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Messages - Dave Yeo

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4816
Based on what I can see of the OS/2 UI they were ahead in the times of Windows 98se, (active desktop?). Remember when that bugger used to crash all the time? Haha. I'm not sure where XP was, but I think it was then they got full PNG support and a few other things. How customisable is the UI on OS/2 Warp? And, if it's programmable, how hard would it be to learn how to program for OS/2? Are icons interchangeable? I'm like Curious George, I've bounced around and used everything like a crazy monkey over the years, haha. I'm saddened I haven't used OS/2 yet. OpenBSD was fun. I wanna know the UI stuff a bit more, because if I were to use it, I wouldn't want 16bit icons, haha.

The Work Place Shell (WPS) is object orientated so you can just subclass various classes and extend the shell. One example is here,  http://svn.netlabs.org/wps-wizard where the programmer added Cairo to the UI to enable things like transparent PNG support.
OS/2 is layered, text mode which is much like text mode on Windows. The Presentation Manager which is the graphic layer, similar to Windows with very similar functions for drawing windows etc, and the WPS on top which I understand is harder to program for.  Need to write IPL interfaces and I believe you need special compiler but I'm far from expert so perhaps someone more knowledgeable can chime in.

4817
Hey Doug, thanks for that addition. Wouldn't you say that no-viruses is because it's such a foreign OS? Not language wise, but in terms of use? It's very sparingly used by anyone, and the market share is so low that no one writes viruses for it? Same goes for linux and Mac OS? Mac OS and iOS is becoming used more, but not at the extent Windows is, to my knowledge.
Not Doug but...
While OS/2 resistants to viruses is partially due to it not being very common it does have very high payback. Rooting a bank is much more profitably then rooting Joe User. The advantage is the IBM culture. While MS seems to have a culture of "it compiles, lets ship" IBM had a culture of "there is still some compiler warnings, we better fix them before shipping". This leads to less holes for virus writers to take advantage of.
 
When you said "If you wanna play games use Windows, if you want to do work use eComStation", I was heavily reminded of the Mac VS PC commercials. Any OS can be used for gaming, provided someone writes software for it, or so I thought? The OS isn't the limitation, it's the developers for the system that create limitations, correct? If someone made a Win32 directx library that ran virtually or parallel in OS/2, couldn't it play games too? Also, if eComStation or OS/2 has support for GCC, couldn't it also install linux software(games), with some sort of driver manipulation for OpenGL?

Of course OS/2 is just as capable of running games as Win32. At that Odin (think Wine) was originally written to run Quake III. And funny enough, directx was a direct ripoff of OS/2 DIVE. The problem now is hardware support for OpenGL, software emulation is just too slow for most games. Perhaps by leveraging LLVM but no-one has the interest in doing the work.
Note that most of Windows is a direct ripoff of OS/2. Even the naming. Internet Explorer is based on Web Explorer which shipped with WARP 3 in '94, mostly as a system DLL so any program could link against it to get HTML functionality.

Back to Martin. Yeah, for a lot of people stability is very important. But how much tuning is actually required, what's the learning curve on doing such tweaks? Would someone have to go out of their way and read an OS/2 for dummies book?

There's a learning curve though much is simple drag'n'drop. The problem now is that people are used to the Windows way (or Linux or MAC) and OS/2 is different. Thing is once learned it is learned. I'm writing this on an install done in '97. Through multiple hardware upgrades this install has kept working. I used to migrate to Linux regularly but it just became so frustrating as every time I learned the system, it would change. It started as fun but with time it was like "how to fix the sound again"

:P That "microkernel" part I agree seems like a nifty thing to have. I guess that means anyone can write software-based drivers and not have to hook into the kernel or different security rings? I'm not 100% knowledged on "rings" or anything like that, but it seems like that's what it would be optimized for.  But they should support enough out of the box to actually do work, and do they? I mean, I see that they finally have support for Athlon 64, which is a decently old CPU. I'm running a modest Phenom II x6 1045t, with 10GB ram. Would eComStation actually work out of the box for my system?

Martin exaggerates a bit. The OS/2 kernel is closer to a microkernel then lets say Linux but is really more of a hybrid. For a true microkernel you'd have to go to the PPC port of OS/2. A true microkernel (Mach based) and the system that IBM should have open sourced, ideally as LGPL. OS/2 device drivers are somewhat a bitch as they still have to interface with the kernel on the 16 bit level.
As for support for an Athlon 64, that was old (non-smp). The odds are that OS/2 would boot up on  your Phenom II system and given the right network and video chips would work fine though only using 4 GB of your memory.

My take, OS/2 has one of the best graphical shells ever written (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Shell), even more amazing as it was optimized for 4 MB of memory (really needed at least 8MB), had a very good scheduler especially for a desktop system. Giving the foreground app a priority boost as well as an IO boost which made it a nice to use (and it could be optimized as a server). It had very good DOS support, even running DOS drivers and also very good Win 3.1 support where you could run multiple win3.1 programs in separate sessions so that if one crashed the rest continued on. The advertised better DOS then DOS, better WINDOWS then WINDOWS was true, even if only because you could use a superior file system. The scheduler was much better then Windows, I remember magazine comparisons where basically they'd test an OS/2 version against NT. After failing to get SMP working on OS/2 they'd declare NT the winner even though OS/2 was faster on one core then NT on two. NT won because it ran slower with 2 cores but used both <GR>
At this point most OS/2 users are using it from momentum as most other systems have caught up over the last decade though the interfaces seem to be taking a step back (look at Win8)

4818
Programming / Re: A little help with OS/2 Warp Architecture Components
« on: March 07, 2013, 04:09:54 am »
My apologies, mixed up ring 1 and ring 2.

4819
Programming / Re: A little help with OS/2 Warp Architecture Components
« on: March 06, 2013, 11:32:23 pm »
I don't think anything uses ring 2 in any OS. OS/2 is unique in using ring 1, namely for DOS device drivers, and even the OS/2 device drivers don't all run completely in ring 0 IIRC.  Used to have an ATI video driver which during boot advertised that it had a ring 0 component and IIRC IBM and MS had a falling out over whether the video system should be in ring 0 or not with MS pushing for ring 0 for speed and IBM more interested in stability back in the OS/2 1.x days.
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can verify my memory.

4820
Applications / Re: Whatever happened to...
« on: February 22, 2013, 07:24:21 am »
Quote
and start to use the same font support that the Mozilla derivatives are using. At least the source is available, so problems should be fixable (I don't know if that would actually work either).

Easier said then done as it would probably take a lot of rewriting. Mozilla uses Cairo http://cairographics.org. Actually following the examples link does show that work has been done on adding Cairo to OO. Nothing recent though, see https://www.google.com/search?domains=www.openoffice.org&sitesearch=www.openoffice.org&resultsPerPage=40&q=cairo&Button=search.

Doodles Screen Saver has some Cairo based modules and WPS-Wizard ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/wps-wizard/ adds some classes to the WPS that adds Cairo support. Unluckily it is not the most stable and source is unavailable. Screen shots at http://svn.netlabs.org/wps-wizard

4821
General Discussion / Re: Hybrid "64-Bit" eComStation
« on: February 18, 2013, 11:24:06 pm »
I use a RAMFS volume with 1 GB, seems to work fine. Also with 1 GB, my swap hardly ever grows to over 300 MB so 1.5 GB should be ideal. I did have Thunderbird run away one day and the system crashed with a swapfile full error. Seems that it was actually a 2 GB limit on the swapfile.

4822
Programming / Re: Suspend
« on: February 09, 2013, 02:42:43 am »
See http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/os2ddprog/message/2739 and follow up. Summery, not stable.

4823
General Advertisements / Re: OS/2 Warp for sale on eBay
« on: February 09, 2013, 02:04:40 am »
What impressed me about installing Warp V3 was after the first 5 floppies IIRC, the system rebooted to the desktop and it was functional enough to start reading the documentation while loading the other 8 or so floppies.

4824
Applications / Re: Qpdf
« on: February 06, 2013, 10:08:12 pm »

In order to try and see what the problem is I attempted to start my browser. No go, Seamonkey will not start with any established Profiles or with the Profile Manager.

I closed qpdf and retried Seamonkey - which started without problems.

So, qpdf can print once and does not allow Seamonkey to start while qpdf is running. No problem starting qpdf with Seamonkey already running though.


The problem is that the fntcfg2.dll shipped with qpdf is incompatible with SeaMonkey and probably Firefox and Thunderbird 10.12. Fix is to replace it with the one meant for Mozilla,
or remove it and have the Mozilla versions in your libpath.
The freetyp2.dll for Mozilla is probably newer as well.

4825
There's still activity on usenet.

4826
Setup & Installation / Re: eCS 2.2 YUM/RPM question
« on: February 01, 2013, 05:28:02 am »

At the moment, I do not have a second boot system on that machine, so I cannot comment on what will happen if I try to share the RPM/YUM installation between two boot systems.


I'm sharing a RPM/YUM install between 2 boot partitions, works fine. In my case I never did let it write to config.sys due to conflicts with my existing %UNIXROOT% volume which has EMX stuff on it. Just use a script to enable it.
All the RPM/YUM stuff is self-contained on the volume that %UNIXROOT% points to except what usually goes in config.sys, PATH, LIBPATH, various Python and probably Perl settings so they can find themselves etc.
I can't imagine the installer insisting on using the boot volume for RPM/YUM and really it needs to be installed to the root of whatever volume it is installed to. Ideally %HOME% should probably be on the same volume as some programs are likely to not understand drive letters.

4827
Setup & Installation / Re: Can't use Facebook and Twitter in Firefox
« on: January 29, 2013, 07:10:28 am »
Make sure you have set
Quote
gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled=false
You may set that by using about:config

This definitely fixes non-flash related Facebook crashes. The same applies for several other sites - don't know for Twitter at the moment.

That should be set automatically now, especially on the latest ESR releases though doesn't hurt to double check.
Einar needs to do a couple of tests. Start Firefox in safe-mode, easiest by going to help --> restart with addons disabled. And try a new profile by starting firefox -profilemanager and creating a new profile.
From the sounds of it he has separate profiles on 2.0 and 2.1 with the 2.1 one broken but until he returns and tests more...

4828
I had assumed it was because our versions are following the commercial ESR line which makes it up to date.

That was as much luck as anything though I did have the goal of getting 10 out for the reason that it would be supported for over a year.
The rapid release cycle made it very hard for a couple of people to keep up. Perhaps one person working on it full time would have but after Peter moved on and Mozilla switched to the release every 6 week schedule...
Mozilla has a lot of people employed developing Firefox and we've never had more then 3 or 4 since IBM moved on. And it can be tedious.

4829

What was the technical limitation because the Firefox ports didn't went from version 10 to 11 and follow on?


Short story, by FF10 I was the only one left building and halfway through 11 it broke and I didn't have the skills to fix it.
Long story, after FF4 they dropped support for non-ipc (interprocess-communication allowing tabs to run in their own process so when Flash crashes it would only take out the tab it was running in, Flash crashing is a problem on all platforms) and mostly Walter kept the ipc patch alive. This was a very tedious process as the patch grew to 280KBs (980+ lines) + supporting patches of about 75kb which had large amounts that needed to be applied by hand. Walter did an excellent job of keeping the patches up to date but had personal problems and got tired of rebasing the patches and moved on.
The other problem was development moved on under the assumption of IPC existing so more things didn't work. I had to remove various things like battery status that were aimed at mobile devices anyways. Eventually most of the HTTP code was rewritten in such a way that I didn't have the skills to fix it.
Also I go through phases of working on it, then getting sick of hours of typing #ifdef MOZ_IPC #endif, then trying to figure out the remaining unresolved symbols.
At this point I feel that without IPC support which Rich estimated at a man-month of work for a skilled developer we won't go on. It is being worked on though not by me.

4830
Setup & Installation / Re: Migration problems
« on: January 13, 2013, 07:19:29 pm »
Try going to C:\home\default\mozilla and search for and rename all copies of pluginreg.dat with the browser closed then restart the browser.

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