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Messages - Dave Yeo

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Applications / Re: Firefox 31.8.0 Beta 5 - First Impressions
« on: July 25, 2015, 03:24:23 am »
Will it make sense to try firefox marketplace? Are those OS independent apps ? will it run on OS/2?


Isn't Firefox marketplace for Firefox OS? Unless pure JavaScript they probably won't run on OS/2

4322
Applications / Re: Firefox 31.8.0 Beta 5 - First Impressions
« on: July 25, 2015, 01:37:36 am »
Can't install add-ons, my locale switcher doesn't work, the nl.xpi can't be installed. Tried to install an other add-on from mozilla add-ons, but no success. It ends that there is an error. Can't do much with it.

Looks like a profile problem. Test with a new one, firefox.exe -profilemanager

4323
General Discussion / Re: OS/2 Distro / Clone Discussion
« on: July 17, 2015, 01:41:14 am »
I had to switch to airboot to boot from a 1TB HD, something that Bootmanager can't do. It is also supposed to make it easier to co-exist with Win7 but I've never activated the Win7 that came with this box, just pulled the drive and put it aside.

4324
General Discussion / Re: OS/2 Distro / Clone Discussion
« on: July 15, 2015, 04:50:38 am »
Originally NT was to be OS/2 V3 NT (or was that NT v3) and the first version that ran was OS/2 NT v3 (I have an article somewhere around here from Byte describing it, text mode and not running on X386, but rather one of those RISC CPUs that started with R IIRC), with the design starting back in the OS/2 v1.x days. The plan was for IBM to write V2 and MS to simultaneously write V3, this is why we're actually running OS/2 v2.45.
MS hired Cutler and team to write NT, Cutler didn't really like the design of OS/2 and MS met with success with Win 3.0 so early on MS started re-purposing NT to run Windows (without telling IBM). By NT 3.1, the primary desktop was Windows though NT was well enough designed that it had several personalities including the OS/2 1.x one and as you mentioned, was more VMS like under the hood.
I played a bit running some OS/2 1.x text mode  programs under W2K, they actually worked well, could even use tedit to load config.sys and change things like LIBPATH and it would stick. Note that there was no real config.sys on the disk, just an internal representation. Some things didn't quite work right like the 1.0 cmd.exe would run in a window under NT while OS/2 4.5 would honour the fullsreen bit and refuse to run it windowed. Would have liked to have seen the 1.x Presentation Manager kit for NT which MS sold.
I also have a small Byte article about MS getting the 32 bit Presentation Manager running under NT, would have been interesting to see and test if the WPS would run on it.

I've heard that when reactos first was starting, they reached out to the OS/2 community to include an OS/2 sub-system, but the developers didn't like the GPL and the OS/2 developer community has often been cat like and it is hard to herd cats.

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General Discussion / Re: OS/2 Distro / Clone Discussion
« on: July 14, 2015, 07:09:14 am »
What I would like to see is the whole OS/2 being converted to 64 bit, although 32 bit would do for a start,  I know there is a 32 bit CMD implementation but it needs everything from networking (IPV6) and up with some sort of VM built in to enable use of 16 bit windows applications.  In other words I would love to see everything (except the win 16) on the WSeB install CD changed up to 64 bit and then have the necessary 64bit drivers included on WSeB CD2.  I know it isn't very likely to happen but I too can dream.

The 16bit Windows (and DOS) applications is the easy part, just use DOSBOX, which is quite capable now of running Win16 and many DOS apps, though it won't give you the hardware access that OS/2 does, nor the shared clipboard.
As for 64 bit, what is the point? All the apps are currently 32 bit and will remain 32 bit. If the swapper back end was fixed/extended, could use PAE memory for swap (already possible) and run lots of 32 bit apps, each using 2GB or more memory, though there is still the shared memory problem.
Personally my fantasy is a bit different then Martins. Start at the bottom end and add a OS/2 subsystem to Reactos. I choose Reactos as it is NT compatible and NT was originally designed to run OS/2 and is more similar then Linux.
Write the backend (Doscalls and a few other basic bottom end DLLs) and use the OS/2 binaries for the PMSHELL and WPS until someone rewrites them. The OS4 guys have already sorta done part of the work, though they don't like the GPL, which is what Reactos is licensed as. Once the bottom end is done, you get all the drivers that Reactos supports and that is what we're missing. With a 64bit version of Reactos, it should be possible to get a full 4GB address space per process (2GB for badly written ones).
Still the problem of needing people with the motivation, time/resources and skill to do it.
The big problem is that OS/2 is now so old that a lot of people have grown up thinking that the Windows desktop is the ultimate and it is so ingrained in them that there is so little interest in anything else. Saw it the other day when on Slashdot where someone was dreaming of combining the best parts of all the operating systems. He actually listed the WPS as one of the components in his OS, but there was endless comments by people who basically wanted the Win7 interface.

4326
Setup & Installation / Re: Samsung ML-2165W Printer
« on: July 12, 2015, 06:06:55 pm »
Hi Holger, I've had a couple of Samsung printers, the last being a ML-1610. They worked fine with cups though there was an extra driver that I had to add IIRC. Best to look at the supported printer list

4327
General Discussion / Re: News from the front line
« on: July 11, 2015, 06:34:03 pm »
Why must XUL.DLL in shared memory? If next releases demand 300Mb than the game is over for me. I'm running now 24.8.1and have 206Mb left for use. Or do we have more systems which rely on XUL.DLL, but if this is an older package then we might end up in the known dll war.

It is the design of OS/2 (Windows too) that puts shared libraries into shared memory. I had a lot of tabs open which is one reason that I was using so much shared memory. Actually I had forgotten to mark the DLLs high on this build and I had SeaMonkey, Thunderbird and Firefox open when I realized that I only had 64MBs low shared free. So as long as you're not opening too many tabs and such, not marking the DLLs high does work. Note that Mozilla tries to allocate high memory as well which helps.
All Mozilla apps (Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey) use slightly different and incompatible xul.dlls, that is why we have LIBPATHSTRICT and the frontend RUN!, to keep the incompatible DLLs separate.
Quote
I posted a bug about 24.8.1, the one that download nr 3 will crash the program, but I get the stupid reply to move on to a higher version. Are they that stupid that they don't understand that not everyone had ADHD in developing?  Where can I put the bug so we get a working system next level?

The problem is Mozilla and their insane quick release schedule (which they're now planning on speeding up) and the fact that the browser is the component of the operating system that is exposed to the most malicious stuff. So security fixes are important, even on our platform, as we don't want a malicious script spying on the next tab and getting your credit card info or even attempting to install something malicious and crashing the browser.
Luckily Mozilla does have the ESR (extended support release) branch which is fairly stable, mostly only getting security updates so we don't have to update every 6 weeks. But the reality is that for security reasons and also to load the latest content, we have to update every year. With only one person working on our main Mozilla port and also working on other stuff (Java update planned for example), bug reports have to be against the latest. Judging by some of the fixes that have gone into the new (not yet released) version, your download crash might already be fixed.
If you still have the issue with the new release (next week?), open an issue at the Bitwise github account.

4328
General Discussion / Re: News from the front line
« on: July 11, 2015, 01:15:45 am »
Is that because both of those programs rely heavily on ODIN code?


Mozilla doesn't use any Odin code and is native (actually xul that pretends to be native on all platforms) and I think that the recent versions of OpenOffice are pure native as well. Plugins such as Flash and Java do use Odin.
The problem is just the size of the code (and data). For Mozilla, xul.dll by itself is over 32MBs after using lxlite and I just fired up SeaMonkey and it has allocated 255 MBs of shared memory of which about half is committed. Certain web sites will raise that a lot. I only have about 300 MBs of free low shared memory after booting so load a few JavaScript heavy pages and the system will get unstable, SeaMonkey will crash and the system itself might not recover unless using high memory. I assume that OO is similar and running both together becomes impossible without resorting to high memory.
Our operating system was designed originally in the '80's and the 32 bit part was designed in the early '90's with only 512MBs per process address space, which was a lot 20 years ago but now programs have grown, the average computer has 2-8GBs of memory and everyone is moving to 64bit operating systems to get over the 2-3GB per process limit.
I'll note that we can build a debug version of xul.dll which 32 bit Windows can't (with only 2GBs of memory here, linking the debug xul.dll sees my swap file grow and the system will thrash if I have Mozilla running).

4329
General Discussion / Re: News from the front line
« on: July 08, 2015, 06:42:02 am »
And has IBM fixed anything since 2006?
The kernel 14.106 is a patched version of the last IBM kernel. It was done be Steve Levine, most likely initiated by Mensys.

Andreas, do you have any evidence/information/link of that?

As far as I know version 14.106 was part of IBM's XR_C006 fixpack released around Feb of 2007.  This is the last one that I know that IBM coded for OS/2. I don't know if there is any other kind of kernel patch or release from that version. (beside OS/4 which is a different kind of project)


XR_C006 was build level was 14.105, which I believe was shipped with eCS 2.1. and dated October 18, 2006, according to README.1ST The 14.106SMP kernel is only available on the 2.2 beta releases (at least I got it from 2.2b2).
Looking at README2, there are only 10 APARs fixed with XR_C006, and that includes a fix for a TRAP 0 when connecting a ZIP drive to a parallel port. Most of the others were important including support for 2TB drives.

4330
General Discussion / Re: Open Source / 2
« on: July 07, 2015, 04:27:04 pm »

What's the plan and how do we make best use of the source code?! Source code doesn't compile itself, someone has to do it and get a project afloat?


Basically with open source, volunteers do what ever interests them (and occasionally what they get paid to do). For example a long time ago I wanted to play an open source game, so I downloaded the source code and the EMX development environment and learned how to compile it. Been learning ever since and still compile stuff such as this SeaMonkey I'm posting this on and when things go good, share the results with the community.

4331
Setup & Installation / Re: Can't install yum
« on: July 07, 2015, 04:20:42 pm »
Yum is installed by the eCS 2.2b2 installer, so no need to also install it manually.
You can test by running yum update from a command line

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General Discussion / Re: News from the front line
« on: July 07, 2015, 08:47:12 am »

For me it would be interesting to know what kind of "License" one need to use the 106SMP kernel - is there a need to have an eCS license? Fortunately ACPI does work with Kernel 104SMP as well.

That would be interesting to know, as well as its pedigree. Hearsay says it has been patched to fix issues with loading DLLs high. Has it also been patched to show 106SMP as well? And has IBM fixed anything since 2006?

4333
Programming / Re: support opengl
« on: July 05, 2015, 08:15:54 pm »
...
The last hurdle that then comes up (possibly) is that I do not know what our Java implementatation has for OpenGL support.
Should the Java API calls not communicate with a call to video subsystem (if we would have hardware OpenGL support).
I would be surprised if does OpenGL calls in Java would currently even be mapped to softwareGL.

Anyway a lot of details that would need to work to get Java OpenGL to work.

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

Probably the OpenJDK API maps to MesaGL which in turn maps to hardware drivers or software emulation. Of course we would still need an up to date MesaGL port as our last port is a dozen or so years old and what it would take to update the driver,  I don't know. Looking quickly at the MesaGL git repo, I found this, http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/log/?qt=grep&q=os%2F2 and can't fnd any evidence of our support being removed, though the whole directory structure has changed and GLUT itself seems to have gone away or become something else.
One way that various Linux desktops implement software OpenGL is using CLANG to implement a JIT (Just in time compiler) which may have acceptable performance on modern hardware.
As usual, lots of work for a knowledgeable good programmer and probably never going to happen.

4334
Programming / Re: support opengl
« on: July 05, 2015, 05:59:36 pm »
Warp 4 supported opengl in software and hasn't really been worked on since. The software support is very slow compared to hardware support. You can start here, http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/h-search.php?button=Search&key=opengl&dir=%2F.

4335
Internet / Re: Thunderbird 31.6
« on: June 29, 2015, 08:18:42 am »
make package currently outputs firefox-31.6.0.en-US.os2.zip and seamonkey-2.28.en-US.os2.zip. I'd guess Bitwise will use similar for Firefox excepting if they wait for 31.8, the name will reflect that. Not sure if I'll modify Seamonkeys name, if uploading from home it'll be a 7z but it's too slow (11 hours to upload TB) and I'll probably rerelease TB 31.8.0 with whatever fixes happen.
Enigmail needs to be linked against whichever Mozilla version it's compiled for (or at least did last time I looked) and I haven't revisited since the version I built for 10ESR. If I get a chance I'll look at it.

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