Some news

I am now preparing 2 systems to continue development of BeOS Max on them. Work will restart this week. Main focus will be to add some new drivers and test them and also finish the Max Updater so I can update and install new software with it.

As you may know the CUPS port has been restarted by other developers, so I am not going to go on with it (I got to a dead end anyways). Hopefully my few notes on that have helped them.

I know I am going to get bashed, but..

I know it has been four months since I had anything to report, and I still don't have anything to report. I haven't had time to check even one line of code for CUPS or an update for Max since my real life (tm) work is keeping me busy with quite a few 12 hour work days.

Thinks aren't looking good either. I am going to try to find some time to get the work I have done on the Internet, so anyone interested can go on from there, since I don't know if I am going to have time in a month or in a year from now.

I am not giving up, I just don't know when I can get back to everything.

I will try to keep you updated. Thanks for being patient.

no progress yet

Tomorrow is my last day at work for this month, so I have a lot to do and I couldn't get any work done on BeOS. However, this weekend will be spend mostly working on CUPS, so I expect to have something to report on Monday. If not, then that means I have a new girlfriend... (working on it) and threading priority has changed!!!

libxml2

Yesterday I ported the latest libxml2, version 2.6.27. This should help in other projects that require it. I have mostly been studying the inner workings of CUPS and will do so during the weekend. I will blog any progress made.

and in comes the usual... "I wouldn't do it like this. It is the wrong way."

Well, I am trying to do it like this just to see if it can be done. I don't even know if I can do it. So please, either help with real suggestions or work, or get out of the way...

This is a general response for the people that would like it done in another way. Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I would prefer if they stated it as their opinion and not as the teachings of the holy bible...!!!

CUPS requirements so far...

So far I have found the following requirements for the various parts of CUPS:

Perl 5.8.0
file 3.31
automake 1.8
autoconf 2.58
libm 5.4
libxml 2.6.2

Now:
perl 5.8.0 exists.
file 3.31 seems to be ported with no problems.
autoconf 2.58 I had to do a dirty port as BeOS R5 doesn't support flock
automake 1.8 can be ported after autoconf 2.58 (done)
libm 5.4 needs to be ported. I haven't yet managed to create the static library, however using trig.h PI definitions from Haiku makes it compile. Any help?
libxml 2.6.2 was a surprise as it seems to be ported with no problems. At the time of this post my dev system is running the libxml tests.

Update: Found out that ginstall is also needed. No time to check on that now. Be back tomorrow.

Now this IS cross platform!

BeDMDiceRoller running on Suse Linux with Flyab, without any change. Great work Team Maui

More on CUPS

I managed to compile the cups 1.1.23 source tree, but no drivers yet and it gives a Missing library error on startup. Probably I need to compile the rest of the cups tree as it contains the drivers and a database driven system for intergrating the drivers, called Foomatic.

To build Foomatic, I need the unix utility called File. I downloaded it and started porting that too. The newest version however did not compile due to the usage of mmap. So I downloaded an older version and it compiled after tampering a little with its code.

Tomorrow I will look into compiling the rest of the tree. But first I need to read a bit more on the architecture of CUPS.