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Programming / Re: cross-os2emx
« Last post by JTA on March 15, 2026, 05:58:18 pm »
KO ... thanks for this emx effort!

If I may further impose upon you, how hard would it be to provide some details of your compiler/dev environment (and I assume you are running OS/2 on physical machine(s))? If such a thread exists, can you point me at it?

I would like to replicate your build environment in a VM, under my AToF scheme, and see if I can push compiling limits further away from causing us grief (VAL = xxxx, for example). I see these limits in other threads, and it seems like we can push past them with virtualization, with multiple os/2 vm's, and so on ... it just needs to be detailed out for new devs, I would think.

Is it possible for you to document your dev environment for us?

Again, thanks so much for all that you do for OS/2!
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Programming / Re: cross-os2emx
« Last post by KO Myung-Hun on March 15, 2026, 03:14:32 pm »
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Article Discussions / Re: Adding an extra thing to the ArcaOS strategy ?
« Last post by David Kiley on March 15, 2026, 11:50:43 am »
ArcaOS could embrace the apple strategy when they created OS/X of using an open source base system (in their case Darwin) with thier own commercial propriety system on top of it (keeping the OS/2 UI for example like the workplace shell/WPS). And, they had created the "classic" mode to allow old os 9 apps to still work.
Would require them embracing a totally new direction though.

Sounds kind of complicated to just replace single parts with open source technology - so at some point it makes more sense to fundamentally change the rules of the game like Apple did I think.
I mean, I know it takes less resources to just keep going with what they have.
But at the same time, at some point it makes more sense to jump onto a whole new ship if the old barge is starting to rust and getting holes and taking on water, as much as I love the 90s OS/2 :).

If ArcaOS embraced a base system like Darwin or some of unix, programming a browser would be simple.
I know a lot of users woud prefer ReactOS or something Dos based since it's closer to the Os/2 Core. Yet ReacOS has struggled themselves for a decade to get beyond beta and don't have a functional browser themselves.
So it might be time to embrace reality and create something new based on what is, if ArcaOS has the guts to do so.

I mean, do I need yet another version of os/2 warp that works on a 2026 motherboard? Not at all.
Do I need a functional browser? Yes.
They are already spending a ton of resources but just in the wrong direction.

I think it's time to relegate the old IBM license to a virtualized session inside a totally new OS, while keeping WPS on top of it, which is where the user has always spent 99% of their time anyways.
My 2 cents.
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Internet / Re: Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?
« Last post by David Kiley on March 15, 2026, 11:40:36 am »
Wow.. thanks for all of your (and others) work. It's fascinating to read everything that happened. And yes impressive what was achieved for so long on a 90s operating system. When I was actively using ecomstation as my primary desktop, the browsers sure kept up for a long time. I had no trouble with any sites back then.

I wonder how many sales Arcaos gets compared to the eCs days. I assume the numbers have gone down as enterprise companies might retire or upgrade their aging equipment eventually.
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General Discussion / Re: What happened to Paul?
« Last post by Paul Smedley on March 15, 2026, 09:18:07 am »
Thanks folks, it's brought me some comfort reading these messages. I'm on a good path now, maybe I'll be back porting some day (If I remember what to do lol)

Hi Paul, I fondly remember using your ports throughout the ecomstation era. You've done such great work and it kept my computer going.
So I do hope you just hang out with us here regardless if you decide to port more stuff or not:).

I still read os2world most days, so I'm usually lurking :)
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Internet / Re: Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?
« Last post by Dave Yeo on March 15, 2026, 08:58:53 am »
they could have found a skilled developer to update our existing browser years ago, before we fell so far behind.

Did Ecomstation contribute to the browser? Or something changed that they didn't need to?

Yes, first they paid Rich to fix the printing. That was FF v4. Walter and I took it to v10, then Serenity paid Bitwise for 17 to 45, actually at the end the community was paying. I supported SM and TB, easy once Firefox built and ran as they all use the same engine. At that point I was left alone with a few resources from Arca Noae and I don't have the skills to do what was needed for 52 and it took awhile for me to even get it building to the point where we needed someone much more knowledgeable. I also ported it to the newer GCC and applied a lot of security fixes from 10four (Mac fork of 45).
In theory someone knowledgeable  could continue development to the latest PaleMoon with our source, though PaleMoon has really rearranged the source.
Meanwhile Bitwise thought that porting Chromium would be a better route using Qt. Turned out pretty hard, newer GCC was needed, lots of libc updates and got Qt5 to where it is now. Development kind of stopped due to issues updating Qt5 on our system and then war broke out and the developer left Russia and spent quite a bit of time stateless. Paul applied the Qt5 patches to Qt6 but wasn't skilled enough to really go on. One problem is that Qt6 doesn't officially support 32 bits, so no testing by the Qt folks and no worries about freeing memory at times.
At the beginning of the month, Dmitriy, Bitwise's lead developer, did post that he expects to get back to working on Qt6 in the next couple of months.
Meanwhile KOMH has ported our build system to 64bit Linux which should really help. Memory has been a problem compiling browsers since FF10 where I needed VAL=3072 and at the time with only 1.5 GB of actual ram, the swap file could overflow (2.1GB limit) and crash the system if I did anything else while building. Linking some of the Chromium DLL's is even harder due to the memory limits of our system.
It's actually amazing what we've accomplished in the way of compiling browsers. We were the last 32 bit OS that could build Firefox and considering that most of the design of OS/2 was done in the early 90's or earlier...

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General Discussion / Re: What happened to Paul?
« Last post by David Kiley on March 15, 2026, 08:44:33 am »
Thanks folks, it's brought me some comfort reading these messages. I'm on a good path now, maybe I'll be back porting some day (If I remember what to do lol)

Hi Paul, I fondly remember using your ports throughout the ecomstation era. You've done such great work and it kept my computer going.
So I do hope you just hang out with us here regardless if you decide to port more stuff or not:).
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Internet / Re: Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?
« Last post by David Kiley on March 15, 2026, 03:45:45 am »
they could have found a skilled developer to update our existing browser years ago, before we fell so far behind.

Did Ecomstation contribute to the browser? Or something changed that they didn't need to?
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Internet / Re: Interested in a remote winflector/ web browser hosting service?
« Last post by David Kiley on March 14, 2026, 09:20:28 pm »
And yes there are definite limitations like YouTube as you mentioned. So we will see if I can build it with enough value to still make it worth using.

I'm looking into bundling others apps like office suites ftp etc. But Microsoft charges through the nose for a multi user office suite so probably not them
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Internet / Re: Interested in a remote winflector/ web browser hosting service?
« Last post by David Kiley on March 14, 2026, 09:18:38 pm »
Thanks for the feedback. It gave me a lot to think about. Fortunately winflector has a lot of built in security. I'm still testing it but here is a list of built in controls:

Isolated Application View:
Unlike Remote Desktop Services (RDS), which share the entire desktop, Winflector only
presents the windows of the specific application, limiting user interference with the server's environment.
Independent

User Accounts: Winflector allows the creation of user accounts that are independent of Windows user accounts.

Resource and App Access Control: Administrators can define which applications specific users can access.
Virtualization: Winflector uses kernel name virtualization to prevent conflicts between different users running the same application, ensuring that each instance acts as if it is in its own user space.

I have a lot of experience with server hardening.. so I am working on that now.
I purchased a server so it looks like I'm going ahead with it. I will probably only buy limited seats to start though in case no one wants it lol.
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