Topics

16

Programming / AVX enabled Firefox

« on: February 19, 2021, 11:19:53 pm »

Finally got around to trying to build Firefox with -march=sandybridge. While the build works fine with -march=i686 or pentium-m, it dies with -march=sandybridge, doesn't seem to like the GCC basic_string<char>. Error log attached if anyone has any ideas.

17

Internet / Password Managers

« on: February 17, 2021, 05:01:52 am »

So I've been using the free edition of LastPass for a while. It works fairly well as a browser extension on both SM and FF with the old extension still supported. It also works well on my Android phone.
They're changing the terms next month so the free edition is only usable on mobile or desktop and I can't afford to pay for it.
So wondering what password managers people are using.

18

Storage / USB 3 Hard drives

« on: December 24, 2020, 05:50:26 am »

Hi, there's been various discussions about USB 3 hard drives here and on the testers list so I thought I'd start a new dedicated thread.
I've acquired a Seagate Slim Drive USB 3 2TB drive for backup purposes which worked well with USB 2, peaking at about 19 MB/s.
Now I acquired this, https://www.ebay.ca/itm/USB-C-PCI-E-Express-Card-USB-3-1-2-Port-Controller-Adapter-HUB/133124878295?hash=item1efedc6fd7:g:OCYAAOSwjm5dOpkd which showed up within 3 days in my mail. Unluckily the needed cables from a different supplier haven't shown up yet. So I lucked out and picked up a 6 foot USB C to USB A cable at London Drugs for $7 bucks, it's rated at 5Gb/s, USB 3 speed.
Testing by transferring an ArcaOS ISO using File Commander, I see speeds of 90-98 MB/s, under Linux, Using MC and an EXT4 partition, the speeds are about 100-110 MB/s for really big files with the odd really high peak. Seems pretty decent, at that testing with the Mozilla source tree (about 5GB's of mostly small files) it is still about 30 MB/s, speeding up for large files and slowing down for small files. It's actually faster then my SSD on a SATA 2 port and may be the fastest drive in my system.
Problems, I have a 1 TB JFS partition for backing up to. Given a power failure or system crash, chkdsk runs for hours before quitting  with

Code: [Select]

JFS0101: CHKDSK  Insufficient dynamic storage available for required workspace
(1,6). CHKDSK CANNOT CONTINUE.

I guess I'll repartition as even though after ejecting and remounting the drive seems fine, who knows.
The other problem is all attempts to benchmark with diskio or sysbench locks the system hard, requiring the big red button to reboot and that hours long chkdsk.
Copying files, using rsync and such seem to work fine.
I must say I'm impressed so far with the hard drive speed, unlike other reports. Not sure if due to the USB C controller or what.
Edit, USBTree reports,

Code: [Select]

USB driver version = 12.8
----- USB device tree ---------------------------------------------------------
DS 07f0=4ff8

Controller 0: USBXHCD$
Root Hub 0 (4 ports) 1B21:2142
  Port 1: Device 0BC2:AC2D (MSD)-(SCSI)-(BO)(MSD)-(SCSI) SS Seagate RSS LLC
...

19

Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Karma?

« on: October 16, 2020, 07:05:25 am »

Notice a new thing, karma, listed under a posting users name. Guess Martin has been playing or updating

20

Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Forum RSS Feed

« on: August 11, 2020, 04:42:23 pm »

Hi, I notice that the RSS feed for the Forum link on the main page seems broken. The other 5 feeds links seem fine.

21

Multimedia / freedb

« on: July 12, 2020, 05:50:41 am »

Well freedb is no more, so programs that depend on it for CD music metadata need upgrading.
What I'm using for LeechMP3 is gnudb.gnudb.org 8880 which is a mirror of the old freedb.
See http://www.gnudb.org/index.php along with usage at http://www.gnudb.org/howto.php
There may be other mirrors and somewhere album art, please post others.

22

General Discussion / QT considering keeping new releases closed for 12 months

« on: April 12, 2020, 10:17:12 pm »

Seems we're in danger of losing one of the benefits that the new web browser will bring, namely timely security updates. KDE is considering forking the project but realistically this would likely be untenable.
KDE discussion, https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html?print=cGh4
Discussion from the Qute (a QTWebEngine browser) take on it. https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006121.html
And Qt's response, https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-Open-Source-Statement

23

Mail-News / Enigmail

« on: February 23, 2020, 06:17:21 am »

I've built a test version of enigmail-1.9.7. I currently don't have the environment to test it beyond that it installs in Thunderbird and complains about not finding gnupg, next I'll try porting the latest GnuPG 1.4 and perhaps 2.x.
Please test, it should work on 38ESR and 45 ESR versions of SM and TB.

24

Comments, Suggestions & Questions / EDM?

« on: August 11, 2019, 07:08:40 pm »

Been trying to look at some articles on EDM but all I've been getting is

Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.

Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.

(Cannot contact the database server)

25

Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Expired certificate

« on: May 31, 2019, 04:38:39 pm »

So this morning SeaMonkey wouldn't connect to OS2World as the certificate had expired. I added an exception to connect but I guess it needs renewing.

26

Mail-News / Security fixes for Mozilla

« on: April 14, 2019, 02:30:10 am »

I've been experimenting with porting security fixes from tenfourfox, a Firefox fork for PowerPC Macs that was also forked from 45ESR. Currently at about 50 changesets, over a 100 security issues patched I believe. For testing I've uploaded,
https://bitbucket.org/dryeo/mozilla-os2/downloads/firefox-45.9.0.en-US.os2-Pentium-m-SUa1.zip which also has unofficial branding instead of nightly.
https://bitbucket.org/dryeo/dry-comm-esr31/downloads/thunderbird-45.8.0.en-US.os2-Pentium-m-SUa1.zip and
https://bitbucket.org/dryeo/dry-comm-esr31/downloads/seamonkey-2.42.9esr.en-US.os2-Pentium-M-SUa1.zip

Don't forget to turn off mozturbo before updating and marking DLLs to load high. Should only use the latest release RPM's

27

Programming / Mozturbo help

« on: April 13, 2019, 09:10:52 pm »

Looking for volunteers to help with mozturbo.
Icons would be nice.
Be nice to have a Rexx script that runs highmem to mark the Mozilla DLLs high and add the turbo program to the startup folder.

28

Applications / mozturbo

« on: December 16, 2018, 06:16:19 pm »

I've updated the old mozturbo using the code from SM-1.19 for Firefox, SeaMonkey and Thunderbird, 3 binaries, one package. https://bitbucket.org/dryeo/mozturbo/downloads/
These will preload the DLLs used by the various packages. The main reason for this is that our kernel has a bug, see https://mantis.arcanoae.com/view.php?id=2194. Basically when using high memory and closing an app, the memory that the DLLs allocated is not unallocated, leaving zombie holes in memory and eventually running out of high memory. Even without using high memory, this may help memory fragmentation.
Install with the browser or email client closed. Simplest is to put it in the working directory where the DLLs are located though it has an option to pass the location to it, create a program object, put in your startup folder with the -l (L) parameter and start it or better, reboot. Use programs as usual. You can use Theseus to keep track.

I've had good results using it with SM and TB, haven't tested too much with FF. Others have reported some problems with FF, low memory usage or not fixing slowness on restart.
Anyways shouldn't hurt, it has a command to unload the DLLs if needed. Run without parameters to see options.

Should work with most versions of Mozilla, targeted at 45ESR and 38ESR

29

Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Captcha doesn't like old browsers

« on: October 28, 2018, 10:55:09 pm »

Had a report about someone trying to create an account here using FF 38ESR, probably the one that ships with ArcaOS, and can't get past the captcha due to too old a browser.
I take it the captcha is outsourced to Google. I told him to try changing user agent or contact Martin. Still something that will need fixing.
While on the subject, more sites seem to not work with our old browsers, yet changing the user agent makes them work, sites such as github.

30

Internet / New SeaMonkey builds

« on: June 09, 2018, 07:59:33 am »

So I've built 3 SeaMonkey packages based on the latest (and probably last) code from Bitwise. Each is built with different optimizations, curious what works best for people.
All target i686 for now. i686 is the minimum requirement as Mozilla uses some atomic instructions that are not available in earlier CPU's.
This one is built with straight -O3 optimization, should be the fastest, also the most memory use <url>https://bitbucket.org/dryeo/dry-comm-esr31/downloads/seamonkey-2.42.9esr_r3.en-US.os2.zip</url>
This one is built the same as the latest Firefox, with the JavaScript engine using -O3 and the rest using -Os for minimal size. This is also what other platforms such as Linux use, <url>https://bitbucket.org/dryeo/dry-comm-esr31/downloads/seamonkey-2.42.9esr_r3_s.en-US.os2.zip</url> xul.dll is almost 10 MB smaller.
Rich pointed out that using -O3 is likely to expose GCC bugs, so I also built one using straight -O2, which is what we traditionally used until late in the 10ESR cycle. May be the most stable but worst performing. Firefox built with this often had a timing issue and failed to play Youtube videos, getting stuck at the loading phase. <url>https://bitbucket.org/dryeo/dry-comm-esr31/downloads/seamonkey-2.42.9esr_r3_O2.en-US.os2.zip</url>

There's also a build of Thunderbird with straight -O3 optimization that I'm using, <url>https://bitbucket.org/dryeo/dry-comm-esr31/downloads/thunderbird-45.8.0_r3.en-US.os2.zip</url> If requested, I can build with different optimizations.

I'll probably delete the exp builds so if anyone wants to save them... and will build for other CPU's.