all about warp
The QT5 Port for OS/2 was updated to version 5.13.1. Some people from the os2world forum now came up with a solution how to use yum/rpm to check out the latest QT5 update including the chromium based QT Simplebrowser. The QT package shows version 5.13.1 but the internal QT version is 5.15.2.
Googles chromium browser engine is an integrated part in newer QT versions. The Port of QT 5.3 to OS/2 includes the QT Web engine which is based on chromium code. A first unstable alpha build was recently done after fixing the build stack and compiler/linker issues.
QT5 web engine chromium OS/2 port alpha
There is more work required to fix some larger and minor issues:
The legacy usb driver stack version 10.x branch is constantly being update by Lars Erdmann and Wim Brul. In 2017 the USB Audio driver got a lot of fixes and new functionality. One part of the patches is for the stream handling that fixes problems after a stream resume in case another stream was played. Starting with driver version 10.217 the usbaudio driver comes with an additional wps ioproc module called “usbwave” which does the on fly sample rate conversion, this is required because the usb audio hardware often supports a fixed sample rate only.
The ioproc need to be installed separately from the USB Audio driver:
usbaudio wave ioproc installation
In case it is correctly installed it should be listed in the WPS Multimedia Codes page:
usbaudio wave ioproc mmcodecs
Audio applications which are using the pmmm interface will work in this setup but audio application/mixer that may talk directly to the audio driver, e.g. uniaud or use the ioclt90 interface will not work.
The OS/4 Kernel Team recently updated the OS/4 kernel to support the AMD Ryzen CPU, which has the famous VME bug found by Michal from the os2museum. AMD fixed the issue with a microcode update found in the AGESA 1.0.0.6 BIOS blob.
Downloads:
The time of waiting is over because the first public Firefox 45 ESR for OS/2 is now available as a zip package. About the issues with the rpm package check the previous post.
Firefox 45.5.0 ESR Beta 8 for OS/2
Changes in this release
Issues
Other stuff
This release not only needs more external libs/dlls (for image format and such)
but also core dlls that were part of the Firefox package – security lib (NSS). You will easily see this change because the Firefox root dir is now nearly empty. If this is a wise move especially when there are now regressions like Firefox isn’t working correctly because of these external libs.
In 2016 there was a change to support again native printers (GPI)(#155, #75, #134) and not only CUPS based printer.
downloads
Firefox 45 ESR for OS/2 (zip) size 53MB
requirements
Firefox needs tons of external libs now, we try to list as many of them here or you can try to use the yum/rpm way.
In April the OS/2 port made some progress to get the first Alpha build of Firefox 45 ESR running:
Firefox ESR 45.5.0 for OS/2 Alpha
Some notes about the latest patches and comments:
The have been some updates to external base dll required for Firefox to run. There is a new issue with the rpm build because of python issues. There’s also a plan to create a new launcher that will call the firefox.exe from a fixed path in the /usr directory tree, fortunately there will be a non rpm release (zip release) that will ship with a standard firefox.exe that can load its dlls from the Firefox root dir and the firefox dir itself can be on any drive and in any dir you like. There is also a plan to make the zip release available before the rpm install issue get’s fixed.
Mozilla’s Firefox Future
Mozilla Research is actively working on the servo browser engine for its next gen browser “project quantum”. Servo is written in Mozilla’s new system language Rust that has some advantages like memory handling, code safety and better performance. Servos aim is to take advantage of the current hardware, that is both the CPU and the graphics for again better performance. Mozilla is now adding parts of the servo project written in Rust to the current Gecko code of Firefox by replacing components written in C/C++. How that plays out for future OS/2 ports of Firefox.. we will see.
Its being late for a Firefox 45 ESR port because Mozilla already switched to a new ESR version 52. The work on the new port started in december 2016, the current status is that building the source is ok now but some bugs prevent Firefox from starting.
The ArcaOS 5.0 release is now scheduled for April, this is a new release based on MCP2 with lots of new software and drivers, a new loader (QSinit) and an old smp kernel (with some patches).
There have been some updates to the FAT32 driver, New releases of XWorkplace V1.0.11, Lucide V1.4.0 and PMView V3.79.
There have been several beta releases of main applications in the last few weeks. One of them is the long awaited public release of VirtualBox 5 for OS/2. The work on the project started again some month ago and the progress so far, so good. The project is run by bitwise works and the founding is done by XEU.com.
Another surprise is the beta 3 release of XWorkplace 1.0.11 made by Rich Walsh. The work on XWP is sponsored by OS/2 Voice.The next beta release is the release candidate 3 of Lucide, a plugin based document and image viewer.
Downloads
This years Warpstock 2016 conference took place in Orlando/Florida. Like in the past years we will cover some of the interesting topics.
Samba 4 Client on OS/2 by Paul Smedley
The Samba 4 port started in early 2015 because of the need for SMB 2.0 support and better security support compared to the current releases. Samba 4 uses kerberos for the authentication and the first step was to port the heimdal kerberos implementation to OS/2. Heimdal version 1.5.3 was first released on 07/23/2016.
The next step was to get then kerberos authentication to work with Samba 3.6.x but this was not successful. The only chance left was to use the latest available Samba 4.x source code. Samba 4 however requires a different build system. It uses Waf and Python for the build process and it was a challenge to get it working. With a patched Waf it was possible to build the samba 4 client code to OS/2. The current builds are based on Samba 4.4.7.
Samba 4 has the support for higher SMB protocol versions and it provides better performance compared to the older Samba 3.x.
Like the previous Samba Client for OS/2 the Samba 4 Client is a plugin for Netdrive 3.x. It will also support large files (> 2GB) when it is used with this Netdrive version. Currently there was no work on the samba server code. Depending on the number of interests and time he may work on the samba server code. The Samba server implements some additional modules like the directory – and dns server along with replication. Although the port was started because of an arca noae request the source of the port is available on netlabs.
Files to download
Installation
First stop the NDFS Control service. If you don’t have a previous of the smb plugin installed you need to first install the ndpsmb V2.0.0 Beta4. In case already installed continue to copy the ndpsmb.dll from ndpsmb-3.0-20160930.zip and smbcln44.dll from smbcln44-4.4.7-20161028.zip to x:\ndfs\ndplugs. All other dlls needs to be copied to a path that is already in libpath or create a new one (reboot required). In case all went fine you can now mount a new smbfs resource with the new plugin:
Samba 4.4.7 Client ndpsmb3 plugin for OS/2 Share config UI
The new plugin is a big step forward because its now possible to access shares with the latest SMB protocols (2.x/3.x) available along with kerberos authentication using heimdal. Because of security issues in 2016 esp. the Badlock bug Microsoft has tightened the security settings of SMB.
A quick test to access a Windows Server 2012 R2 network share using kerberos authentication worked without a problem. Currently there’s a NDFS issue that affects some systems where the NDFS control service (ndctl.exe) is started from config.sys but it can’t load the samba plugin, the current workaround is to start ndctl.exe from startup.cmd. Bug reports for the Samba plugin can be opened on the Netlabs Samba Project page.
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