Messages

301

Article Discussions / Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions

« on: March 08, 2013, 06:31:36 pm »

I have tried the Demo CD in a Thinkpad W520, it booted up fine but with no network. 
Tried it in a Thinkpad W500 and it requires the BIOS to be put the SATA into compatibility mode (AHCI ticket #11). 
I'll have to do more testing but so far each time I have attempted to set my own options and tell it to use multiple CPUs it reboots during the boot process.

302

Article Discussions / Re: Preview: eComStation 2.2 Beta, the legacy of OS/2 lives on

« on: March 01, 2013, 07:20:23 pm »

In theory it sounds nice but in practice here are some of the pitfalls of sticking to specific models/brands of computers.

1. Not every hardware vendor has the same model on sale everywhere around the world. I can mention one example we needed an HP workstation for a large customer.
It had different part numbers and different models world wide. Or some PC brands are not even for sale worldwide!

2. Some companies Mensys does business with has a preferred brand they want to use for example Dell. Such a list would then not work.

3. if we focus on a subset of hardware its still not going to safe us. Because how long will hardware be for sale and what happens if the vendor brings out a new BIOS with an ACPI in the BIOS that is suddenly broken. Years back I once had it with a T42 that had APM suspend/resume problems and another T42 did not. Turned out it was a BIOS revision problem...

To answer in short terms: "Using that Theory"  must be the reason why Apple failed during the last years, I guess..... 

Apple is not a good comparison when coming to hardware.  They own their hardware architecture. 

303

General Discussion / Re: Hybrid "64-Bit" eComStation

« on: February 19, 2013, 10:08:10 pm »

Froloff (nick on netlabs IRC) had written a device driver to use more memory.  I don't see a need here for more than 3G of memory, I run out of shared memory long before I start to use my RAM up but if the additional memory (such as a W510 here with 16G) could use the rest for a RAM drive would be handy for doing builds (a 13G RAM drive would be really nice).  If there were a way to increase shared memory would be really useful but I think exponentially more work.
Andy

304

Applications / Re: Qpdf

« on: February 09, 2013, 05:11:01 am »

this will be fixed with the upcoming qpdf 0.4.0 beta1. and yes the freetype dll coming with qpdfview is a bit older than the one from dave.

welcome to DLL hell - a reason I tend to use static linking - larger executables but no clashes of dll versions

This was a concern I had with not to continue static linking it into Mozilla.  However, as long as the newer dll works with the older apps it is not unexpected that an app would require the newer dll.  The windows DLL hell was that newer versions of their DLLs such as the mfc ones would break compatibility and not work with older apps so that you had to have multiple versions lying around.

305

Applications / Re: Why Firefox for eCS-OS2 didn't went up from version 10?

« on: January 20, 2013, 12:20:16 am »

Primarily IPC, interprocess communication.  It was in 10 for everyone else be we could back it out.  IPC makes it so that each tab runs in its own process so that each tab is protected from the other.  There are a few other things that Dave is working on too.

306

Setup & Installation / Re: eCS 2.2 YUM/RPM question

« on: January 16, 2013, 07:12:54 pm »

I have not seen the 2.2 installer and I am not associated with Mensys or Serenity so this is in no way authoritative but just reasoning from what I do know.
1.  This would only be true if the answer to ? 3 is that RPM/YUM must be on the boot drive (as the question comes from the RPM/YUM readme).
2.  I do not know if RPM/YUM will be installed if you do not select installing anything that requires it or if it will also have its own selection etc.
3.  RPM/YUM can be installed to another partition so I would expect the eCS installer would allow that as well.  The same partition you install RPM/YUM to will also be where everything it installs goes to.
4.  There is no reason a requirement for multiple partitions would exist if someone were to want one large partition with OS and RPM/YUM and applications installed to.
5.  If RPM/YUM had to be put to the boot drive then it would mess up the whole boot drive.  RPM/YUM might be put into a separate folder with its structure under by setting the unixroot=X:\rpmyum but the readme says that is untested but I don't know if there are any known issues with it.  I haven't seen anything in the RPM/YUM timeline suggesting any fixes have been made to RPM/YUM to allow it if there are any known issue (or whether anyone has tested that there are no issues so that it will just be allowed).  As the readme has a warning about not being on the root of the drive I doubt the eCS installer will be setup to put it into its own folder but I can't say that hasn't been addressed either.

307

Programming / Re: Have questions about porting software to eCS?

« on: December 28, 2012, 06:00:13 am »

I'd suggest starting with a simple command line app like wget

People seem to want to be ambitious and start with something like virtualbox!

I was trying to lead a thread to get wget to build. The latest one wasn't cooperating. Then OS2world ended. I did download an older version, which has been built in the OS/2 environment previously, but I have done nothing with it, other than discover that it won't build either. I am pretty sure that it is just a minor setup problem, but I don't see what it might be, and need some guidance from those who know about these things.

I intend to restart that thread, sometime early next year, unless somebody else wants to start it earlier. Hopefully, it will serve as a guide for others, but it should also serve as a guide to get the build environment to work with a basic project, before a user decides to tackle more complicated things, like virtualbox.   

wget built very easily with Paul's environment... I had to make one change to the code to make up for the fact that that some struct (sched_param) was getting defined twice in their code.  With my home grown environment I was having problems because it wanted gnutls which in turn wanted libnettles.  There is not a gnutls in the yum repository for that environment so I have the same issue there as I do with my own.