New Browser Delay Discussion

[Eugene Tucker]

I would not sweat dropping Otter for Dobble. As I have been following Otters development and it seems to have issues even in the Windows and Linux platforms. And Dimity I salute your courage.

[Tom]

Athough it seems that the Qt Company recently (march 2022) released an opensource version of Qt 5.15.3 :

https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-March/042262.html

That's actually a good news which I overlooked being smashed by the crimes of my country. It should be relatively easy to update the OS/2 port of Qt 5.15.2 to it (which will also update Chromium from version 83.* to 87.* with some patches from 88.* according to the readme — with the top version from Google being 103.*). When it will happen exactly - I don't know. Reasons are above.

While it would be nice, nobody may expect it to be done any time soon - you have more important things going on about your personal situation.
I am happy to read that you are at least safe, though of course that is only one aspect of your current everyday life. I wish you all the best with your situation and wellbeing!

[Lars]

About updates to libusb and libuvc:
they were done by me exclusively (with Wim doing a lot of testing, also for free) and they have been done entirely for free. No money was spent on this. I also updated IJFW ( the FXWRAP.SYS driver to more specific) entirely for free. Silvan suggested that we might need libuvc and libusb to support USB webcams in the browser.

I thought about contacting Dmitry to ask him if he would leave Russia but I thought that might be a not safe thing to do. Well, he made his decision and I am glad that he is safe.

Cheers,
Lars

[Dave Yeo]

Hi Dmitriy, glad to hear that you're doing realtively well in these weird times though pretty crappy having to leave home and not really having status in other countries.
I worded things badly as what I meant was work in progress repositrories or unpushed stuff as it wasn't quite finished.
It seems it was all based on my error of using qmake instead of qmake-qt5 for building, my inexperience with QT5.
As for Dooble, it does almost build out of the box, we seem to be missing mlock/munlock in mmap.h. Posting this from Dooble and can play around with it now.
Thanks for your and the rest of Bitwise's work.

[Dmitriy Kuminov]

Thanks for your support guys. Yes, I was not right about libvusb and libuvc, it's Lars' work, not Silvan's indeed, sorry Lars.

[Lars]

Thanks for your support guys. Yes, I was not right about libvusb and libuvc, it's Lars' work, not Silvan's indeed, sorry Lars.

No worries. Just wanted to make clear that NO money was spent on something nobody has explicitely paid for.

[Roderick Klein]

The Dooble RPM file has been released. This is preview. It in rpm.netlabs.org when I write this and it will be moved from th EXP repo to the normal user repo Stable repo. This is what is normally active in ANPM (Arca Noae Package Manager).

Readme is attached for some more information.

Roderick

[Doug Bissett]

The Dooble RPM file has been released. This is preview. It in rpm.netlabs.org when I write this and it will be moved from th EXP repo to the normal user repo Stable repo. This is what is normally active in ANPM (Arca Noae Package Manager).

Well, that is certainly not ready to be put in the release repo. I can't even read Help-> Documentation, or Help-> Release notes. The pictures seem fine, but the text consists of a line, or blank. I tried on more than one system, with the same results.

Some complex web sites seem to work well (nasa.gov for example). Important web sites, like OS2WORLD.COM have some text, but most of it is just a line, or blank. HOBBES is just lines, where text should be.

Something seems to be missing.

[Paul Smedley]

Help -> Release Notes & Help -> Documentation both work for me with my build of Dooble <shrug>

[Dave Yeo]

Same with my build, though sometimes have to reload the page for it to appear.
Really important to mark everything to load high.
Edit: Ok downloaded the official build, works as well as Paul's and my builds. Something is wrong with your setup I guess. I am using a netlabs-exp install.

[Lars]

Dooble as downloaded from Netlabs Exp works for me.
But I am still using eCS.
Maybe I also have some missing prerequisite component already installed, who knows.

[Dmitriy Kuminov]

Well, that is certainly not ready to be put in the release repo. I can't even read Help-> Documentation, or Help-> Release notes. The pictures seem fine, but the text consists of a line, or blank. I tried on more than one system, with the same results.

This has nothing to do with Dooble or Chromium or Qt. It's the fontconfig (mis)configuration. The Ghostscript libraries (used by CUPS if you have it installed) install some really outdated legacy PostScript fonts like Nimbus which are not Unicode aware. This broken Nimbus is then used as a default (!) font in the system (because of some fontconfig magic). But even if you would get rid of it, you still have outdated non-Unicode Type1 Times New Roman font supplied by OS/2 since ages which gets selected as a default for the "serif" family by fontconfig. And since Chromium/Qt/Google requests "serif" as the standard font for web content by default, Times New Roman gets selected and this makes many pages (including Dooble Documentation) lack any text. Note that if you remove this Times New Roman (TNR.PFB) and friends from /PSFONTS, the mentioned Nimbus will be selected for "serif" with the same effect — lack of Unicode support.

A proper solution is to fine-tune fontconfig for OS/2 so that it ignores Type1 in favour of modern TTF (e.g. ArcaOS comes with the nice Droid family IIRC which works just fine with Dooble). But this isn't an easy task, it needs time to sort things out. As a time being, there are two possible workarounds:

1. Install a well-known font family that has a higher priority in fontconfig (the DejaVu family works great here). This is a preferred solution as it will fix not only Dooble but any Qt/Chromium application.
2. Go to Dooble Settings, Web page, Fonts group, and replace all Nimbus/Times New Roman entries with Droid or any other font that works with Unicode (i.e. not standard OS/2 Type1 fonts).

Perhaps worth mentioning in the Readme.

PS. You can easily check which font Qt will use for a given family request by doing `fc-match FAMILY` on the command line. You may need to run `fc-cache -f` to rescan your fonts after you toss them around.

PPS. Here's the fontconfig ticket, for future reference https://github.com/bitwiseworks/fontconfig-os2/issues/1

[Doug Bissett]

This has nothing to do with Dooble or Chromium or Qt. It's the fontconfig (mis)configuration. The Ghostscript libraries (used by CUPS if you have it installed) install some really outdated legacy PostScript fonts like Nimbus which are not Unicode aware. This broken Nimbus is then used as a default (!) font in the system (because of some fontconfig magic). But even if you would get rid of it, you still have outdated non-Unicode Type1 Times New Roman font supplied by OS/2 since ages which gets selected as a default for the "serif" family by fontconfig. And since Chromium/Qt/Google requests "serif" as the standard font for web content by default, Times New Roman gets selected and this makes many pages (including Dooble Documentation) lack any text. Note that if you remove this Times New Roman (TNR.PFB) and friends from /PSFONTS, the mentioned Nimbus will be selected for "serif" with the same effect — lack of Unicode support.

This seems to describe it. Note, that I am using a test version of ArcaOS 5.1, so it would seem that some adjustments need to be made, before 5.1 is released.

A proper solution is to fine-tune fontconfig for OS/2 so that it ignores Type1 in favour of modern TTF (e.g. ArcaOS comes with the nice Droid family IIRC which works just fine with Dooble). But this isn't an easy task, it needs time to sort things out

That makes sense, but I have never played around with that stuff, and I have no idea what needs to be done. Can somebody expand on that, please.

Perhaps worth mentioning in the Readme.

I would consider that to be an essential part of the Readme.

PS. You can easily check which font Qt will use for a given family request by doing `fc-match FAMILY` on the command line.

Result:
[C:\DESKTOP]fc-match FAMILY
n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"

I will see if I can figure out the "workarounds".

THANKS...

[Doug Bissett]

2. Go to Dooble Settings, Web page, Fonts group, and replace all Nimbus/Times New Roman entries with Droid or any other font that works with Unicode (i.e. not standard OS/2 Type1 fonts).

Okay, I was able to replace the "bad" fonts with DROID fonts (already installed in ArcaOS). Now, it seems to be working properly.

Thanks.

[Wayne A. Smith]

I was virtually paralysed when Russia invaded Ukraine and started a war by the end of February. I couldn’t do anything besides thinking on how catastrophic this is for everyone. When I caught my breath I realised that I can’t stand it any longer and need to leave Russia ASAP. It’s not only that it became impossible to do business due to all the sanctions. It’s mostly because I couldn’t tolerate what’s going on. I couldn’t be part of the country that turned into 1930’s Germany (even though I was born there and spent there all my entire life except one year). The least I could do is leave. So I was completely occupied with organising an immediate relocation (with the help of my friends, including some OS/2 folks, as well as some guys from the independent news outlet I also work for).

As I was getting closer to the leave, I got some confidence back and made myself work on the browser a bit between solving numerous move out problems. I don’t understand why this became a subject to criticism as if it were better if hadn’t done this. A few days ago I finally left Russia and plan to stay in Turkey for a while. Currently I’m a person with no home and no residence permit anywhere but Russia (where I’m not going to get back) — and this exposes a huge number of every day problems, starting from inability to have a bank account (and therefore bank cards) to prohibition to stay in a country for more than three months in a row (so I need to move between countries until I get a permit). So until this is solved somehow, my life situation remains volatile and my resources are very limited (in addition to limitations that were already there before the war).

What are your residence plans, Dmitriy?

While here in the USA immigration is a "hot issue", it appears that refugees from Ukraine, Russia (and, with limitations, Afghanistan) are favored.  I haven't practiced Immigration Law for decades, but I could look into it if interested.  Just a thought.