ArcticFox 42.1 released

Working on most platforms! ArcticFox 42.1 is out. Here in action with WebGL on MacBook with 10.6 SnowLeopard.

The WebGL test in question has been fixed with 42.0 release.

While here it is running om the CI20 MIPS Board natively! What is still broken? You can help!

• PowerPC is crashy...
• SPARC64 crashes on startup
• FreeBSD doesn't compile on recent versions anymore

ArcticFox to browse on an iBook

I did quite some work to have "--enable-altivec" work in ArcticFox. The FireFox AltiVec test did not work because it relies on GCC rejecting it if not supported by the CPU.

Most of the work was getting the 32bit AltiVec code actually work during a 64bit compile on a PPC970. But what about a non-AltiVec build? WIth some #ifdef's imported from TenFourFox... I was able to get it and produce, while compiling on a G4, a usable G3 optimized binary for Linux.

Result? A quite current browser for a 21 year old vintage computer! Fun! Not very fast and the beautiful tangerine clamshell has only 160MB of RAM, but still, one can browse Wikpedia!

ArcticFox now on Raspberry 3 - ARM support is back!

Just completed these days... ArcticFox now runs fine on Raspberry PI 3, it also compiled natively on it on Raspbian!

Coming from PaleMoon which had dropped ARM support, it took quite some time, but it is kicking again and the classic browser is a good companion on the Raspberry!

It runs surprisingly good and you can even watch youtube videos. Obligatory screenshot as proof:

In fact, this same post was written on my RPI3. While I was able to fix neon support in graphics, I have issues doing a cortex-a53 optimized build. I also have issues compiling on the newer RPI3 which as a newer Raspbian/RpiOS, with similar errors. However, seeing ARM support back is a good feeling .

DataBasin 1.1 S released

DataBasin 1.1S and DataBasinKit have finally been released, after a long time-span.

This release is dedicated to my late friend and colleague Steven Rovelli (hence the "S" in the release name) who parted from us too young. He was an enthusiastic user of DataBasin and used and supported it inside our company, for countless AMS tasks. COVID-19 carried him away and he will be sorely missed.

This release is marks also the move from the GAP svn repository, to standalone projects on GitHub.

DataBasin sports some interesting news:

• Improved interface with ComboBoxes to select update/insert objects and preferences to filter out more system objects
• remember last successful login username
• getUpdated / getDeleted
• Undelete
• Improved support for sub-objects and lists and unpacking (from DataBasinKit), this allows for example to use sub-queries, provided the related object is one (LIMIT 1)
• support for enabling Assignment Rules in create/update

The core DataBasinKit has also many improvements,, some of them are not completely appreciated from the GUI interface, but useful for other programs wishing to use the API:

• enhanced and rewritten handling of sub-objects and object-lists in query results: this allows to have SObject lists interpreted as such when using subqueries.
• getUpdated and getDeleted
• undelete
• possiblity trigger Assignment Rules in create & update
  

LCD Display on RaspberryPI with Objective-C

Since many years there are ways to display Data on the Raspberry PI by using small LCD Displays connected to the GPIO pins. Most of these small projects however use Python, an interpreted language which I dislike. There are C projects using the wiringpi library and which are inspired by Arduino versions, I have looked at this nice work by binerry which concentrates on the PCD8544 (aka known as the Nokia 3310 display!).

I studied it but wanted to use the Objective-C language which I like much more and which will enable me in the near future to leverage existing Kits. I had some doubts about speed and interoperability, so I started by "wrapping" the C functions with an Objective-C class. The proof of concept worked fine, so I went on to write more native library.

SPIDisplayKit is thus born - requiring GNUstep Base only and providing an AppKit inspired interface to the Display - e.g. Coordinates to the methods are passed with a struct, similar to NSSize or NSRect, but simpler, since they are direct integer without any transformation, scaling or other support and thus eliminating the need of floating point:

Look in this video the result running on an original Raspberry PI 1:

Objective-C + GNUstep + Raspberry PI + PCD8544, the code of this trivial Pong example is full Objective-C and very easy too!

This opens the road to a lot of nice examples, since Data Management and Connection Management supplied by GNUstep Foundation is so convenient, but the speed of Objective-C (here with the GNU GCC runtime) are more than enough!

Arctic Fox 27.11.0 release

 This 2020 with COVID, quarantines and lockdown was and is a strange year, but it allowed me to take care of Arctic Fox quite a bit. A lot of work is going on in my Arctic Fox fork, which Matt dutifully imports.

Thousands of commits flew in into this new release, tackling JavaScript upgrades, build fixes, further metro removal, JIT optimizations. SO much was imported from Firefox that this is really exciting!

Arctic Fox continues to run very well on MacOS-X 10.7 for example, on my MacBook Pro:

But also Linux is fully supported, of course. 

Linux/PowerPC works as before, but still no JIT of course. Roy continues his fork with WindowsXP support which differs only by a minimal set of patches.

SPARC64 support was pursued, now NetBSD/SPARC64 compiles fully, but.... the browser crashes on startup. Help seeked!

The same goes for ARM, ARM64 and MIPS: we would love to get these platforms working again: they were probably lost in PaleMoon.

Arctic Fox thus continues the pursue of PaleMoon and Firefox heritage but with enhanced compatibility on more platforms, no Rust and legacy OS/Compiler support. If you like this, please help!

ArcticFox 27.9.19 release

Arctic Fox 27.9.19 has been released!

Plenty of enhancements, still supports your trusty Mac from 10.6 up and Linux PowerPC!

Arctic Fox on Devuan amd64

Code has been fixed to support newer compilers. On Linux, currently, the highest supported compiler remains gcc 6.5, more recent versions do compile now with this release, but fail to link afterwards with errors on very standard symbols. Help appreciated! On NetBSD gcc 7 now works fine instead.

ArcticFox has working DevTools again

The past release of 27.9.15 ArcticFox has the Developer Tools working again, they were broken previously because of excessive work on Private browsing.

You can see them here in full action:

ArcticFox continues the work as a fork of PaleMoon trying to catch up with past releases of FireFox.
It has been succesfully backported up to MacOS 10.6 SnowLeopard, is working reliably on Linux x86, amd64 and PowerPC 32bit and 64bit.

If you like the browser, we need your help!

GIMP 2.10.6 working on MacOS Leopard!

My white MacBook is a perfectly fine computer, has an excellent screen and keyboard (superior to later models I have) so even if it is running a legacy OS version, I'd love to continue using it and, perhaps, other of you are in the same situation.

Besides ArcticFox (which I got running on 10.6, but not on 10.5 yet) and various developer tools, the most essential tool I like to have is GIMP, also given the excellent LCD this Laptop has.

Some work from macports to get up-to-date tools and dependent libraries, I patched its package.

Little work was needed in GIMP itself, I shared all the patches upstream and I hope they will be accepted. The remaining issues are in GEGL, but different solutions are available: essentially realpath doesn't like a null argument.

Enjoy this screenshot as a proof.

Next question: will it work on PowerPC too? I hope so! Getting GIMP to work on 10.5 opens this possibility.

P.S.: this post was written directly on the MacBook i386 using TenFourFox running natively on Intel!

ArcticFox on 10.6

ArcticFox, currently in my own fork, succesfully compiles natively on MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard and runs! 64 bit currently.
Great news for those who use older but still perfectly capable Macintoshes....

ArcticFox derives from PaleMoon 27 which in turn is FireFox derived.

I tried Facebook and even WebGL samples as this screenshot shows.

This Blog entry is written natively on my MacBook and ArcticFox.

first release of StepSync!

I'm proud to announce the first release of StepSync, a file sync tool for GNUstep and MacOS (even for venerable PowerPC).

StepSync allows synchronization of folders, optionally recursively descending in sub-folders. It allows thus various options of performing backups: pure insertion, updates and including full synchronization by importing changes from target to source.

After months of development and testing, I consider it stable enough, I tested it with thousands of files and folders.

You can find it at the GNUstep Application Project. I already have plans for new features!

Graphos 0.7 released

Graphos 0.7 has been released a couple of days ago!

What's new for GNUstep's vector editor?

• improved Bezier path editor (add/remove points)
• Knife (Bezier Path splitting) instrument fixed and re-enabled (broken since original GDraw import!)
• important crash fixes (Undo/Redo related)
• Interface improvements to be more usable with Tablet/Pen digitizer.

Graphos continues to work on GNUstep for Linux/BSD as well as natively on MacOS.

Graphos running on MacOS:

Graphos GNUstep and Tablet interface

I have acquired a Thinkpad X41 Tablet and worked quite a bit on it making it usable and then installing Linux and of course GNUstep on it. The original battery was dead and the compatible replacement I got is bigger, it works very well, but makes the device unbalanced.

Anyway, my interest about it how usable GNUstep applications would be and especially Graphos, its (and my) drawing application.

Using the interface in Tablet mode is different: the stylus is very precise and allows clicking by pointing the tip and a second button is also possible. However, contrary to the mouse use, the keyboard is folded so no keyboard modifiers are possible. Furthermore GNUstep has no on-screen keyboard so typing is not possible.

The classic OpenStep-style Menus work exceedingly well with a touch interface:the menus are easy to click and teared-out they remain like palettes, making toolbars not necessary.
This is a good start!

However, Graphos was not easy to use: aside from typing text, with no keyboard, several components requried typing (e.g. inserting Line Width).
I worked on the interface so that all these elements also had a clickable interface (e.g. Stepper Arrows). Duplicating certain items available in context-menus in regular menus, which can be detached, provided also an enhancements.
Standard items like the color wheel already work very well

Drawing on the screen is definitely very precise and convenient. Stay tuned for the upcoming release!

DataBasin + DataBasinKit 1.0 released

A new release (1.0) for DataBasin and its framework DataBasinKit is out!

This release provides lots of news, most of the enhancements coming from the framework and exposed by the GUI:

• Update login endpoint to login.salesforce.com (back again!)
• Implement retrieve (get fields from a list of IDs, natively)
• Support nillable fields on create
• save HTML tables and pseudo-XLS in HTML-typed formats
• Fix cloning of connections in case of threading
• Implement Typing of fields after describing query elements (DBSFDataTypes)

DataBasin is a tool to access and work with SalesForce.com. It allows to perform queries remotely, export and import data, inspect single records and describe objects. DataBasinKit is its underlying framework which implements the APIs in Objective-C. Works on GNUstep (major Unix variants and MinGW on windows) and natively on macOS.

GNUMail + Pantomime 1.3.0

A new release for GNUmail (Mail User Agent for GNUstep and MacOS) and Pantomime (portable MIME Framework): 1.3.0!


Panomime APIs were update to have safer types: mostly count and sizes were transitioned to more Cocoa-like NSUinteger/NSInteger or size_t/ssize_t where appropriate.
This required a major release as 1.3.0 for both Pantomime and GNUMail. In several functions returning -1 was replaced by NSNotFound.

Note: When running the new GNUMail it will update your message cache to the new format. In case of problems, clean it (or in case of reverting to the old version). Message size is now encoded as unsigned instead of signed inside it.

Countless enhancements and bug fixes in both Pantomime and GNUMail should improve usability.
Previously there were issues of certain messages not loading when containing special characters and/or decoding personal part of Addresses.

Pantomime:

• Correct signature detection as per RFC (caused issues when removing it during replies)
• improved address and quoted parsing
• generally improved header parsing
• Encoding fixes
• Serious iconv fix which could cause memory corruption due to realloc
• Fixes for Local folders (should help fix #53063, #51852 and generally bugs with POP and Local accounts)
• generally improved init methods to check for self, that may help avoid memory issues and debugging in the future
• various code cleanup in Message loading for better readibility
• more logging code for debug build, should help debugging

GNUMail

• Possibility to create filters for To and CC directly in message context menu
• Read/Unread and Flag/Unflag actions directly in the message context menu
• Size status for Messages in bytes KiloBytes or MegaBytes depending on size
• Spelling fixes
• Improved Menu Validation
• fix for #52817
• generally improved init methods to check for self, that may help avoid memory issues and debugging in the future
• GNUstep Only: Find Panel is now GORM based

OresmeKit initial release: plotting for GNUstep and Cocoa

Finally a public release of OresmeKit.
Started many years ago, it has finally come the moment for a first public release, since I put together even a first draft of documentation. Stay tuned for improvements and new graph types.

Oresme is useful for plotting and graphing data both native on Cocoa/MacOS as on GNUstep.

OresmeKit is a framework which provides NSView subclasses that can display data. It is useful to easily embed charts and graphs in your applications, e.g. monitoring apps, dashboards and such.
OresmeKit supports both GNUstep and Cocoa/MacOS.

An initial API Documentation is also available as well as two example in the SVN repository.

Graphos printing fix

Important Graphos fix.

Graphos had issues when printing and the view was not 100%: to speed up drawRect, all objects were represented scaled, so that they had not to be scaled each time, which especially for Bezier Paths is expensive with all the associated handles.

Thie issue is finally fixed by either caching both original and zoomed values for each object and conditionally drawing them depending on the drawingContext.

Here the proof with GSPdf showing the generated PDF!

Soon a new release then!

LaternaMagica 0.5

LaternaMagica is the image viewing and exporting tool of the GNUstep Application Project.
Quickly create a list of images and export it by converting the file type and resizing the images to a uniform size, to prepare your next slide show, a folder of thumbnails or the folder to give your local printer and print out pictures.

The new 0.5 version comes with a lot of fixes and improvements.

• Improved drag&drop support
• Improved recursion of folders, including drag&drop of folders
• Rotation has key shortcuts
• Image rotation is remembered for export
• Code cleanup, optimization and minor bug fixes 
• Exporting (including Scaling and Rotation) have many fixes:
• Better support of Alpha images
• Resolution and Size are better interpreted and preserved. 
• better scaling algorithm imported from PRICE

GNUMail and Pantomime 1.2.3

New releases which combine many improvements collected in the past three years!

GNUMail and Pantomime found a home in the past years in the "GNUstep non-FSF" project on GNA. However, GNA shut down and the project was moved to https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gnustep-nonfsf. This move was time consuming, left the repository unavailable for weeks, but we were able to recover the repository with full history. The code is on savannah.nongnu.org on SVN.

During the move, Copyrights, Headers and Licenses were cleaned up. The X-Face code had no clear license and was removed. It is quite an obsolete feature anyway, I haven't seen it used since long time.

The MacOS version works quite well and we provide now both a PPC and an Intel binary. The PowerPC version works well on vintage Macs so you can use GNUMail on your trusty iBook or iMac!

GNUMail

• Thanks to improved Pantomime, more names and addresses appear correct and not quoted
• bug fixes in quoting and re-flow, which could lead to mails have missing text portions
• Allow creation of mail filters from To and Cc addresses
• Continued to reduce GNUstep specific code: EditWindow, Console, AboutPanel;
• Improved mail header view when resizing windows
• Version check fixed and re-instantiated to work against nongnu.org
• Fixed display of in-line attachment icons on GS
• code clean-up, memory leak fixes, improved portability (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD)

Pantomime

• improved header parsing, recognizes better address formats, on the TODO list since many years
• bug fixes in header and subject parsing which could lead to some mails not to load fully
• speed improvements
• code portability improvements
• misc fixes

NetBSD source build and crosscompile notes

An update on my notes to compile NetBSD kernels and userland.


Build / update the tools:

-U : for unprivilged building
-u : to update
-m : to specify architecture

./build.sh -U -u tools

To cross compile, this is would enough:
./build.sh -U -m i386 -u tools
However, since I do want to build on the same computer and the build script would be confused, we add -T /usr/tools-${HOST_ARCH}-${TARGET_ARCH} and also separate the object dir with -O!

./build.sh -U -m i386 -u -O /usr/obj-amd64-i386 -T /usr/tools-amd64-i386 tools


Then we build the kernel

./build.sh -U kernel=CONFNAME

or for cross compilation:
./build.sh -U -O /usr/obj-amd64-i386 -T /usr/tools-amd64-i386 -m i386 -u kernel=GENERIC

The modules:
./build.sh -U -u modules installmodules=/

Now to build userland, including X11. I did not attempt to cross-build userland yet.

./build.sh -U -x -u distribution

./build.sh -U -x -u distribution install=/