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Offline CrumbTopic starter

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Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« on: March 09, 2004, 05:34:01 PM »
Yes, most of people want that... and one of the first problems we meet is that we don't have GTK...

Well, a rootless XWindow server would allow us to port much more easily all these titles...

Optionally we would have a Window Manager that used MUI/Zune/whatever so the integration with the rest of the OS would be very high...

Amiwin did something similar to this in the past... but it's no longer in development.

What do you think about this?
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Offline KennyR

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #1 on: March 09, 2004, 05:42:01 PM »
Ah, at last, someone is thinking practically!

Yes, I think that's the way to go. The foundations have to be ported and made to use native APIs, FIRST. Most people don't realise all this 3rd party stuff that goes into things like Mozilla and OpenOffice - they should see what comes out when you try ./configure when building Mozilla on Linux. On linux you have to collect about 35MB of shared library tarballs if you want to compile Mozilla from source. Simply porting Mozilla or Openoffice by manually replacing all this by hand (the usual porting approach) would take years and the end-product wouldn't be maintainable.
 

Offline Fats

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #2 on: March 09, 2004, 07:39:26 PM »
Quote

Crumb wrote:
...
Well, a rootless XWindow server would allow us to port much more easily all these titles...
...
What do you think about this?


If somebody wants to do it I think Cygwin/XFree86 would be a good starting point for a rootless XServer. They also have written their internal window manager that uses the native windows API for MS Windows style windows.
I've not delved into it but someone with Windows and amiga experience should be able to port this to AROS/Amiga/ABox.

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Offline Cymric

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #3 on: March 09, 2004, 07:52:47 PM »
Quote
KennyR wrote:
Ah, at last, someone is thinking practically!

Seconded. The point is that in order to have something akin to X, you must have POSIX-compliancy. And AmigaOS is not POSIX-compliant. Certainly not OS3.9-, and I doubt that OS4 will meet the full set of requirements too. I have no idea what the situation is with MorphOS: the feature documents are poor sources of information when it comes to this sort of thing. But I'd bet a lot that it has problems too.

If that wasn't bad enough, many Amigans have had their fill of the dreaded 'ixemul.library', and would be extremely sceptical of any replacement. In other words, however tempting all those fancy Open Source packages are, they will most likely not be appear on the Amiga, ever. In my opinion, this will eventually kill the platform for good. There's but one slim chance: get a group of developers together to define one, and only one common set of important things you need for big programs. This includes GUI toolkits (MUI or Zune or ReAction or whatever), game libraries (SDL or something DirectX-like), networking facilities, and so forth. Anyone not using those basic libraries should be cast out of the community, after being thoroughly ridiculed. This ensures that what is left of the Amiga coders can focus on developing applications rather than their framework with associated forum wars ('MegaCoolTool sucks!' 'It RULEZ, ya big ToolZ-humpin' freak!').

But this idea has about as much chance as a snowflake in Hell, so that's why I'm sticking with Linux :-P.
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Offline CrumbTopic starter

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #4 on: March 09, 2004, 08:16:57 PM »
"The point is that in order to have something akin to X, you must have POSIX-compliancy."

Well, with Geek Gadgets you can have a decent compatibility with unix apps. It's not fully posix, but it's enough to port some programs... and AmiWin can run XWindow apps, so I don't believe that being posix compatible is a must.

I'd like to know the status of the alpha version of XFree86 of GeekGadgets (I don't have ftp access from here). Someone tried that version?

I hope that the AROS guys heard us :-)
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Offline piku_

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #5 on: March 09, 2004, 08:21:52 PM »
You guys are pretty much in the same situation we are in the Atari world.  We have MiNT and a good libc implementation.  Recently another guy and myself ported over gtk+-2.2.4 and all dependencies but it still depends on the xwindows implementation.  Now we have the rootless X server that you are talking about that uses X protocols for drawing and the native window system but you might be surprised just how slow this is, and my machine is a 92.9MHz 68060 with 256M PC133.  Sure there might be room for optimization but I doubt you can optimize it that much.  In your case, I believe you guys have shared libs done so you're one step ahead of us.  We have static binaries (gtk tests and whatnot result in 2 meg binaries), and a change in libc for instance requires recompiling the whole toolset which isn't cool.  Worse the X server implementation for us is so old, the gtk+2 stuff won't run, only gtk 1.x which doesn't port to native calls acceptably.  The goal of porting gtk+-2 was to get the new changes that allow for a native gtk+ port similar to what was done to port gtk+ to windows, linux-fb, etc.  It should make it fairly easy for us, and then rather than compiling a bloated mozilla or openoffice, we can use lighter abiword or perhaps epiphany web browser.  For us though we have a team of people working on highwire which stands to be the fastest web browser in existence, I'm more worried about having the latest version of gaim running acceptably on my atari.  Good for us though is a good rpm distribution system that seems well suited to this type of work.

Regardless, people from the amiga and atari crowd should work together as much as is appropriate because it's likely we have similar hurdles to overcome.
 

Offline BigBenAussie

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #6 on: March 09, 2004, 09:12:44 PM »
Curious. Never even occurred to me that there'd be Atari ST guys trying to rebuild their platform.
Should have known.
How do we find out more about the Atari ST revival?
Are there websites?

It would be interesting to see simularities with the Amiga situation.

Any chance of convincing Atari(formerly Infrogrames) into producing a piece of hardware? A console with an OS for instance that can be a comp, sorta like we might would want Amiga to do. But the Atari brand is much much more recognised.

I dare say Atari as a company is more cashed up than Amiga.

 

Offline CrumbTopic starter

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #7 on: March 10, 2004, 10:01:50 AM »
@piku_
"92.9MHz 68060 with 256M PC133"

Nice board, I've read about it... :-)
don't you have a pci gfx card? I guess that using Falcon's on board gfx chip will be a little slow in resolutions like 800x600 and 16bits...

With a graphic card and a ppc or a coldfire it should run more or less ok...

There's already a program called AmiWin that does something like that, but I'd like to have an updated version that supported P96 better (the old version supports CGX much better). It runs some ports of Chimera, XV,... but it's no longer updated and is only 680x0...

"Regardless, people from the amiga and atari crowd should work together as much as is appropriate because it's likely we have similar hurdles to overcome."

Yes, but sometimes there's some cooperation, like in the mp3 player for Falcon's DSP that was ported to our sound card Delphina, TinyGL, Linux 68k for Atari advanced quite a lot thanks to the Amiga modifications... Aranym advanced quite a lot thanks to UAE's CPU engine...

We can't help you much because our OS is quite different to MINT, MagiC or TOS...

It's nice to see that some Atarians are alive :-)
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Offline gnarly

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #8 on: March 10, 2004, 10:28:21 AM »
Quote

Cymric wrote:
Quote
There's but one slim chance: get a group of developers together to define one, and only one common set of important things you need for big programs...

But this idea has about as much chance as a snowflake in Hell, so that's why I'm sticking with Linux :-P.


What, you mean the home of KDE vs Gnome, QT vs GTK etc ;-)
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Offline Emufreak

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #9 on: March 10, 2004, 12:34:03 PM »
For Mozilla:

Wouldn't it be possible to just port the Engine. I mean the part who interprets HTML, Javascript, CSS. I guess you wouldn't have to port that many stuff then.
 

Offline Acill

Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #10 on: March 10, 2004, 12:35:05 PM »
Why is it that the old classic 68k Mac systems had Netscape and we still dont? The base code in that should be portable to Amiga I would think. Its all 68k code isnt it? MAybe thats a good starting point to look at?
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Offline piku_

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #11 on: March 10, 2004, 03:11:51 PM »
Actually netscape 4.7x nobody that I know can seem to find the source code to.  We actually thought of this :)
 

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #12 on: March 10, 2004, 03:20:59 PM »
>Why is it that the old classic 68k Mac systems had Netscape
>and we still dont? The base code in that should be portable
>to Amiga I would think. Its all 68k code isnt it? MAybe thats
>a good starting point to look at?

It was all compiled into 68K binary for Mac yes, but the source was all C or C++, which is then compiled to 68K, x86, PPC, or whatever CPU. I remember people talking about it had been organized into two parts, one part was very easily portable, the "core", and th eother part was OS specific to deal with windows, gadgets, OS calls for disk access, etc. That part was written for the MacOS API system calls, which ain't the same as the AmigaOS API system calls. There was also versions of that part specific to Linux, Windows, and whatever else may have been supported.

The core part might be relatively easy to port. Unless there are calls to a fork functin, which AmigaOS does not have at all, and it would be a lot of work to make an equivalent or  undo the need for it. The OS-specific part would be a great deal of work.
 

Offline piku_

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #13 on: March 10, 2004, 03:33:50 PM »
Quote

BigBenAussie wrote:
Curious. Never even occurred to me that there'd be Atari ST guys trying to rebuild their platform.
Should have known.
How do we find out more about the Atari ST revival?
Are there websites?


Well sure.  What else are we supposed to do with 100MHz of 68060 muscle.  Sure the demos and intros can make use of the new power but the reality is there's a small segment of Atari users dedicated to advancing the platform as a useable machine today.  This is only possible of course because of UAE and their contributions to the ARAnyM project, and certain Atari hardware developers that remain.  The guys left aren't trying to rebuild Atari ST's.  ST's are too limited for any of today's needs.  But a Falcon with CT60 is a perfect starting block.  The ST's still get new code released regularly but it's mostly games and demos.  The ST is truely just a playtoy now unless it has a (extremely rare) PAK030 accelerator and video card or something like that.  The revival efforts are concentrated around the MiNT OS which is an Atari TOS/unix hybrid sort of system.. I guess kind of like Mac OSX in a way, and this effort is being done on a couple clones like Hades 060, Milan 040, Atari Falcon (with CT60) and TT030 (they've got lots of ram and decent speed) and they are focused with stuff like building an rpm based easy to install unix distribution called sparemint, http://sparemint.atariforge.net (freemint kernel development is also housed here), highwire web browser - http://highwire.atari-users.net.  and good atari news can be found at http://www.ataritoday.com which aggregates several sites including mine, http://portal.atari-source.com.  

Quote

It would be interesting to see simularities with the Amiga situation.


The similarities are simply that certain things must be implemented from scratch.  True shared libs requires virtual mem.  When I say true shared libs I mean elf binaries, unix style ld.so, mmap() and the likes.  On the Atari side we don't have any, AFAIK there is at least one implementation of unix shared libs on amiga but it's not very standard.  Perhaps programmers from both sides could work together to figure out how to overcome these obstacles on our respective system.  Though on the Atari side, this is not much of an impossible or even terribly hard, just that only 2-3 people are left in the world that are willing and qualified enough to do the work.  I was told once the memory management on the Atari makes it very hard.  The linux code for this stuff isnt' helpful, but as both AmigaOS and MiNT would be implementing this from scratch, certain parts and ideas COULD be reuseable - I'm not sure though.

Quote

Any chance of convincing Atari(formerly Infrogrames) into producing a piece of hardware? A console with an OS for instance that can be a comp, sorta like we might would want Amiga to do. But the Atari brand is much much more recognised.


Not to be a naysayer, but Atari as _I_ loved it is gone.  There will be no computers.  Atari is just a cash cow name now, nothing more.  I mean sure it's possible but it will be some executive's brilliant idea and I don't think anyone will get far suggesting it to them.

Quote

I dare say Atari as a company is more cashed up than Amiga.


Maybe.. Maybe not.   Amigas were great machines all along but IMHO the Falcon had the last laugh.  On thing that annoyed me always about Atari was the upgrades for the machines are rediculously expensive and there's not many.  Look at how long it took just to get 68060, and only one developer and it costs 299EUR.  Good video cards for Falcon/TT/Mega STe cost anywhere from $299-$799, etc.  And there's very few fastram options for ST series machines, hence a 4 MB limit hence these machines are practically useless to run a unix style environment.  Amiga uses always seemed to have it good with upgrades, PCI, 68060, PPC, Amithlon, just better support in general still, so don't fret amiga guys :)

There's not many Atari guys left, but those that are left, there's a good number of people who want advanced features on their old Atari Falcon's like ethernet, 1600x1200xTC 3d accelerated video, PPC accelerator, etc and they want it because they use their atari for everyday tasks like web browsing, word processing, irc, aim, and the likes.
 

Offline piku_

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Re: Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice
« Reply #14 on: March 10, 2004, 03:51:08 PM »
Quote

Crumb wrote:
@piku_
"92.9MHz 68060 with 256M PC133"

Nice board, I've read about it... :-)
don't you have a pci gfx card? I guess that using Falcon's on board gfx chip will be a little slow in resolutions like 800x600 and 16bits...


Unfortunately 800x600x16bits is too high.  The videl with even the bus boosted to 25MHz can only do about 800x600x256 color or 640x480xtruecolor, but it does do it fairly fast.  The video is not the stumbling block, I believe it's the X protocol or server - if we remote display these X applications to a PC running linux, they're quite useable.  So take that as you may.

Right now the Falcon has only DSP accessories (and they are oh so cool), the EtherNEC ethernet card (nice price), and the CT60.  The CT60 is great because right now it's done.  It's an excellent board that can run amazingly high clockrates.  The developer is brilliant.  Right now due to the expansion slot that was installed on the CT60, a special video card is being developed, as well as a PCI/AGP/USB interface board.   The PCI board will be as it sounds and probably end up similar to amiga boards available.  Cool but plain.  The Nature Supervidel video card however will be amazing.   Since the Falcon's video hardware is so flexible as far as resolutions and such, and the way the CT60 is designed you can add new hardware to replace old hardware so the new supervidel is going to be a new videl chip in an FPGA except one that runs at 250MHz and has room for 3d acceleration features and such, and can do 1600x1200xtrue color at non-headache refresh rates and such.  The benefit is that this nice card will give us the video we want while maintaining 99.9% compatibility with no drivers to worry about.  Cool and well thought out - even games and demos will only need a small address patch to run.

Quote

With a graphic card and a ppc or a coldfire it should run more or less ok...


Like I said, I don't think our particular slowness problems are relating to display speed.  It takes a LONG time just to draw it on the screen.  I'm not being vain, it's REALLY slow :)

Quote

There's already a program called AmiWin that does something like that, but I'd like to have an updated version that supported P96 better (the old version supports CGX much better). It runs some ports of Chimera, XV,... but it's no longer updated and is only 680x0...


Sounds pretty much just like ours.  We got xchat, gtk-1.x, xv, chimera, and a bunch of tools.  Some things run okay, other things don't.

Quote

"Regardless, people from the amiga and atari crowd should work together as much as is appropriate because it's likely we have similar hurdles to overcome."

Yes, but sometimes there's some cooperation, like in the mp3 player for Falcon's DSP that was ported to our sound card Delphina, TinyGL, Linux 68k for Atari advanced quite a lot thanks to the Amiga modifications... Aranym advanced quite a lot thanks to UAE's CPU engine...

We can't help you much because our OS is quite different to MINT, MagiC or TOS...

It's nice to see that some Atarians are alive :-)


Humm all the things you mention about Atari and Amiga helping each other are very true.  

As far as the OS being different, you are right.  I was thinking along the perspective that sure our OS's are REALLY different from each other, but....  we have similarities in that these things must be implemented from scratch on OS's that don't really seem to want the features much (not designed around having such features at all)..  also both our systems are so different from linux and that's a similarity :)  And lastly of course, 68k origins (and we're not on PPC yet either).

As far as being alive, we are - but we have problems with duplicated effort.  Everyone wants to create 10 GEM libs, 12 word processors, etc.  It's kind of annoying when we have basic os issues that could stand to be solved ;-)  I'm not looking forward to a clone, although if the coldfire project ever realizes a finished product I'll buy it, I think I'll be happy with the CT60 falcon for quite some time to come.

Good to see you amiga guys are so friendly.  I as kind of scared as to what the reaction might be of an Atari guy posting in an Amiga forum.  I know there's been adversity in the past between amiga and atari users but I've never been apart of it.  I'm only 22 :)