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TITLE: Intreview with Paul Smedley (2014/07)

DATE: 2014-07-25 12:12:38

AUTHOR: Paul Smedley

OS/2 GURU Jam Session (2014/07) More interviews, irc-chat discussions, ..

Q: Do you feel changes in Personal Computer usage? What is the tendency?

Drive towards portable devices - smart phones, tablets, laptops. I no longer own a desktop PC, but there are several laptops in the house. Running OS/2 gets harder on modern laptops due to lack of wifi support.

Q: Do you see developers around? Which follow your way and start porting applications to OS/2?

I talk to many developers in #netlabs on the Freenode IRC network. Elbert Pol is a great example of an end user who did what I did and picked up a compiler and decided to see what he could port to OS/2. He's not ported literally hundreds of Qt applications.

Q: What are your current OS/2 projects? What applications do you update?

I tend to work on projects that interest me, or those that people provide feedback on. The surest way to make a developer lose interest in a project is to provide no feedback.

In some cases, I've worked on projects because people have requested a port and provided some financial support towards that project. Examples of projects I maintain/update are Apache2, PHP, MySQL, gcc, Scribus, wpa_supplicant - see http://os2ports.smedley.id.au for more details.

Q: Is is easy port USB drivers and applications to OS/2 today? For example, Fingerprint support library.

I ported libusb-1.0 over 12 months ago. This should make porting things easier, but I'm yet to see any other developers utilise the library, which is disappointing given the considerable number of hours I put into the port

Q: Why Apache/2 and some other ported applications don't work properly in OS/2? (Or work with deviation)

Mainly due to outstanding bugs in klibc. Progress has been slow in getting the runtime updated - note the time delays between libc063 and libc065

Q: What technology / library do we need in OS/2?

Technology - modern wifi support. Library - Qt5.

Q: What to improve in User Interface of OS/2?

No real comments here - my desktop OS of choice these days is Ubuntu - largely due to hardware support.

Q: In the past OS/2 was powerful, later it lost positions, can we expect that it will attract new users again?

In short no. The resources to replace all the bits that need updating simply don't exist.

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