Ok, so obviously, there are many active people on this list.
Now, how can you help Arachne project immediately...
I know it is hard to participate on development of closed source
product, on the other hand, I believe it is effective way (see Mnemonic
project - www.mnemonic.org - it is completely dead, IMHO).
I need mainly personal experience and personal advice from skilled
programmers.
I was playing with SVGAlib 1.4 recently and I found out, that it
supports my S3Virge chipset in critical 640x480xHicolor mode (i haven't
tested 800x600xHicolor yet, but it should workk too). I will put
X_LOPIF source code to http://gnu.arachne.cz/ page next week, after
some final cleanups, so maybe someone can help me with x_lopif ->
svgalib bindings (but I expect to be able to that on my own).
Another SVGAlib issue is mouse and keyboard. I can probably learn it
easily from my documentation, but if you can send me some examples, it
would be good. Well, I probably won't use keyboard in raw mode, to allow
consle switching while in Arachne. But Arachne needs some basic
"button=mouseread(&x,&y)"
function, and also way to set resolution of mouse, so if you can send
me the code fragment, it would save some time.
I would like to know if somoene has experience with WATTCP compiled with
DJGPP ? This seems to be only problem when porting Arachne to 32bit DOS,
but for me it is really not priority. I think I will rather pack Linux
kernel with UMSDOS support, SVGAlib and Arachne together, and we can get
better results than with pure 386 DOS port, IMHO...
And finaly some very straightforward project: There is strong need for
porting INSIGHT.EXE to Linux. (in latest package, I cleaned up the code
so it is pure C, no C++ now, but it still very messy and Borland .PRJ
based... check gnu.arachne.cz)
I would like to see Insight to support directly native Unix
/var/spool/mail/* format insted of .CNM files, although original DOS
command line switches for work with .CNM files may be preserved, so
people can process their old DOS-style e-mail archive too...
Additionaly, I would like to modify Insight to run as CGI script (maybe
using cgi.h ?), so we can offer free web mail to Arachne users, on
arachne.cz server. I know some open source web mails already exist, but
I think Insight is slightly better thanks to full support of MIME and
UUencode attachments.
So anyone here interested in maintaining InSight and porting it to Linux?
Really big cleanup is needed, because original author (not me) was using
weird formatting of code, and he also absolutely doesn't believe in
comments... ;-)
BTW, I can't write Makefiles. I was thinking about using rhide or xwpe
for Arachne, but I feel like for future opening of Arachne's source code
may be important to join existing habbits. So if you can send me
Insight's .PRJ file rewritten to Makefile for GNU make, it would really
help me a lot...
--
Michael Polak: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Arachne Labs: http://arachne.cz/
My mobile phone - up to 160 characters: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
