Messages

4906

Setup & Installation / Re: ecs2.2 beta refresh

« on: December 22, 2013, 09:36:54 pm »

The problem is that OS/2 is old and particular about partitions starting on cylinder boundries while all other operating systems know that cylinders don't even exist anymore. You used Windows to change partition size and the boundaries ended up wrong. Same with Linux with the added problems that Linux will use the same reserved areas as the OS/2 LVM thus destroying the LVM info.
The advice has always been, only use OS/2 tools to do anything to the partitions except changing the partition ID.
There used to be howtos shipped with Linux including this, http://www.ru.j-npcs.org/usoft/WWW/HOWTO/mini/Linux+DOS+Win95+OS2 and some similar ones. Perhaps it needs updating and included with eCS.

4907

Programming / Re: Test build of GCC 4.7.3 available

« on: December 21, 2013, 06:58:39 am »

GCC 4.8.2 binaries now at http://os2ports.smedley.id.au

I'll get the source up at github when i get a spare afternoon

Finally tested the C part by running the FFmpeg FATE suit which consists of about 2000 tests.  http://ffmpeg.org/fate.html.
While GCC 4.4.6 usually passes all tests (I get failures on 2 HEVC (H265) compliance tests after a few days of up time, see http://fate.ffmpeg.org/history.cgi?slot=x86.os2.446 and for comparison fate.ffmpeg.org), 4.8.2 failed between 24 and 30 tests and ffmpeg.exe and especially ffprobe.exe froze multiple times forcing me to kill them. There's still something wrong, I'd guess alignment issues.
If you want to test, you need to configure with cpu=i486 or higher to pull in the GCC atomics (could they be broken?) and I'll attach a patch for eCS to work around the buggy PMSHELL. Note this also tests your environment as things like diff not supporting stdin or a bad bc will cause falures. Need to use [k]sh to run configure as well due to buggy ash (doesn't set CWD).
Anyways thanks for the great work and I wish I knew how to debug some of this stuff.

4908

Hardware / Re: eCS on an Acer Aspire One?

« on: December 12, 2013, 10:51:23 pm »

Probably qckguide.pdf with the link being one line up from the link to download eCS 2.1 CD#1 on the Mensys Download page.

4909

General Discussion / Re: hobbes.nmsu.edu information

« on: December 07, 2013, 06:56:45 pm »

Hihi Ian,

Must the extension be zip or can we use also Rar or Tar or Lz or Xz or 7z ?

Only zip and wpi are acceptable with exe in the case of self extracting archives such as warpin occasionally acceptable. I'd advise zipping up any self extracting exe file.

4910

Hardware / Re: SNAP - Customize for modern Videocards!!

« on: December 06, 2013, 01:02:17 am »

Whoever is the current maintainer seems to have got pretty aggressive about just deleting instead of leaving alone or putting into delayed.
The problem with SNAP_7300LE.zip was the capitalization which is lower cased and then compared to SNAP_7300LE.txt which refers to the uppercase file name ASFAIK.

4911

Hardware / Re: OS/2 compatible?

« on: November 30, 2013, 09:50:00 pm »

I usually take my computer outside, remove the cover, make sure the fans are locked so they can't be over-spun, usually by inserting a piece of wood and blow it out. Due to using wood heat I get a lot of dust and sometimes a huge cloud of dust is stirred up when cleaning.
I'd also suggest that while the cover is off, remove and re-insert all cards, memory simms etc.

4912

Article Discussions / Re: WPS Classes Clone

« on: November 20, 2013, 06:07:15 am »

Down Side
But I also think there are some downsides:
- We depend on the old IBM somcompiler. (sc.exe)

This is the killer. Until an open source sc.exe is written, working on the WPS is limited to people with the tools. Tools that are not commonly available.
I'd suggest that if you want to work from the top down, then the top would actually be the tool chain to work on the WPS.
Also in writing the tool chain knowledge about the WPS internals would be learned.

4913

General Discussion / Re: The State of ReactOS's Crazy Open Source Windows Replacement

« on: November 13, 2013, 07:07:08 am »

Rumour was that when Reactoss was first starting they approached some OS/2 developers about including an OS/2 sub-system but none of the OS/2 developers liked the GPL and didn't co-operate.
It's a shame as Reactoss being a NT clone, it is the most suitable to running OS/2 programs. NT (up to at least Win2k) did a good job of running OS/2 1.x (16bit) applications, you could even fire up tedit and load a virtual config.sys and adjust things like the libpath and with the right kit which I forget the name of, the old 16 bit Presentation Manager was also there. This wasn't too surprising as NT started out as OS/2 NT v3 (have a byte article somewhere describing MS getting it to boot to text mode on some RISC processor) and was built to have various sub-systems or personalities.
I also have a Byte article (actually little news bit) about MS successfully getting the 32 bit Presentation Manager running on NT (probably v4). Somewhat easier for them as they have the source code for the PM as well as NT.
Seems to me that even now the Reactoss Kernel would still be a better choice then the Linux kernel to run OS/2, in theory only needing doscall0 added to the kernel and doscall1.dll to interface with it, and then the OS/2 DLLs could be loaded on top. Of course things like the Multimedia DLLs would also have to be rewritten to interface with Reactoss but it seems like a better course for a kernel and drivers then trying to adapt to Linux which internally is very different then OS/2 and NT.

4914

Networking / Re: Remote file browsing and management OS/2 -> Linux

« on: October 07, 2013, 02:07:26 am »

The things with EAs (called xattrs under Linux) and Linux are it has to be enabled in the kernel, which it most likely is for most distributions, I believe it also has to be enabled when mounting a file system or in /etc/fstab and not all file systems support xattrs good enough for use with OS/2, eg ext2, ext3 and ext4 only support 4kbs of xattrs, some other file systems don't support any and only a few such as JFS support them well.
If you decide to use JFS, it's best to format under OS/2 as Linux supports the OS/2 version of JFS but OS/2 will not read Linux formatted JFS.
So they have to be enabled and you need to be using a file system that supports them and quite possibly Samba also needs to have them enabled.

4915

Utilities / Re: PMVNC & Linux?

« on: October 02, 2013, 06:25:11 am »

At one time there was a Java based VNC viewer for Firefox etc. Haven't heard of a native VNC viewer being added to Firefox though I might have missed it. Perhaps about:plugins or looking at the installed extensions might show something.
The slow connect speed could well be just negotiating a common protocol, newer VNC has various compression algorithms and who knows what to speed things up.

4916

Utilities / Re: PMVNC & Linux?

« on: September 30, 2013, 04:42:17 pm »

PMVNC should work with Linux VNC, at least it did last time I tried a couple of years ago. As far as I know they should negotiate a common protocol.  If not post your errors.

4917

Applications / Re: Java applications

« on: September 24, 2013, 04:17:54 am »

The $@ is a *nix shell thing which the WPS won't expand (not sure about Java but I doubt it will expand it as well).  Being a program object you can just drop any files on the program object or associate it with the appropriately.

4918

Setup & Installation / Re: eCS 2.2 clone for X200t and X230t - Questions and observations

« on: September 13, 2013, 02:41:45 am »

-> but what is working mostly is the sound with Youtube videos inside Firefox!
-> in addition: when I play m3u Internet radio stream (starting in Firefox, opening than in PM123) it works better than before (but still repeating - but "only" for 2 or three times) BUT: as soon as I close Firefox the sound repeats in PM123 like before and is totally unusable (partly crash) -> still not really usable, but a small step

Is there a logical reason for this? May this help to find the problem?

Are you playing youtube videos with Flash or Webm? If Flash then I guess Odin is taking care of playing the sound. If Webm then IIRC it is using DART

4919

Programming / Re: Test build of GCC 4.7.3 available

« on: September 08, 2013, 04:28:58 am »

fate tests fail here with:
Test eval failed. Look at tests/data/fate/eval.err for details.

http://smedley.id.au/tmp/eval.err

That'll be the FPU exception bug where the Presentation Manager re-enables FPU exceptions without saving state and restoring state, my V4+free updates install doesn't have it.
Easiest fix is to add
 

Code: [Select]

#ifdef __i386
    short fcr;
    __asm__ volatile ("fstcw        %0 \n"
                      "or      $63, %0 \n"
                      "fldcw        %0 \n"
                      : "=m"(fcr));
#endif
or from Cairo,

Code: [Select]

static inline void
DisableFPUException (void)
{
    unsigned short usCW;

    /* Some OS/2 PM API calls modify the FPU Control Word,
     * but forget to restore it.
     *
     * This can result in XCPT_FLOAT_INVALID_OPCODE exceptions,
     * so to be sure, we disable Invalid Opcode FPU exception
     * before using FPU stuffs.
     */
    usCW = _control87 (0, 0);
    usCW = usCW | EM_INVALID | 0x80;
    _control87 (usCW, MCW_EM | 0x80);
}
after main() in all executables.
Plan9 has a similar bug and there is an alternative main() in compat/plan9/main.c where main() is undefined and replaced but I never could get it to work on OS/2, multiple symbol errors, I guess it would be needed to be added to crt0.obj and perhaps used with another flag much like -Zbin-args.

4920

Programming / Re: Test build of GCC 4.7.3 available

« on: September 07, 2013, 09:15:54 pm »

Hi Paul, also a thanks here though everytime I download a build, you post a new one
Can you brand your builds, perhaps with the date? I see other builds with things like,
gcc 4.0.1 (GCC) (Apple Inc. build 5493)
gcc 4.4.7 (FreeBSD Ports Collection) 20111108 (prerelease)
gcc 4.4.5 (Debian 4.4.5-8)
and such. Perhaps a version.h or configure option?
Thanks