Notices by PulkoMandy (pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net)

Your periodic reminder that Borland released the sourcecode to Turbo Vision under an open source license, and then someone added Linux, Windows and Unicode support to it, so you can use it to write modern applications

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision?tab=readme-ov-file

This machine doesn't have /dev/diskette present. I'm not sure how to make it appear. Some internet search suggests using "devfsadm -v" but that is hitting some timeouts with ide disks. Eventually it worked and created the device file! Now let's see if I can format a floppy...

Apparently after that you need to run "volrmmount floppy" so the system notices that's there is a floppy in the drive, and then you can format it. That is, if my new old stock floppies don't all give crc errors at some point. The first two out of 50 failed to format...

Ok, I have at least one "good" one. Now let's figure out how to transfer files to the Solaris machine over the network and wether I can write disk images to floppies with it (if not, should still be fine to copy the files to a dos formatted floppy).
Also, do I still have floppy label stickers somewhere? 🤔

Let's gooo!

The VGA output has some... interesting color palette choices. There is an option to use a serial mouse, but I can't find my 25 to 9 pin serial port adapter at the moment.

There are also rumors of a year-2000 compatible utility disk (to set the date past 1999) but I couldn't find it. The system software handles dates after 2000, but only if you set it to december 1999 and wait for time to pass. And after that, the utility to set the date is confused about the date format.

I guess if the updated disk is not found anywhere, I could try patching the utility software?

Now that I have the Solaris machine booted up I wondered if I could port some of my software to it just for fun. But there's no git. I tried to get pkgsrc, but appartently the tar version on Solaris 8 can't extract their latest archive correctly (and cvs isn't installed so that's also not an option). What are my options here?

Good news: my "new" logic analyzer was d livered today, it was not damaged by postal services (despite the postman letting the package fall on the ground in front of me) and it powers up fine.

Bad news: either the floppy drive or the (orginal) system disk is not working. Spent a couple hours trying to find a working floppy drive and old PC in my parts stash to write a new system floppy. I think my computer from 2003 has a bad floppy controller, couldn't get that to work...

I then tried an older PC but it is an AT machine and has the big DIN keyboard connector. I don't have the matching keyboard anymore and can't find my PS/2 adapter.

The only other machine I have with a floppy drive is a Sun Ultra5 and I think I only used it to port Haiku bootloader and have no idea what's on its hard disk. And of course can't find my Solaris install CDs...

Found the install CDs. But I can't open the cdrom drive in this machine, is it dead?

Replaced the drive. My Solaris 8 install CD (which is a very old CDR) is unhappy. But I could boot a Solaris 2.5.1 one! That allows me to mount the ide hard disk and remove the root password. And I'm in!

@aperezdc @riley @reidrac @WebKitGTK even if you don't do GTK, and take the hard way of rewiring WebKit to whatever else, it's doable. And the main contributions are not by just one entity, it's partly Apple, partly Igalia, partly Sony at the moment. It survived various others joining and leaving over the years. Such an organization makes soft forks unnecessary or at least much less likely to be needed.

13 years left until the year 2038 bug, and the end of the first epoch of Unix. Is your code ready?

My currently pending changes for Haiku:

- custom baudrates support in serial port drivers (I need it for high speed communication over usb serial with my Amstrad CPC)
- improvement to ps/2 mouse-touchpad multiplexing detection (my laptop keyboard controller advertises support for it, but doesn't implement it correctly)
- automatic enabling of VESA BIOS live patching to inject custom video modes in video cards BIOS

1990s technologies don't want to disappear from modern hardware!

#HaikuOS

@HauntedOwlbear in France there is https://www.cinemutins.com/p/a-propos

Me: Can we have a PowerPC computer?
Mom: We have a PowerPC computer at home.
PowerPC at home:

@uliwitness @js it's not a license for imports, it is a declaration (which the ANSSI will probably not even read).
This is the result of various "anti-terrorist" laws, and classifying cryptography as a "war weapon" for lack of a better way to control exports.
(not trying to say it is a good way to do thing, it is still very stupid, but I think it is only an unintentional side effect of badly designed laws)

Just noticed that apparently I forgot to publish the sourcecode for readingame, my interpreter for the Lectures Enjeu educative interactive fiction adventures. I got it to a state where some of the adventures (the simplest ones) are fully playable. I still have some work to do for the more interesting ones...

This was a DOS game to learn reading by playing interactive adventures. It uses buttons and hyperlinks instead of a syntax analyzer.

https://pulkomandy.tk/projects/readingame

I have just relased a new version 2.9 of GrafX2, "the ultimate 256-color painting program".
Binaries are available for Haiku, Gamepark Holdings GP2x, Nintendo Switch, Atari Mint and Windows (yes, our build automation somehow focuses only on the most ridiculous platforms). For Linux it should hopefully be updated in your favorite distribution soon.
Not a lot of changes in this version, many bugfixes and more fileformats supported (Apple IIgs, C64, CPC, Atari TT...)
#GrafX2 #PixelArt