Well this just makes me mad, not at the skyOS folks, but at those of us in the Amiga scene and MorphOS scene. A small userbase OS now has one of the best browers out and on top of that a great email application too!!! Why cant we get this ported? A good note is the SkyOS people will be writing a guide on how to port firefox to a new OS. Maybe we will get lucky.

www.skyos.org is the address, but its seems to be down now.

Screenshot here: http://www.techimo.com/photo/showphoto.php/photo/6797

[ Edited by Acill on 2004/12/23 7:05 ]

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That's and easy answer. AmigaOS/AROS/MorphOS (continued as AmigaOS now) are no POSIX operating systems. That's why it's not easy to get something as big as FireFox ported that easily. The common benefits around SkyOS, BeOS, MacOSX, Linux, QNX, BSD and so on is, that they are POSIX compliant operating systems which offer a similar API or use common crossplattform compatible libaries such as libc, pthreads, GTK+, QT, XFree (Xlib, Xtk, ...) and so on. All things that are missing on AmigaOS. We do have a basic feature such as libnix and ixemul which gets us close to something UNIX'ish so we can get some stuff ported. Unfortunately all the major and complex things such as pthreads as one example is truly missing. To say these operating systems are totally different to the AmigaOS one, they also offer an entirely different API (programming interface). Now you could ask, why does Mozilla exist for Microsoft Windows then, but that's because since day one it was planned to support this architecture and code to support this architecture has been added. So to get FireFox properly ported to AmigaOS a lot of work has to be done and that guy who made the big binary for AmigaOS started to go the right way in how he is doing it. First started to get it compiled and write a shitload of empty wrapper classes and then populate them one by one until he gets a working browser one day (whenever that might be). That's exactly the same approach that I and others are trying with getting KHTML ported to MorphOS. While the library is tiny, the approach and way to go is huge, while it's easy to port KHTML from one POSIX compliant OS to another in a shorter time it on the otherhand is a shitload more complicated porting it to something which is throughly different from API, from philosophy etc. Once we make MorphOS 'yet another Linux clone' we might be able to get things as big as Mozilla ported (which is 3-5 times bigger than the Linux kernel's source). If you look closer to the SkyOS, BeOS or QNX ports of Mozilla or FireFox then you realize that during installation the dependency list is huge. E.g. FireFox on QNX for example also installs wrapper libaries (or real ported libraries) of XFree, GTK+, and and and. The more we port from Open Source, the more we port from POSIX to MorphOS (the bloddier it gets, the more 'yet another Linux clone' it gets the higher the chance to get big stuff ported as well.

greetings,

Ali Akcaagac

And MacOs9 ? it's not posix....
Why not using the Macos9 mozilla sources....

I've wondered why the 68k or the PPC OS9 even Mac sources are not used more. I'd think a big part of the code is done in that with only interfaces needing to be added? I am no coder so I have no clue what needs to be completed for a project like that.

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Because MacOS9 is still not AmigaOS. The API's are too different Just because it's not POSIX doesn't necessarily make it compatible (even partially) to the AmigaOS API. It's just another different OS with it's own quirks and philosophy. They only had people working on the MacOS9 as well as Windows parts since beginning so the code matured the same speed and time that Mozilla exists already. Since no one of the Amiga world ever bothered or cared for Mozilla till now, now you are stuck to rework every thing from beginning which just takes a lot of time. Beside this, the other problem on the Amiga sector is that there are indeed a lot of people interested but none of these people have the balls to handle this. We do have a lot of experts but all of them work in their own dark little chambers instead working together with others to achieve the goals faster - which in my opinion is the only issue why we don't have Mozilla ported correctly (using own MUI or Reaction) interface till now. The bounty raised by AmiZilla is interesting but people are egoists and want that cash for themselves or fear sharing their already done work with others so everyone can help getting closer to that goal. The code done so far is kept closed and people work on their own mostly as single person on such a big project that no one can handle alone. That's the problem.

greetings,

Ali Akcaagac

Looks like Amiga OS 4.0 has POSIX now.

http://www.os4depot.net/showfile/?file=development/library/pthread.lha

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Well, it might have pthreads, just a small part of POSIX. Amizilla does not require pthreads any more, but uses Amiga "threads". Something, which is "only" available on AOS4 doesn't help much, at least not for MorphOS, AOS3, AROS etc.. and we are far from concentrating on the special flavours.

oGALAXYo:
thanks for the correct information ;)

Very true o1i

[ Edited by discreetfx on 2005/1/26 23:26 ]

@oGALAXYo

SkyOS is not posix compliant, not very much anyways. you can run a few terminel appps but thats about it....is has basic posix emulation but the os itself is not a unix like OS

@Galaxy: except that SkyOS is *not* POSIX.

While porting FireFox the authord had to implement/fix a lot of functions in order to make it compile.

Leo.

It would be interesting to see if we can have the SkyOS team port the OS to the Pegasos. I took a look at the home site and its moving at a real fast pace. It has a lot of great applications now.

Robert wont do it. I have talked to him already about it.

Well I got him to reply to my email asking for more info. With the 10% deal Genesi is offering I think he may just do it. We will see, the ball is in his court now.

[ Edited by Acill on 2005/1/27 7:19 ]