Topics

31

Programming / GSView - make complains of "No such file or directory"

« on: January 29, 2022, 04:29:49 am »

I decided to take a stab at building an updated version of GSView (because the pswrite device is no longer present in our ghostscript 9.18 release and the latest GSView verison seems to have it hard-coded instead of picking the device name up from the gvpm.ini file and using that).

Anyways...couple of small tweaks to the makefile, but I'm getting stumped by a reference to two other makefiles: one for common objects and the other is a GSView version mak (auto-updates the GSView header that contains the version info).

I've attached the makefile here, and I'm seeing the following error:

Code: [Select]

...
[G:\code\source\os2\gsview-5.0]\usr\bin\make
makefile:85: ".\src\common.mak": No such file or directory
makefile:86: ".\src\gvcver.mak": No such file or directory
makefile:174: *** missing separator (did you mean TAB instead of 8 spaces?).  St
op.
...

which is a result of the following lines in the main makefile:

Code: [Select]

...
#################################################################
# Common

include "$(SRC)common.mak"
include "$(SRC)gvcver.mak"
...

And yet, from a CLI where I am executing make from I can certainly do a "dir" and both of those files are certainly there:

[G:\code\source\os2\gsview-5.0]dir .\src\*mak

The volume label in drive G is OS2.
The Volume Serial Number is 45B6:75C3.
Directory of G:\code\source\os2\gsview-5.0\src

11-17-07  4:14p         2,409      0 a---  bzlibmsc.mak
 5-28-11 12:21p         5,677      0 a---  common.mak
 1-17-12  9:26p        23,686      0 a---  gvc.mak
 1-28-22 10:21p         1,802      0 a---  gvcver.mak

So what am I tripping over here?

Is this a OS/2 vs Linux path separator issue?

For what it's worth I tried the "/" vs "\" with no difference.

Thanks!

32

Networking / Samba connection - how to troubleshoot what gets sent and received?

« on: January 25, 2022, 03:59:19 am »

Guys!

I've had a pesky problem on my OS/2 box for a while now, that being on Samba connections Lucide takes far too long to open a PDF that's sitting out there on my NAS box. This is not just a Lucide issue, GSView as well as QPDFView show the same behaviour.

We are talking here PDF files that are about 70-150k in size that take 5-10 secs to open up.

To be clear, I am using NetDrive Samba plugin to make this work, and that could certainly be adding, I just can't tell.

What I can see is that as I open a PDF file my TCP/IP monitor shows multiple traffic spikes, they continue (back and forth) until the file is opened up. Now nearly each one of these are spikes are actually larger than the actual PDF file itself, so that's literally flooring me as I can't for the life of me understand what is causing the traffic to happen.

Alright...so how can I troubleshoot this in order to figure out what all that "overhead" is that appears to be moving back and forth?

I've got Wireshark installed, so I could capture the packets as the transactions start...but is there something a little more human-digestable? I'm thinking Samba logging perhaps?

Thanks!

33

Networking / Samba Shares - default CAPS in filenames?

« on: January 22, 2022, 05:35:38 pm »

Hi Everyone,

I've noticed this the other week: it would appear that ALL newly created documents which I am saving on my NAS (therefore using Samba client connection) are using UPPERCASE letters, this is despite the fact that within the application itself I am actualy saving with lowercase, and/or combination of the two.

Has anyone else noticed this?

I recall having a sporadic occurence of this before, but I just attributed that to "human mistake" as I rarely create a lot of NEW documents on my NAS. But recently I have been doing a bit of a re-org and moving some of my OS/2 application specific things to formats that non-OS/2 apps can read and that is how I discovered this issue.

The NAS confirmation has not changes at all and so far I haven't spent much time researching the Samba config side of it, that'll be my next step though. In the meantime I was curious if anyone else has been encountering this behaviour?

Thanks!

34

Applications / LIBC panic errors anyone?

« on: January 09, 2022, 02:18:56 am »

I am running the following LIBC RPM packages:

1) libc.pentium4                            1:0.1.9-1.oc00
2) libc-devel.pentium4                      1:0.1.9-1.oc00
3) libcurl.pentium4                         7.75.0-2.oc00
4) libcx.pentium4                           0.7.2-1.oc00
5) libcx-devel.pentium4                     0.7.2-1.oc00

...and at some point in time (along the upgrade path) I started to notice the following "LIBC PANIC" errors in my trp directory:

LIBC PANIC!! _um_free_maybe_lock: Tried to free block twice - block=37013a00 lo
...
Call Stack
______________________________________________________________________
   EBP     Address    Module     Obj:Offset    Nearest Public Symbol
 --------  ---------  --------  -------------  -----------------------
 Trap  ->  1FE4B89E   LIBCN0    0001:000FB89E
 0013EAF8  1FE4C0A8   LIBCN0    0001:000FC0A8
 0013EB18  1FDE4B69   LIBCN0    0001:00094B69
 0013EB68  1FDC4D69   LIBCN0    0001:00074D69
 0013EB88  7B395268   XUL       0001:03565268  between js::gc::Arena::finalize + 228 and js::gc::ArenaLists::backgroundFinalize - 3678  (both in Unified_cpp_js_src23.cpp)
 34734D20  344B0538   *Unknown*
 Lost Stack chain - new EBP below previous
...

This one was actually generated by FF following my upgrade to the latest NSPR and NSS runtimes.

However, I've seen this error repeatedly with other applications, such as:

CRON/2:

LIBC PANIC!! _um_free_maybe_lock: Tried to free block twice - block=20030035 lo
...
 Call Stack
_____________________________________________________________________
   EBP     Address    Module     Obj:Offset    Nearest Public Symbol
 --------  ---------  --------  -------------  -----------------------
 Trap  ->  1FE4B89E   LIBCN0    0001:000FB89E
 0012FF14  1FE4C0A8   LIBCN0    0001:000FC0A8
 0012FF34  1FDE4B69   LIBCN0    0001:00094B69
 0012FF84  1FDC4D69   LIBCN0    0001:00074D69
 0012FFA4  000100E0   CRON2     0001:000000E0
 0012FFC4  00014238   CRON2     0001:00004238
 0012FFF4  1FFECE38   DOSCALL1  0004:0000CE38  DOS32R3EXITADDR
...

...or PMMail and AOO.

So I'm curious if anyone is seeing this too?

I can't quite peg this to a particular release, but it would have happened within the last couple of drops I think?

35

Applications / Apache OpenOffice - OOWpsWizard anyone?

« on: January 08, 2022, 03:09:49 am »

Alright, so way back when (circa OO3.2) there was a handy little WPS class utility (OOWPSWizard) that defined multiple WPS classes that directly mapped to various AOO program objects.

I have had this installed for a long time now...but having just upgraded from AOO 4.1.7 to 4.1.11 I am trying to clean the place up a tad, you know?

So this begs the question: is anyone still using this OOWPSWizard thing?

I can't quite for the life of me remember what use I got out of it back then...clearly I thought there was value in having it installed though..LOL, so maybe the old memory is getting a little shaky???

Come to think of it, the benefit I think we got back then was to map all the AOO program objects to a particular WPS class, which then allowed one to manage those classes and assign WPS associations accordingly.

....yeah, it's been a while, and I really would rather keep the AOO install clean to avoid any problems in the future...which makes me think I should un-install OOWPSWizard...

Thanks!

36

Storage / JFS - Trap 0003 - anyone?

« on: January 06, 2022, 02:51:27 pm »

Folks!

I figured I would inquire here first before logging a ticket for the AN folks on this JFS issue.

So the other day I had a weird situation: my nightly RSYNC job LOG needed to be "rotated" having grown to some 32M in size over the past couple of years. I decided to manually split it up into calendar year LOGs. I most likely had the file open in my editor while at the same time attempted to execute a CLI copy of that big file.

BAM!!!

JFS died with TRAP 0003...meltdown!

Following a power re-boot JFS did a check disk and uber quickly flashed some messages up on the screen about lost directories. The chkdsk forced an automated re-boot and a 2nd chkdsk run. At the end of what felt like the longest 5 mins ever I got back to my MAINT partition to discover that my 'lost+found' directory now had some 17k files. Clearly chkdsk found some directory problems and moved a boat-load of files into the 'lost+found' directory. Yikes!

Anywyas, I was aware that this is probably the worst JFS situation when directories are mangled. Now luckily for me I had a nightly backup (RSYNC...LOL), so I was able to recover just fine. The mangled directories turned out to be my Firefox and Thunderbird cache, thus the massive listing of files.

Now that I'm up and running again and spending a little time researching this I discovered the following description of a TRAP 0003:

TRAP 0003 - BREAKPOINT. This is a special instruction (INT 3) used in "debugging" software, which was left in the code either accidentally or by design. Contact software support.

Further on, the following is also available:

[G:\]help 1933

SYS1933: A program caused a breakpoint error.  The program was ended.

***

EXPLANATION: A program started an INT 3 instruction when it was not
being run by a debugger.

ACTION: Correct the program and retry the command.

I found this extremely interesting given that in this latest version of JFS AN announced a successful quashing of a JFS bug when operations on a file LARGER than the JFS CACHE would potentially trap.

In my case I am running a large 1G cache, so I do not think this to be the issue...however as I experiment with various MIN and MAX buffer settings I may have potentially ran into a problem there. Hard to tell and NO I have not tried to replicate this issue!!! ha....

Take a look at the attached TRAP screen...what do you guys make of it?

Thanks!

37

Multimedia / Audio-Data/CD-Creator - problems scanning the bus

« on: December 28, 2021, 11:17:41 pm »

I figured I would do a clean-up pass through my multimedia apps and configuration during the holidays, and part of that meant replacing as many of the previously added one-by-one apps with RPM modules (where available).

One of these is cdrecord.exe, which I installed the RPM package for and intended to replace my originaly installed 'CDRecord/2 v2.0-Final' that came along with the 'Audio-Data/CD-Creator' application.

Well, as luck would have it having deployed the RPM package I attempted to test by scanning the bus for my DVD device, and that's where I ran into a snag:

Code: [Select]

argc:4
0: G:\APPS\MULTIMEDIA\ADC_056\bin\scanbus.exe
1: -2147482817
2: G:\usr\bin\cdrecord.exe
3: G:\APPS\MULTIMEDIA\ADC_056
Command is: G:\usr\bin\cdrecord.exe -scanbus
G:/usr/bin/sh.exe: 1: G:usrbincdrecord.exe: not found

Alright, so it looks like the SH shell is being invoked by the Audio-Data/CD-Creator application, why? I have no idea...can anyone tell?

It looks to me like sh.exe is stripping the "\", which results in a garbled cdrecord.exe name, which is why the "not found" message shows up.

I'm off to continue looking at this...

EDIT
====
Found the following contents of the scanbus.log file:

Code: [Select]

argc:4
0: G:\APPS\MULTIMEDIA\ADC_056\bin\scanbus.exe
1: -2147482739
2: G:\usr\bin\cdrecord.exe
3: G:\APPS\MULTIMEDIA\ADC_056

Command is: G:\usr\bin\cdrecord.exe -scanbus

Drop down listbox cleared.


Scanbus done.

...which literally imply that this is working fine here, and yet the actual VIO window must be failing as no device ID is actually populated in the setup window.

38

Multimedia / mplayer - H265 problems anyone?

« on: December 13, 2021, 03:35:16 am »

That's right...not H264, but H265...

I published another engine building video on my channel a couple of weeks ago, and it being nearly 20 mins made for a pretty good-sized file, even the YouTube 720 version was about 1.6G.

So I went back to my old trusy video encoder, that being HandBrake, which I'm running on the Ryzen7 Win10 box here and played around with a few different setups. Eventually I compared the H264 to a H265 encoding because the Nvidia video card that's in that box supports H265 hardware encoding...YEAH...big improvement, from about 20 mins on Super1080HQ on CPU-alone, to just about 3 mins on the GPU!

Anyways...was pretty happy...but I always do my final review on my OS/2 box to see how the slower hardware handles it. Now here is where the surprise showed up: mpalyer wasn't able to play the H265 video normal. What I mean by that is that the playback was about 1/2 speed and it was definitely single threaded, my CPU monitor would show a single core at 100%, which would switch to another core, etc, etc.

In comparison a regular H264 1080HQ playback normally uses about 15-20% spread on the 6 cores, and it's definitely multi-threaded.

I'm running MPlayer SVN-r38083-9.1.0, smPlayer is just fine and VLC seems to be OK, but for some reason I discovered that none of the 1080 vides are producing video outputs in VLC, but that's a separate issue.

Sooo...I'm curious: has anyone else seen this?

I logged an issue report for this, see => https://github.com/komh/mplayer-os2/issues/11

Thanks everyone!

39

Internet / PMMail - corrupted folders?

« on: December 08, 2021, 02:35:16 pm »

Hi Everyone,

I've been happily using PMMail [3.24.01.1981 (32798) - Mar 13 2020 17:32:02 +0000 (GMT)] for a while now. No issues, although occasionally at start-up it'll trap, meaning the WPS goes locked but usually after a few ESC-CTRL hits it'll re-awake. Mostly a nuissance really.

As best as I can tell I have never encountered any problems, however the other day I was putting away some new emails into a much much older folder and couldn't find the emails afterwards. I re-index that particular folder at first, no change, I then re-index that whole folder tree, still no change.

This morning I hit CLI and went looking for the actual email MSG file itself...lo' and behold, nowhere to be found...worse yet, that whole folder TREE is completely missing!!! ugh?

Now the strange thing (to me anyways) is that from within PMMail I am still able to access each one of the folder tree contents...so it looks like the stuff is still there (thank God, so I haven't lost anything it would seem), but attempting to move new emails into that tree does appear to send the messages into "nowhere".

So am I seeing some kind of a corruption here?

No idea at all how to troubleshoot this...any hints/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

EDIT
====
I went looking through the PMMail program logs and I think I found the matching entries for this email move transaction...however it appears to have completed just fine?

Code: [Select]

...
2021-12-08T08:19:15.033 (008)-I-MessageMoveMessage: enter. use mutex [1]                                                                                           
2021-12-08T08:19:15.033 (008)-I-MessageMoveMessage: moving from [Dariusz]:[Inbox] to [Dariusz]:[Mopar Archives]:[Engine Components]                               
2021-12-08T08:19:15.037 (001)-I-oswin_msg_drag: dragged [1] of [1] allowed of [1] requested                                                                       
2021-12-08T08:19:15.037 (001)-I-oswin_msg_drag: Dropped on Accounts/Folder                                                                                         
2021-12-08T08:19:15.039 (001)-I-oswin_msg_drag: leave                                                                                                             
2021-12-08T08:19:15.065 (008)-I-xmlfolder.profile_save: fld change [1], saving [Dariusz]:[Inbox]                                                                   
2021-12-08T08:19:15.072 (008)-I-xmlfolder.profile_save: fld change [1], saving [Dariusz]:[Mopar Archives]:[Engine Components]                                     
2021-12-08T08:19:15.080 (008)-I-MessageMoveMessage: leave.                                                                                                         
...


40

Multimedia / How do I change this default behaviour?

« on: November 27, 2021, 08:44:49 pm »

So I've got a bunch of AVI and MPG video files: family get-togethers, various car events, etc. My box currently insist on always opening the AVI and MPG stuff using the ancient default OS/2 AVI player. How the heck do I change that?

Before you say "adjust the associations", well they already have been. All of these media files are pointing to mplayer as the default, and yet each time I double-click on a AVI file the default viewer plays.

So I'm thinking that's because the 'Current class' is defined as MMAVI for the the AVI files and MMMPG for the MPG files. Meanwhile the MP4 stuff is simply showing up as XFldDataFile (which is to be expected given my XWP install).

Do I need to un-register a particular class?

Take a look at what currently shows up under 'Codecs' TAB of the Multimedia object (see attachment).

41

Setup & Installation / Making of bootable USB stick, or CD - how to?

« on: November 21, 2021, 12:35:24 am »

Everyone,
I've had my new Samsung 860Evo SSD in the system for a few months now and was intending to replace my older 850Evo with it. I never got around to it since I do not have an emergency boot "disk" handy.

What I mean by that is the following: I do not have a bootable CD, nor a USB stick that will give me a maintenance OS/2 partition.

Having said that, I do have such a partition on my SSD itself, which I regularly use. Uber-quick boot to a CLI, easy access to any sort of recovery toolsets, etc. But since I'm about to pull a SSD out (where that MAINT partition exists) I want to be able to have a fool-proof Plan-B as well.

So what are the available utils to make that happen? Is it possible for me to simply "pack up" my MAINT partition and toss that onto a CD? Seems to simple, haven't tried it though, I figured I would ask here first before I end up with a stack of coasters! 

As always, thanks for any suggestions!

42

Applications / Where does the program "name" come from?

« on: November 13, 2021, 04:41:54 pm »

So my Visual SlickEdit programmer's editor has from the very start always showed up in Theseus as "HELLO", see screenshot below.

Meanwhile, in the Tasklist and Taskbar it does show up with the proper name, however the icon is missing in both.

Not a big deal, but it kind of bugs me...LOL, so how the heck do I fix this?

I suspect something in the EXE stores this info, maybe a header record of some sorts? I simply do not know these details, but if anyone can give me a hint as to what to look for, I'll take it from there.

Any pointers?

43

Programming / Function MACRO or #DEFINE?

« on: October 21, 2021, 09:44:07 pm »

Alright...so I'm going through the IBM CPP (3.6.5) header files and pulling the various constructs as I enhance my 'VSE Modern Theme' solution.

Now, here is where i'm running into a bit of a...umm...mental block??? LOL 

Looking at tchar.h I have the following section:

Code: [Select]

...
#ifndef __tint
         typedef wint_t _TINT;
         #define __tint
      #endif

      #define _TEOF  WEOF

      #define __T(x) L ## x


      #define _tprintf     wprintf
      #define _ftprintf    fwprintf
      #define _stprintf    swprintf
      #define _vtprintf    vwprintf
      #define _vftprintf   vfwprintf
      #define _vstprintf   vswprintf
      #define _tscanf      wscanf
      #define _stscanf     swscanf
...

Alright...so one of my rules is to colour code all static DEFINEs in a certain way. However, the xxprintf & friends really do not fall in line with that approach. After all, these are genuine functions, and in this header file we are simply creating a pointer (MACRO really I think) that references the xxprintf library calls.

So for example:

"#define _tprintf     wprintf"

simply allows _tprintf to be used elsewhere and really being a MARCO it will get mapped to wprintf.

OK, so that's simple right? (and I'm assuming my thinking on this correct...smack me if it's not though!!! )

But if the above is right, I really should NOT colour code those #define statements that point to a function, they should really be colour coded as a MACRO instead.

Makes sense?

44

Storage / JFS cache sizing, and system "speed-up"

« on: October 21, 2021, 05:43:04 pm »

Alright, so for what it's worth, I had recently made some changes to the JFS cache sizes and thought I would share my results.

8Gig machine here, at bootup 4Gig is used for a RAM drive, the remaining is seen by OS/2 as workable memory. Not all of it, but you know the standard limitations that apply.

OK, so I've had my VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=3072 setup in CONFIG.SYS for quite some time, and utilized a JFS cache of 256M. Seemed to work fine, no issues. Keep in mind the underlying disk is a SSD (Samsung 850Evo).

Given the above hardware details and my application use/mix I have consistently found that at least 1.5Gig of that upper memory would regularly go un-used. It would simply sit there and if anything, it was always the Shared Memory that would get exhausted first. So that got me thinking: cache is cache, and so if the RAM is there, why not make better use of the darn thing? 

If you see what ther other OSes are running, the cache sizes are typically much larger.

So off I went experimenting a little bit:

1) bump the cache up to 512M, set VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=2048, but I kept the MIN and MAX buffer settings the same as with the prior smaller cache, that being:

G:\OS2\CACHEJFS.EXE /LW:8,30,6 /MINBUFFER:4000 /MAXBUFFER:21000

Umm...nice, system just seems faster...apps respond quicker. Obviously not on the first attempt, but openning OO the 2nd and 3rd and 4th time is faster.

2) now since I freed up some upper memory due to the VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT change why not go bigger (or go home, as the saying goes...LOL), so I bumped the cache up to 768M

Following this change I started to see a weird 'stagger' in the system...went back to some published/presentation notes on the JFS and realized that I was saturating the cache and pretty much exhausting the free buffer space, so I implemented the following:

G:\OS2\CACHEJFS.EXE /LW:8,30,6 /MINBUFFER:16000 /MAXBUFFER:84000

...basically I increased my MIN and MAX buffer sizes by a factor of 4.

Those system 'staggers' I mentioned above appear to be gone now. The apps are loading consistently faster, on multiple attempts.

All in all, tripling the JFS cache has provided for a good positive result.

Of course not everyone will be able to max out on their JFS cache this way, and even if you have the room your apps may limit you to how much of that upper memory can be utilized for cache itself.

45

Web applications / firefox - newtab thumbnail images are empty, why?

« on: October 20, 2021, 04:15:10 pm »

Hey everyone!

So most likely they are empty (as opposed to showing a scaled down version of the page) because I did something way back when to stop the thumbnail creation...heck, I recall having some discussions about the huge disk space use growth this was causing.

Well, I spent about two hours yesterday trying to remind myself what that was, and regardless of where I went to look for that info, I found nothing.

Take a peek please at the attached screenshot, I am talking about the blank 3rd 'Moparts' site, which is blank as opposed to showing an image.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Thanks!