Category Archives: personal

Make up time…

Class and work have just eaten up my time. However, as things slow down it is time to start playing again! Come Tuesday I should have 2 IBM Xseries 335 servers. One will be loaded with Linux and the other eCS 2.0 RC6.

osFree…

I have joined the osFree Project at Sourceforge and will keep a mirror of my loader project there.

In the process of hooking in the freeLdr micro-FSD calls, I found a real pain in the ass with BootableJFS. Each call to open clears the screen and displays their copyright message. This messes up any messages anyone else wants to display…

The fix? Well in the newest BootableJFS (as of 2008) Pasha has a turn off. At the JFS uFSD segment and offset 0x1944 a check is made for the byte value 0x0F. If this is set to anything else the message is not displayed.

OS/2 GIT? Is GIT better than Subversion

Hey! I am no expert, but now I go to get some source and I find that the version control is GIT. What the hell is GIT? Here’s a couple links that I read to try and understand this stuff:

http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSvnComparsion
http://issaris.blogspot.com/2006/10/why-git.html

Here’s my take on it. I wanted to get the current NASM source to compile on OS/2-eCS and found out it uses a GIT repository. Ok, great there is no GIT port for me to use. What is the purpose of using a versioning system that not everyone has for a cross-platform project? MS-Linux.

Might as well just make this a rant post. I think the fact Pasha has provided a ACPI solution for OS/2-eCS even though it is not open source. However, I am sick and tired of providing feedback to get something fixed, have it work in the next version, and then a version after it find it doesn’t work again. What’s worse is it looks like regression.

Easy gcc build environment

Open Office for eCS-OS/2 2.4 Beta1 is available (news post) and I installed it on my old SMP PIII box. Seems to work well! I guess the big milestone was just getting it going in the previous version.

Also, Pasha has his updated os2ldr on hobbes (here). No chance to try it yet, but I wish it was open source. Guess that is up to ecomstation.ru.

I am in the process of rebuilding my sandbox system and I reached the point where I setup the gcc environment. The easiest way to do this, especially since I rarely use gcc, is to use Paul Smedley’s build environment, currently buildenv_20071022.zip and a size of 234,635,207 bytes.

I know Paul has it on his U: drive and that the setup could be changed to use another drive, but I don’t want to invest the time. So, I created a U: drive during the system setup.

First thing to do was to unzip the file. A quick dir /s gave me the unarchived space required:

686,439,038 bytes in 26,738 files and 8,057 dirs

So, plan ahead because the zip file contains gcc, qt, perl, and all kinds of other libraries and executables.

First thing was to cd into extraslib and run makeomflibs, as instructed on Paul’s site. I got this at the end but I believe it is expected:

warning: one or more operations failed, check the above output. :-).

Also, if you look in gcc335.cmd there are a bunch of e:python25 statements, but python is not in the zip archive. I just grabbed Paul’s Python v2.5.1 for OS/2 & eComStation. I just did:

unzip python-2.5.1-os2-20071223.zip

and changed the references in gcc335.cmd from e: to u:.

With that done I gave it an easy test, compiling nasm-2.02. I first ran sh ./configure
and after it finished make. The problem I ran into is that Paul’s gcc335.cmd defines tmp to u:tmp which did not exist:

‘set tmp=u:/tmp’
‘SET TEMP=%TMP%’
‘SET TMPDIR=%TMP%’

I thought it was a good idea to keep the tmp drive on u: for my gcc stuff so a quick md tmp and I was off to run make again. The result was an complete nasm.exe build so I was happy.

Things to note: Paul has a newer version of perl on his site and I think qt has been updated, but I have yet to download them. There may even be an updated gcc package on netlabs by now.

Anyway, that’s it – short and sweet. Thanks to both Knut and Paul.

Other stuff:
100,000 customers tell Microsoft to save XP

Big gap…

On top of being busy with work, home remodeling, and classes I finally got my pages moved to new hosting. The previous hosting service, Namesecure, might be a poster child for piss-poor support if they add anything that could pass for support. It took over a week to get a reply from them. Good riddance!

I did play on occasion with the rexxutil.dll and managed to screw-up sysstemsort which I need to fix. I also worked some on uniaud32 build system.

Gregg Young sent me his FTE source with changes which I want to look at soon. I do have a version I patched in UClip for fun.

First on the agenda is to finish my eCS RC4 install on the ZPro. I finally got tired of the ridiculous large file size crap that pops up on some installs. I firmly believe it is caused by the toolkit install.

During the install, again I was plagued by an ACPI version that would not work, but getting the debug info to Pasha fixed the problem. Version 3.07 should contain the fix. I still can’t get APIC but that is no big deal.

On the whole this is interesting, Sun buying Innotek. Wonder if they will have to box up Bird and send hime to Sun?

Should IBM’s SOM/DSOM Be Open Sourced? This seems to be a better option than IBM releasing OS/2 code which will never happen. It must have hit a nerve, it caught the fakesteve’s eye The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

Article chain:


Should IBM’s OS/2 Be Open-Sourced?

The Open Source Petition letter to IBM

A good article Esther Schindler at CIO: Should IBM’s OS/2 Be Open-Sourced?

Comment by me:

Sadly, I agree

I would like nothing more than to think that this time the petition might work or, at the very least, IBM would step up and publicly say no. My money is on no reply at all. Why revisit something that represents a period when IBM was slowly falling apart and being displaced my Microsoft? Why step up and say no in front of the open source crowd, showing their true colors?

I did sign the petition, again. It is just a shame that the source that took so much time and effort to produce will just cease to exist. What a waste.

Storm…

Lucky me! While I was out of town Tuesday night we had the mother of all storms. It didn’t whack me through the power cords, but rather through a hub. My 8 port hub was fried and every network item attached to it was trashed. This includes the network card on my old server, the network connection on the old MPro, a 5 port hub, and (Damn it!) the network connection on the xbox 360. So, I have been recovering the last couple days.

But, on the bright side Brendan released uniaud rc3. This comes after a lot of work and testing by Allan, Andy, Steven and others. My build system for uniaud16 was committed using all Open Watcom tools. But all the credit goes to Brendan who picked up this project.

Last, Open Watcom 1.7 has been released! In a world of gcc, Open Watcom is a breath of fresh air…

Blah-blah

Found Alger Pike’s old webpages using The Wayback Machine. I recreated some of them here which also includes the hard to find example archives wfastio.zip, wiolib.zip, and devhelp.zip.

Setup yet another free Blog to track my adventures with uniaud building.

Update 6/4/11: Deleted the other blog.