Re: NetBSD for the dekstop

[Stephan <stephanwib%googlemail.com@localhost>]

Hi folks

I´m not sure if everybody has gotten my point I described in mail #9
to this discussion.

What I certainly will not do is anything with one of the X based
desktop environments. These are the problem and not the solution.

I performed some experimentation and I decided to focus on Haiku
becuase its in a pretty good shape and under active development. They
have a fantastic UI which is a pretty exact copy of Be Inc´s BeOS. It
has also nothing to do with X.

I´m not the first one with this idea and there was a project called
cosmoe which had the goal of porting the Haiku userland to a Posix
kernel (well, actually, Linux). BeOS/Haiku has some own IPC primitives
(ports and messages for instance) which are unknown to Posix. Cosmoe
is trying to emulate these through shared memory and SysV semaphores.
I think this is a good base for a prototype.

I had to make a couple of changes to the code but it does compile now
and I can start the appserver, which renders to wscons through SDL
(I´m seeing a white rectangle and a mouse pointer). The Haiku to Posix
wrapper is, however, broken on NetBSD so I can´t do anything further
yet.


2015-02-18 21:24 GMT+01:00 Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost>:
> Hi,
>
> Stephan wrote:
>>
>> Hi!
>>
>> Is there anyone still interested in bringing NetBSD to the desktop?
>
> Why still? I use it as a desktop. I have it running on two laptops,
> sparcstations, mini-pcs, etc
>
> I use for everything GNUstep applications (GWorkspace, GSPdf, Zipper, Ink,
> LaternaMagica... etc etc)
>
> On one laptop I use for Mail and Web SeaMonkey, on the other one I use
> Firefox and Thunderbird.
>
> I must say the Mozilla applications work absolutely fine, exactly as on
> Linux. No stability problems compared to Linux or other BSDs.
>
> I am in the meanwhile trying to improve GNUMail and TalkSoup. Clearly, for
> the Browser it will be a long way.
>
>
> To be true, not everything is so smooth compared to Windows or MacOS, I'm
> sorry to say that, but not inferior to other unix-like systems.
>
> What are your problems?
>
> Riccardo