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Topics - Roderick Klein

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1
Hardware / Testing if a UEFI system can work with ArcaOS....
« on: October 29, 2024, 01:50:20 pm »
This tool used to be limited to the ArcaOS install media (syseval). You can now download it here:
https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/arcaos/uefi-diagnostics/
Its a UEFI tool tool so it does not run under ArcaOS, Windows or Linux, and you need to load as UEFI tool.
It seems pretty simple... (See website for instructions).

Roderick

2
General Discussion / Question for Roberto about your basic files...
« on: May 19, 2023, 12:28:39 am »
Hello Roberto,

Since I do not have your email address, I wanted to ask here. You posted in the QT thread the following:
https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php/topic,3252.msg39838.html#msg39838
You write:
"The UA.Bas file eliminates a block of one or more processors that tends to go 100%, and when executing it"

So why do you "poke" certain memory addresses inside the DOS VDM itself ?
Or put differently the DOS VDM can not read or write to the memory where the Dooble code is loaded.

Or is purely based on the idea to increase the CPU load on the CPU and slow down the Dooble code execution ?

I am just curious but I am having a hard time understanding how this is supposed even have an effect ?

Roderick

3
Applications / Alternative to Thunderbird
« on: December 13, 2022, 04:51:29 pm »
And while its still early days we might soon have an alternative to Thunderbird asn an email client.
Its still need more work to get it done, but there is being worked on https://github.com/equaeghe/trojita.
An open source email client.

Hopefully next wear we can release a beta version of Trojita.

Roderick Klein

4
Hello,

The new Otter Browser has been tested by a small group of people.
The most important issues are now being fixed to provide a stable browser experience. Current expectation is that first *public* beta of Otter Browser will be released in the last week of February or the first week of March.

Installation of the new Otter Browser will only be supported via ANPM (Arca Noae Package Manager). When the public beta of the Otter Browser is released we will also release the instructions how to install the Otter Browser.

We need your donations to keep going, please consider making a donation via https://donation.os2voice.org

Please visit https://articles.os2voice.org , at the bottom of the Browser update 13 you can find 2 questions. Could you please fill in these two questions about your browser experience
on OS/2, eCS and ArcaOS ? Thank you!

In this newsletter you can also read why the Browser update newsletter have not been released over the last couple of months.

We also explain how the browser will distributed when
the beta cycle is finished.

You can also read how Steven Levine views the new Otter Browser.

Best regards,

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

5
I am not that concerned really about cookies. You can install software to block cookies.
What I did notice is that recently (unless I missed something) is that on OS2world I keep getting a lot of Google adwords.
I assume these adwords are there to generate some income ?


Best I know os2world is based in Sweden as a Swedish non profit organisation and there for should comply with EU law.

That brings us in the topic of cookies:
https://www.privacypolicies.com/blog/eu-cookie-law/
In other words, if you're in Europe and host a website that uses cookies, you are required to tell your visitors that you're using cookies, let them know what those cookies are being used for, and get their consent before you can place cookies on their device.


The website does not ask you if you want to install the cookies.
You also, best I can tell do not have a cookie policy.

It is not really my conern. But its required by EU/national laws.

The new OS/2 VOICE donation website https://donation.os2voice.org/ I also had to bite to work on this stuff...
It has a cookie policy and explains which cookies it installs and it privacy statement...

If you guys need help with this feel free to look at my donation website and copy away :-)
Or send me an email if you need help.

Roderick

6
Marketplace / OS/2 items for sale on Ebay
« on: August 12, 2019, 11:05:58 pm »
Over the next couple of days I will be adding more items.

https://www.ebay.com/usr/os2voice

Includes Denim team OS/2 jacket.

Microsoft OS/2 1.3 OEM version from Olivetti.

All income from the sales are send to BWW to support the development of the new QT port.

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

7
Applications / Sponsoring Bitwise Works, we need your donations!
« on: March 25, 2019, 07:52:46 pm »
The OS/2 community has been very supportive to support Bitwise works its effort to the port the latest QT version to OS/2. But can you please consider donating more ? We need your continued support.

For two reasons this QT is port is being done to OS/2/ArcaOS:

1. To be able to port other QT based programs to OS/2/ArcaOS.  Such as games.

2. More important the Firefox browser is dead for 2 reasons on OS/2. The first is that Mozilla was adding and removing to much with each release of Firefox for us to keep up with the development. Second we would need the RUST compiler on OS/2.  Which in it self would a lot of work to port RUST to OS/2.

With QT ported to OS/2 we can port different QT based web browsers. One of these browsers being Google Chromium which also exists on Linux.  Other browsers can be considered as well! The beaty is that with most QT browsers about 80% of the functional code is in the QT library.

For more information about this QT port you can read the different newsletter on the VOICE website:
https://articles.os2voice.org

I am posting to this forum asking if people could please consider donating to OS/2 VOICE or consider Patreon member for OS/2 VOICE.

You can make a donation to OS/2 VOICE
www.os2voice.org/membership.html

You can make monthly donations to BWW via Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/bwwbitwiseworks

All newsletter updates send have been written by OS/2 VOICE and approved by Bitwise Works.

Best regards,

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

8
I already have a few email addresses that people have send to me. I have the logic one's you could already find such as osnews.com for example. What I am working is on is a press list called press@os2voice.org to send mayor press annouchedments to, such as a new release of ArcaOS or news on a Warpstock event. Its simply to hard to find OS/2 related information outside the community. If you have an email address that is specifly for sending news items to an ICT or computer magazine please send me an email roderickklein@xs4all.nl.

Thanks,

ROderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

9
General Discussion / IBM DDK License Discussion
« on: August 01, 2018, 10:37:33 pm »
Yes, ArcaOS does good job with supporting OS/2 on modern hardware. Though, it is closed. It is even more closed than eComStation. They do copy protection by branding some binaries with user's own name. Neither IBM OS/2, nor eCS did not do such bad things. Newer drivers like DANIS506 or AHCI are linked with closed-source libraries (DRV16, DRV32 etc.), so that they are not fully open source while having been published under GNU GPL. And they now port drivers from FreeBSD, because BSD license allows them to not publish sources.

Well one thing that is easier about ArcaOS and putting in drivers the user data is that you no longer have to deal with license number you have to enter. Having worked (note I no longer work @Mensys) on eCS the license key was not working to bad. But for some people it was a not that easy to enter the 40 or so character registration key in the installer.

As for your statement that 16 and 32 bit driver library is closed source most likely duo to the DDK license.
In this file Drv16-20161010.zip (download here https://88watts.net/software.html) is a readme file:

"The Drv16 Kit is a derivative work of the IBM DDK. You must have a IBM"
DDK license to use this software.
Anyway for the the 32 bit and 16 bit driver they have a library and a presentation on how to write drivers:
http://www.warpstock.eu/images/2015/presentations/David_Azarewicz-WSE2015_Writing_Device_Drivers.pd

Anyway again it might be the age old problem this caused the orginally IBM DDK license.

Why Arca Noae did not provide the source code of certain libraires I do not know.  But I have an idea, you must be aware of what the DDK states about publishing  source code! This is also the reason why UNIAUD16.SYS @Netlabs can not be published publicly, because its covered the DDK license from IBM.

As for your last statement that Arca Noae picked FreeBSD so they do not have to make the source code public.
They had a different reason, a technicall on. When I worked with David Azarewicz at Mensys on eCS the Wireless NIC driver based on Linux sources ended up being dead. Why ? The Linux guys had made such many changes to the sources you could no longer recompile the sources. Aaaah:

https://www.arcanoae.com/roadmap/
"With the aid of the MultiMac framework, Arca Noae already provides support for some Intel, Nvidia, and Realtek chipsets based on Linux drivers. Changes in the Linux driver architecture have made maintaining these drivers and porting new drivers increasingly difficult. As was announced at Warpstock 2014, Arca Noae is working on an alternative new library for porting FreeBSD drivers to OS/2."

Roderick Klein

10
Events / IRC speakup with BWW this Saturday (3 of March)!
« on: March 02, 2018, 03:14:20 pm »
Dear OS/2 users,

OS/2 VOICE used to organize IRC speaks with developers and organizations
supporting the OS/2 community.

The good news is we will be holding a series of speaks ups via IRC.
If you are unfamiliar with how IRC works, then no problem.
While you can use an IRC client you can also use a your browser, which
in my opinion is easier:

Before the meeting starts you goto the following URL:
https://webchat.freenode.net/

Fill in your nickname: Its preferred if you use your real name.
At the channel name fill #os2voice.

The first IRC speakup will be targeted at Westen Europe, Afrika and the
American continent.

The speakup with Bitwiseworks will be held on the Saturday the 3th of
March and start ats 17:00 hours Amsterdam/Berlin Time. Which means:
19:00 Moscow time, 11:00am New York time, 08:00am Los Angeles time.
BitwiseWorks is the company that works on ports of for example Open Open
Office and Firefox to OS/2.

The speakup is intended to not last longer then 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

Best regards,

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

11
Setup & Installation / A tool to setup LAN server on ArcaOS...
« on: February 27, 2018, 12:19:11 am »
A few people where asking me how to setup an OS/2 LAN server on top of ArcaOS.
Since I wanted to have a server with OS/2 at home running again.
The VOICE foundation released this tool:
http://articles.os2voice.org/category/software/15-lan-server-installation-utility.html
Its under a public open source license.

Note you need to have a CD with the LAN server to install LAN server on top of ArcaOS.

Best regards,

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

12
Events / Reminder about OS/2 VOICE IIRC speaktup in about 18 hours
« on: February 16, 2018, 10:00:11 pm »
Reposting from last week:

Dear OS/2 users,

OS/2 VOICE used to organize IRC speaks with developers and organizations supporting the OS/2 community.

The good news is we will be holding a series of speaks ups via IRC.
If you are unfamiliar with how IRC works, then no problem.
While you can use an IRC client you can also use a your browser, which in my opinion is easier:
Before the meeting starts you goto the following URL:
https://webchat.freenode.net/

Fill in your nickname: Its preferred if you use your real name.
At the channel name fill #os2voice.

The first IRC speakup will be targeted at Westen Europe, Afrika and the American continent.
You will be able to ask questions to the Arca Noae LCC.

The speakup with Arca Noae LLC will be held on the Saturday the 17th of February and start ats 17:00 hours Amsterdam/Berlin Time. Which means:
19:00 Moscow time
11:00am New York time
08:00am Los Angeles time

The second speakup is will be held on the Sunday the 25th of February.
I will start at 02:00 Moscow time, 0:00 Amsterdam time, local time Syndey 09:00 in the moring. This means for people in New York the second speakup will start on 24th of February 18:00 hours New York time!

This second speakup is to try and accommodate the OS/2 users in Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

Its the in tension that as many of the developers from Arca NOae will be present to answer your questions. The speakup is intended to not last longer then 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

Best regards,

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

13
Comments, Suggestions & Questions / SSL OS/2world
« on: January 23, 2018, 11:40:54 pm »
While the postings on os2world.com are not really that secret. Is OS2WORLD.COM going to use SSL encryption ?
As in the near future web browsers such as Firefox will warn if a website does not use SSL. It might scare away users... Just a thought...

Roderick

14
Applications / SOME steps to write device drivers...
« on: June 10, 2015, 11:04:25 pm »
I keep claiming writing device drivers takes a certain level of skillset. If you wanne write device drivers.

You could look at the eCS CD 2 as there is a kit on it how to write device drivers (presentation from Daniela).
It also has a ZIP file with some examples. It has been on eCS CD #2 since version 12 of eCS I think.

The other thing are these libraries David. He has had them around for some time and they have been on his website.
I hope next week when I get back from vacation I can get the presentations online on the website and the video's on youtube. Then you guys can see how these libraries should make writing device drivers easier.

http://88watts.net/software.html

You do however need a DDK. As the DDK contains some libraries and a lot of header files.
I need to get David his presentations online so people can see what he said. But from what I remember of David his presentayion it should make live _easier_.  As these libraries provide a basic skeleton to write drivers.

Using device driver samples from the DDK should be done with caution. I do not know if the last version of the DDK released has for example this issue fixed. SiS and VIA released OS/2 drivers for some of its NIC chipsets.
From what I remember they would crash because they had some ISA code in it claim PCI IRQ"s via the resource manager exclusively. Sadly SiS or VIA never fixed this issue.

Writing device drivers is not maybe that difficult. What can become difficult is when a device driver causes a kernel crash. Tracing that can be a pretty time consuming job. I did plenty of does things at Mensys and some jobs took more then 40 to 60 hours to trace back (even with in my opinion very skilled develoeprs). It especialy becomes difficult when a driver for example corrupts memory and you need trace back what corrupted the memory.  Finding it and fixing it can be very time consuming job.

A lot of these problems can be prevented by commenting code properly and checking in changes into SVN frequently. So you can trace back when you introduced the defect. It takes longer, but pays itself back in gold when you run into trouble. Frequent checkings I have even seen paid developers not do this very often. Finding the broken code then only takes longer as you made more changes between the working and none working code set.

I have had it with severeal people and 1 company I hired at Mensys where dispite putting in the contract frequent checkins where required. They did not check in the code for months.  It took 3 project managers 2 developers after 9 months they gave up on a trap in a driver. One of the well known developers in the community traced it down and fixed it about 45 minutes....

The thing where the skillset comes in is to understand what you are doing. I have at Mensys for years try to help a lot of people to write device drivers. But seing how many people got stuck. Its certainly from what I have seen is easier to write applications then drivers. As when a driver takes down the system you are down to memory dumps or kernel debugging in some cases...

Some tools that can help and tools you have been online here for many years:
http://www.warpcave.com/
(Page of Steve Levine).

And even when you stick to these rules it can still be extremely time confusing to trace bug. In my opinion learning how to use the OS/2 kernel debugger is not learned in a few days...

And if you do release drivers a developer. But bldevels in the driver (that can be read with bldlevel.exe command). Do not be depended on date and time stamp of the driver. So that every public release can linked to the code in SVN.

Also release your driver with a so called SYM file. That makes tracing bugs for other developers eaiser.
I do not know how you create such a file but its easier for other developers if you have a SYM file to trace code in memory dump or kernel debugger. As you will see function names etc... I hope I explained this last bit correctly...

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE


15
General Discussion / Update on Warpstock Euroep 2015
« on: May 17, 2015, 01:40:41 am »
Anyway the website for Warpstock Europe is coming together. About 2 months ago I had 2 people who could help out with Warpstock Europe but they could no commit really. But that was not because they did not want to... They where extremely busy.  So I organized the event myself.

* The current archive pages will stay up on typo3. But next year we will have a new website running on Wordpress or Joomla.
That way the pages will be up quicker! It took a lot of work to update Typo3.

* Tomorrow May 18th I will update the pages with most of the presenters and presentations.
For people who can not make it to Warpstock Europe 2015. An MP3 audio stream will be offered. The program of which presentations will be streamed
will be published next week. For details please visit: http://www.warpstock.eu/en/agenda/live_audio_stream.html

* Over the last couple of years it was possible to buy a ticket at the event. This is no longer possible as a volunteer had to sit behind a table waiting for people. Also the VOICE foundation (www.os2voice.org) does not have any cash money. Also I need to indicate to the hostel in advanced how many people are coming so they can provide enough coffee and tea! Hence the reason you need to reserve your access in advanced!

* Also note that lunch _cannot_ be purchased at the hostel. I was clearly told by the booking office of A&O hostels
this is not possible!

So you need to buy your access in advanced via:
https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/warpstock-europe-2015-access/

The reason Arca Noae deals with the bookings is because they sponsor VOICE partly to organize Warpstock Europe 2015.

* The following speakers will make a presentation(s) at WarpStock Europe 2015:

    David Azarewicz, participant in Arca Noae LLC
    Roderick Klein, chairman of the VOICE International
    Steve Levine, independant OS/2 developer (remote via Skype)
    Keith Merrington, OS/2 developer
    Lewis Rosenthal, participant in Arca Noae LLC
    Gregg Young, independant OS/2 developer

Program and topics of the presentations will be added to the website tonight and tomorow.

Hope to see you at Warpstock Europe 2015 in Munich on the 6 and 7th of June. For more information please visit www.warpstock.eu.

Regards,

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

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