Update 8 from OS/2 VOICE/BWW QT/browser funding campaign, QT partly working!
- Details
- Written by Roderick Klein
- Category: Software
Dear OS/2 community,
The Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation (referred as “VOICE”) send out a status update about the funding campaign to support bww bitwise works GmbH (referred as "bitwise") company. Bitwise is working on a port of the QT library to OS/2 and is making a lot of progress. As I have written in the Update 7 I have not written an update about the status of the funding campaign f duo to health issue's.
In update I had forgotten to report a very important detail. Next to that the current QT port passes all 70.000 tests build into the QT framework. QT text mode command line applications can already be compiled. While grapgicall applications is what we want as community it shows we are making a lot of progress1
You can see how much money is donated here. We are currently at about 23.310 Euro. We need your help as a community to make this important port QT from Bitwise move forward. All source code is provided free of charge to the world and is always checked in here. Bitwise works counts on YOUR donations to make this happen. You can read here how you can donate money to Bitwise here: www.os2voice.org/membership.html. A lot of people in the community download software from the Netlabs server without fully releasing a lot of that work is being performed by Bitwise. So please continue to donate!
Another new way to sponsor Bitwise monthly is by using Patreon. Each month you donate an amount, you decide.
This is a statement that was jointly written by the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation and bww bitwise works GmbH.
Best regards,
Roderick Klein & The "bitwise" team
Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation Silvan, Herwig and Dmitriy
Update 7 from OS/2 VOICE/BWW QT/browser funding campaign
- Details
- Written by Roderick Klein
- Category: Software
Dear OS/2 community,
It has been about 6 months ago since the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation (referred as “VOICE”) send out a status update about the funding campaign to support bww bitwise works GmbH (referred as "bitwise") company. Bitwise has are working on porting the latest version of the QT platform to OS/2. The reason you have not heard anything from VOICE is because I had some medical issue's. I am recovering and slowly picking up on some OS/2 stuff again, such as Warpstock Europe that will be held in Utrecht in de The Netherlands on the 18 and 19th of May. For more information please visit www.warpstock.eu.
Bitwise has however not stopped working on the QT project and a lot of progress has been made. Please check this old posting for the roadmap that was published jointly by VOICE and Bitwise. Currently Dmitriy Kuminov, the developer from Bitwise is working one of the most important DLL's. This is the QT DLL that provides the graphics in applications.
Of the QT port about 60 to 70% of the project is finished now. The QT test suite has also been used to make certain the QT port works correctly. You can read more about it here. This was posted on the 31st of December 2018: "The debug build passes 68572 tests (with only 2 failures as well, for the same reason). This is quite a number. Apparently, Qt5 is going to be the best Qt for OS/2 port ever."
In some cases however work is not performed directly on the QT project itsekf. Like with the previous big project Bitwise worked on, such as the Firefox browser, updates where made to many libraries to make it possible to deliver Firefox on ArcaOS/OS/2. All the Linux software ported to ArcaOS/OS/2 use a couple of core DLL's. One of these sets of DLL's are called LIBC. In order to make QT work updates had to be made to the LIBC DLlL's. You can read more on the details here. So your donation is put to good use!
You can see how much money is donated here. We are currently at about 22.000 Euro. We need your help as a community to make this import port of Bitwise move forward. All source code is provided free of charge to the world and is always checked in here. Bitwise works counts on YOUR donations to make this happen. You can read here how you can donate money to Bitwise here: www.os2voice.org/membership.html. A lot of people in the community download software from the Netlabs server without fully releasing a lot of that work is being performed by Bitwise. So please continue to donate!
Another new way to sponsor Bitwise monthly is by using Patreon. Each month you donate an amount, you decide.
This is a statement that was jointly written by the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation and bww bitwise works GmbH.
Best regards,
Roderick Klein & The "bitwise" team
Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation Silvan, Herwig and Dmitriy
Update 6 from OS/2 VOICE/BWW QT/browser funding campaign
- Details
- Written by Roderick Klein
- Category: VOICE
Dear OS/2 community,
As summer is more or less over (we hope you enjoyed your holidays!), we would like to recall the ongoing efforts to port the current Qt 5 framework to OS/2! During the summer break we have not collected that much money over the last 2 months. Most likely this was caused by the vacation period.
10 months ago the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation (referred as “VOICE”) teamed up with bww bitwise works GmbH (referred as "bitwise") in order to make Qt 5 a reality on OS/2.
Why Qt 5?
We already ported Qt 4 to OS/2 and it is an ongoing story of success. Qt 4 enabled us to have numerous applications that were easy to port to OS/2 because Qt is a platform independent framework from ground up. Just think of Quassel, PSi, VirtualBox, qpdfview, SMplayer and many more. The latest version we have at netlabs.org is version 4.7.3 and it is showing its age.
“bitwise” has already started to tackle the job and a lot has been done already. You may monitor our twitter feed or hook directly into our github repository in order to see what is being done right now. The goal is to repeat the success story of Qt 4 on a more modern basis.
And there is a bonus…
We had to acknowledge that Firefox has become more or less undoable for us, from version 52 onward. Why? Please, read this article, it fully covers this topic http://articles.os2voice.org.
Now what about the bonus? A significant part of Qt 5 is QtWebEngine and that is the basis for many Qt-based web browsers (most notably, Falkon which is a new name for QupZilla). QtWebEngine uses Chromium, an open source web engine used by Google in their very successful Google Chrome web browser. The current plan is to port Chromium as part of QtWebEngine. But later this port may be used standalone, e.g. to port Google Chrome to OS/2 (if Google ever makes Chrome itself open source).
The leap from version Qt 4.7.3 to version 5.11 is a huge one. But we are on track: 25% have already been done as described in this roadmap.
And that brings us to the next item:
Good software does not grow on trees. Unfortunately not.
Both Herwig Bauernfeind and most notably Silvan Scherrer make little to no money from "bitwise" and work by and large for free. However “bitwise” is a commercial company driven by 3 OS/2 enthusiasts.
The 3rd “bitwiser”, Dmitriy Kuminov, is not in the position to work for free. Dmitriy works as a full time developer and unlike Silvan and Herwig, Dmitriy has to make a living from that. And driving a company brings costs for many kinds of stuff that has to be provided in order to make it run.
Dmitriy now works fully on the Qt 5 port. The goal is to get it going and provide it for free to the community.
That said, "bitwise" is not the manufacturer of ArcaOS and is not affiliated with Arca Noae LLC. Both companies are strategic partners, but beside that they are completely separate companies.
Therefore, we encourage all members of the OS/2 community to support us:
* You can buy your license of ArcaOS or subscription via the "bitwise" online shop.
* You can make a direct donation via the OS/2 Paypal donation button:
Another new way to sponsor BWW monthly is by using Patreon. Each month you donate an amount you decide.
This is a statement that was jointly written by the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation and bww bitwise works GmbH.
Best regards,
Roderick Klein & The "bitwise" team
Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation Silvan, Herwig and Dmitriy
Update 5 from OS/2 VOICE/BWW QT/browser funding campaign
- Details
- Written by Roderick Klein
- Category: VOICE
Here is finally the 5th update of the VOICE QT 5/browser funding campaign. Sorry for the long delay again some private issue's
with the health of a family member required some attention . So where do we stand ?
The porting of QT 5 has began and the first part of what was outlined in the roadmap is finished.
A total of 5000+7825=12825 US Dollars were collected.
The funding campaign from Sigurd Fastenrath on os2.org collected a total of 4430 Euro.
OS/2 VOICE has currently spent the money in the following way:
Development for May and June have been paid with an amount of 4000 US Dollar per month.
To fullfill Sigurd his campaign OS/2 VOICE sponsored 1650 Euro. This was done, because the orginal target was set to
4250 Euro. And when the target would not be reached the whole campaign would have been withdrawn with no money collected. This money was directly send to bww bitwise works GmbH (hereinafter called BWW).
The people at BWW would like to thank everybody for sponsoring/donating. However as you may understand we need more money for this big project to keep moving forward. The current Qt version 4.7.3 we have on OS/2 (to be found as rpm at Netlabs) shows it's age and a lot newer applications need Qt 5 as a requirement. That's the version BWW is porting right now. There are several reasons this is such a large project. The most notable is that Qt (Qt 5) envolved a lot since version 4.7.3. In summary why Qt is important and usefull for OS/2 (ArcaOS): Qt makes software development smarter. It is a powerful plattform neutral framework that makes it easy to bring many applications to OS/2 that were written for various other plattforms. Right now we have more than 270 Qt based applications and with Qt 5 even more can be ported.
What BWW does in the background when working on major ports.
We (OS/2 VOICE and BWW) try to make all OS/2 users aware of what work is being done to keep software ports created. Next to major projects such as Firefox and Qt BWW maintains a total of over 260 projects for OS/2 which are distributed via Netlabs RPM. To get a better understanding of what BWW does, please look at the presentation SIlvan Scherrer he gave at Warpstock Europe 2018. Dmitry Kuminov (the main developer at BWW) also gave a presentation at Warpstock Europe 2018.
It gives a better idea what massive amount of work BWW has to do to keep a lot of applications on our favorite operating system running. What Dmitry explained is that porting software to OS/2 is sometimes a very labour intensive process because certain libraries need to be ported first. Some libraries (DLL) we do not have on OS/2 or we have older versions and they need to be updated. This is why porting applications to OS/2 can take longer or even a lot longer.
We need your donations
100% of your donation will go to BWW. All information in these postings has been jointly written and approved with BWW.
Previosly OS/2 VOICE did not have a Paypal account. If you want you can now donate with Paypal directly to VOICE. We found a way to make administration easier for our treasurer. This is especially convenient for people living in the European Union. If you want to send a wire transfer please visit the ourwebsite for details.
But you can of course also donate via the Arca Noae website. This is handy if you want to make a donation in US Dollars. I