

* File descriptions and Colored dots (Devid): this was implemented by someone in 1994 and never heard from again. Why? I can see how this might be useful if you had a folder full of documents you needed to organize but in the grand scheme of things (e.g. 'C:\OS2\DLL'), not compelling.

* File Previewer (Devid): this one has broad appeal and should require little configuration, so why not implement it? Because the results would be half-assed at best. OS/2 does not support vector graphics like OSX does, so appropriately-sized thumbnails aren't possible.  Further, OS/2 apps aren't designed to render the files they create on-demand, so the viewer would have to implement every supported format itself either directly of through plug-ins. Ugggh!!

* Screen drawing (Martin): what does this have to do with the WPS? Since this is used almost exclusively with screenshots, why not ask the maintainer of Gotcha! about it?

* Windows Shadows on Desktop (Martin): waaaay too DOSish if done like NPS; somewhere between waaaay too difficult and impossible if done "correctly".

* RMB 'Copy/Paste/Cut' (Dariusz): pros: broad appeal - cons: an exception list as long as your arm.

10

Setup & Installation / Re: Switch from CSM to UEFI

« on: November 02, 2024, 08:15:21 pm »

v 2.52. Included with ArcaOS 5.1.0 EN. Built 2023-08-23. Maybe that's to old. But I really tried. Even looked into the help without any hint.

I even cleared start of the disk with DFSee and started again. But could not find how to select GPT when creating the first partition.

I think there's a basic misunderstanding here: neither MiniLVM nor PTE _create_ a GPT disk. They are partition editors that know how to manipulate an *existing* GPT disk. To create one, you must use 'InitDisk.exe' or DFSee.

After a reboot, MiniLVM will clearly identify which disks are GPT and which are MBR. 'PTE' will only display GPT and will ignore MBR (IIRC). The other partition editors ('lvm.exe' and that java thing) are useless for GPT because they can't see the actual GPT disk.

11

Setup & Installation / Re: Switch from CSM to UEFI

« on: November 01, 2024, 07:29:56 pm »

DFSee 17.0 also has the ability to [...] do any other required changes.

Actually, it doesn't.

While a disk is identified by OS/2 as "MBR", DFSee can convert it to GPT and (presumably) create GPT partitions. However, once you reboot and OS/2 identifies the disk as "GPT", DFSee is incapable of performing any changes to the partition table because it is read-only. DFSee doesn't know how to get write-access nor does it know how to coordinate the physical GPT partitions with the emulated MBR disks that LVM sees. The GPT disk itself is invisible to DFSee.

Honestly, this is waaaaay more complicated than it looks. Skip DFSee and use David A's 'InitDisk.exe' to do a destructive conversion, then reboot and use MiniLVM to create partitions (including the UEFI system partition).

Note: DFSee is still able to perform operations within a partition (e.g. finding lost files or editing binary data) because the GPT partitions are always read-write. However, what DFSee thinks it's seeing is the only partition on an MBR disk.

12

Setup & Installation / Re: Switch from CSM to UEFI

« on: November 01, 2024, 06:43:55 pm »

ArcaNoae offers a way to convert MBR to GPT via dfsan. [...] I already saw a menu entry in DFSee some time ago doing that.

When you select that menu entry in DFSee, the one-line help at the bottom of the screen says:
"Convert an MBR-style disk to an EMPTY GPT one [...]". In contrast, my tool takes an in-use MBR disk with up to 127 partitions and converts it in-place without the loss of a single byte of data. They're just not the same.

ArcaOS also comes with a simple GPT partition creation tool (PTE.exe I think).

I wrote PTE. It was intended to be a temporary GPT partition table editor for use until GPT support could be integrated into existing tools. I did so subsequently by adding GPT support to MiniLVM. As such, PTE is obsolete (though still functional) and should be removed from the distro.

13

Setup & Installation / Re: Switch from CSM to UEFI

« on: October 31, 2024, 05:21:21 pm »

Could the MBR-to-GPT converter be used on a win10-disk/NTFS  as well?

This has nothing to do with the filesystem and little to do with the OS.

GPT uses the first 34 sectors  of the disk as well as the last 33 sectors for its headers and partition tables. These sectors are always unused on an LVM-compliant disk, allowing them to be used for GPT without overwriting anything else on the disk except for the MBR itself. An MBR disk that was created by Win probably has the initial sectors free (because it aligns partitions on a 4MB boundary), but the last sectors are likely included in an existing partition which would have to be resized.

Note 1: I overstated the converter's capabilities. Once converted to GPT, the disk cannot be used as an MBR disk without restoring the original MBR sector (which the converter saves so the change can be rolled back).

Note 2: My MBR-to-GPT converter is not freeware. If someone wishes to pay $2,500 USD, I will provide an unlimited-use license allowing them to resell individual copies, post it to hobbes as freeware, include in AOS, or whatever. I have no plans to issue individual-use licenses.

14

Setup & Installation / Re: Switch from CSM to UEFI

« on: October 29, 2024, 09:43:57 pm »

converting the HDD to gpt disc layout is more complex yet again (if you want this). Could Arca Noae have developed this code ? Perhaps. But its pretty complex code.

Years ago I wrote an MBR-to-GPT converter that worked with any LVM-compliant disk and didn't require moving or copying the disk's contents. In fact, after conversion, you could use the disk as MBR _or_ GPT until you changed the partition layout. I offered it to AN but the person I dealt with couldn't imagine any use for it and declined the offer.

15

Programming / Re: VisualAge C++ 3.6.5 (+ Fix2) - WarpIn or RPM?

« on: October 25, 2024, 07:15:13 am »

Attached is a forwarder that eliminates the need for the real 'netscape.exe'.

Unzip, then place the dummy 'netscape.exe' into either your Firefox or Seamonkey directory. You can invoke it from any directory using a f/q pathname (or you can add your FF/SM directory to the PATH).

When it starts, it will change to whatever directory it's in, then see if FF or SM is present. If so, the browser will be started; if not, it will terminate.