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Messages - Alex Taylor

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181
Applications / Re: BrainStorm: Wish list for OS/2 and eComStation
« on: November 17, 2014, 05:32:21 pm »
A new text rendering & layout engine for PM, probably based on FreeType + Harbuzz, to replace the out-of-date and no-longer-maintained Innotek Font Engine. Probably only available as a development library, not a runtime replacement like Ft2LIB (which was a cool idea but just not stable enough).  Hopefully this could allow us to finally retire FT2LIB for apps like OpenOffice, for which it is still an anchor around the neck.  (If really ambitious it could be the basis for a new Unicode-capable widget library for PM-based apps like PMMail or ProNews.)  This is one of the big three things that I've long wanted to try tackling myself, but I just don't have the time right now.

UEFI and GPT support.

An IPv6 stack.

Already mentioned by others:
- A solution for the shared memory problem.
- USB3.
- New WiFi drivers for modern adapters.

182
Storage / Re: NAS and OS/2?
« on: November 04, 2014, 01:20:38 pm »
More reports about NAS devices: http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=category&section=disk

* yes, not all reports were published, 100 reports in the queue, it requires efforts
* ZyXel NSA320 -- http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=item&id=2205

Ah yes, there it is.  Thanks, Eugene.

183
Storage / Re: NAS and OS/2?
« on: November 02, 2014, 12:22:51 pm »
I've been using a ZyXel NSA320 for over a year and a half now, it works very well.  You do need to use the included Windows software for first-time setup, but otherwise it works fine from OS/2 with EVFS/NetDrive and the Samba plugin.  I use it to run backups onto, as well as save some of my iTunes videos.  The NAS itself has no hard drives out of the box - you get a pair of SATA hard disks to put in it, and you can choose to configure them as one big volume, separate volumes, or RAID of various types.  It's small, fits easily under a desk or on a shelf, and is very quiet (a definite advantage when it lives in the bedroom!)

IIRC I submitted a detailed review to ecomstation.ru shortly after I got it, but they never bothered to post it on their site.

184
Quote
Boot from the eComStation 1.2R CD-ROM and press Shift-F3 again to get a command prompt.

At what stage of the eCS boot process should I do this - once I get into the graphical shell?

Yes, once the graphical installer starts, Shift+F3 at any subsequent screen will open a command prompt.

185
Applications / Re: CUPS Discussion
« on: October 24, 2014, 07:02:10 am »
Well, I tried printing a test page with cups-2.0.0 today.  I get nothing from the printer.  According to the error log, all the filter programs seemed to execute properly, and the data gets sent to the printer... but the printer simply makes a brief noise and does nothing, and the error log (even in debug mode) reports nothing more helpful than the single error: 'filter failed'.

Looking at the temp directory, the banner PDF is created, as is a Postscript file with the same contents, so I assume that gs ran successfully.  (The gs.exe symlink exists and is correct.)

This is a native Postscript printer so pstoraster and additional filters are presumably not used. I tested with both GS 8.71 and GS 9.15, with no change. I also tried using both lpd and ipp backends, again with no difference.

186
Applications / Re: About eComStation Pricing
« on: October 18, 2014, 04:37:36 pm »
I would also have to better font rendering, better font support with full TrueType and OpenType for usage on screen and print - incl. embedding TT and OT fonts into PDF files using ePDF/Ghostscript. Gostscript supports it but our print system does not (I dont know situation on cups I never - I used it).

My FT2IFI on Hobbes allows support for OpenType, at least as a beta.  (It doesn't work with all fonts, still trying to debug why that is.)

My PSPRINT driver supports TrueType embedding, I've been planning to update it to handle OpenType as well but that will take a while. It doesn't support subsetting, that's something I hope to look at eventually as well someday but I'm pretty sure it's incredibly hard to do.

187
Utilities / Re: Convert INF to PDF
« on: October 01, 2014, 04:48:56 am »
I see that too, also with the C Library Reference.

BTW on further investigation I've noted one serious shortcoming to generating PDFs this way: NewView (or probably more accurately Sibyl) rasterizes all the text to bitmaps when generating the Postscript, which means (a) the output files are huge, (b) the text looks kind of ugly, and (c) searching for text is impossible.

One alternative is to use IBM View (ibmview.exe on eCS) to print... this avoids the above problem, but is only capable of printing the text in monospaced font (specifically Courier).

In both cases, support for bookmarks/PDF table of contents is unavailable.

188
Utilities / Re: Convert INF to PDF
« on: September 30, 2014, 05:59:30 pm »
Simplest way is to use NewView to print the file to a Postscript printer on FILE: and then convert the output PS file to PDF (which is quite easy with Ghostscript).

Or even just print straight to an ePDF or PMPDF printer object.

If it makes use of split windows then obviously you'll lose that aspect of the layout, but it will still come out pretty readable in my experience (I just tested here with my VROBJEX documentation).

189
Setup & Installation / Re: Need help with QSINIT Loader
« on: September 22, 2014, 01:30:21 pm »
Hi Sigurd,

When you extract a PF file with E_PF, the current script for that file is dumped to STDOUT.  So if you redirect that to a file, you will have a pre-made script for recreating the PF file with PACKFILE.  (Of course, you'll generally need to modify it a bit to handle any changes you made to the contents.)

Also, I've sent you a PM.

190
Marketplace / Re: Free (almost) OS/2 stuff!
« on: September 17, 2014, 03:37:03 am »
I sent out PayPal invoices to everyone that requested books - except for Alex.  I don't have your email address.

Sent by PM. Thanks!

191
General Discussion / Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
« on: September 17, 2014, 03:24:28 am »
My project group at grad school here actually specializes in ICT & Internet based learning, videoconferencing, etc. We often do support for remote lectures, but we have rather a lot of specialized equipment for it. For point-to-point videoconferencing we have Polycom equipment which is probably out of reach for a non-profit group like Warpstock. For more ad-hoc video meetings we tend to use a mixture of Skype, V-Cube, Google Hangouts, or Opentok.

One of our subprojects is actually trying to develop an open source conferencing system using WebM and WebRTC, but it's still in the early planning stages only.

We often stream (one-way) lectures or presentations, but again, we have specialized equipment to help us. Our most common method is:
  • Camera and presenter's computer both connected to a video switcher, which allows us to not only switch between the presenter and the computer desktop, but overlay one on the other, picture-in-picture style.
  • Video switcher outputting its stream to a video encoder PC, which in turn streams it to our target URL, which is usually UStream. IIRC the encoder PC actually uses a hardware encoder box, but there are undoubtedly software-only options as well.
  • The video is streamed lived on UStream; we sometimes also upload our presenter's slides (if any) to UStream and have someone controlling the online slides in sync with the presenter and the slides on their PC.
  • The UStream page has a real-time chat interface which forwards to an IRC channel.

I'm not sure how useful any of this is to Warpstock, given the specialized hardware we use, but at least the general theory might be instructive, somehow.

192
Quote
I have no idea if the actual filesystem data differs between the two eCS versions' JFS implementations, but I haven't heard of any interoperability problems either

I think the eCS versions are data compatible. It was just the very early OS/2 version that had the problem. I mentioned it because it was a possible cause.

I seem to recall there was one release which changed the filesystem structures slightly, and therefore necessitated a reformat.  I don't remember if it was a late IBM update or one of the BootJFS releases. In any case, reformatting with the latest eCS JFS.IFS and UJFS.DLL in place is probably advisable.

193
Marketplace / Re: Free (almost) OS/2 stuff!
« on: September 12, 2014, 01:17:28 pm »
@Dave: Thanks, I understand. It's not urgent. :)

@Kevin: I will PM you tonight or tomorrow with my details.

194
Marketplace / Re: Free (almost) OS/2 stuff!
« on: September 06, 2014, 06:41:23 am »
Hi Dave,

Yeah, I think that would be chapters 23 - 26.  If you could do that it'd be awesome.

Thanks!

195
Marketplace / Re: Free (almost) OS/2 stuff!
« on: September 06, 2014, 05:56:31 am »
Some very nice stuff there!

I'd definitely be interested in:
  • OS/2 Warp Presentation Manager for Power Programmers
  • OS/2 2.1 Application Programmer's Guide

and possibly also
  • Writing VX-REXX Programs

Shipping would be to Ontario, Canada.


On a related note, while I already own "OS/2 Warp Programming for Dummies", I haven't been able to find my copy for years. I'm pretty sure it's buried at the bottom of the storage locker where I keep a lot of my belongings in Canada. Anyway, I've been very keen to take a look at the information it has on WPS programming - as I recall, it has a chapter or two introducing SOM+WPS programming.

If you or anyone else who has a copy of this book wouldn't mind scanning just the SOM/WPS chapters and sending them to me, I'd be very grateful. (Again, I do own copy of this book so it should be perfectly legal.)

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