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Applications / Kermit 95 / C-Kermit for Windows and OS/2

« on: January 31, 2023, 11:42:35 pm »

- Kermit 95. Doesn't work, but it's now open source and modular. It could actually be interesting to (re-)port as it once supported OS/2.

I'm the maintainer of Kermit 95 - now called C-Kermit for Windows (and OS/2 I guess). Pull requests welcome

My main focus so far has been getting it working properly on Windows again but I have been careful not to break OS/2 support along the way so no need to re-port it. In fact, github produces OS/2 binaries cross-compiled from Windows with OpenWatcom on mostly every commit! All that's needed to get it back to where it was 20 years ago is some bug fixing (bugs probably caused by switching from some IBM compiler to OpenWatcom). Problem is I know almost nothing about OS/2 development (but I do have boxed copies of OS/2 1.3 through to Warp 4 to test on). And also Kermit 95 didn't support SSH on OS/2 AFAIK - but thats a solvable problem now that its open-source.

As far as SSH goes, libssh supposedly supports OS/2 but not OpenWatcom - possibly because OpenSSL doesn't support OpenWatcom either. So either libssh+openssl need to be ported to OpenWatcom or C-Kermit for OS/2 needs to be ported to GCC. Not sure which is easier (or even possible). If the libssh+openssl situation can be sorted out, the libssh support code in C-Kermit for Windows and OS/2 uses Win32 threading APIs so there will be a little bit of porting work there too but I expect that would be pretty easy.

Screenshot of it running on OS/2 here: https://kermitproject.org/ckwscreenshots/os2.html