Aquileo | Recent changes to Project The NitrOS-9 Project

Aquileo | Speech Sound driver

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 19:00:38 -0000

Hi;
Just wanted to share my personal disappointment., so perhaps it turns out into an asset for someone.
Back in the day I tried and failed at building a driver to echo text to the The Speech/Sound Cartridge.
In Basic it was just a matter of poking text into a data memory location, and back in the day I wrote an OS-9 driver that did just that but never worked.

Aquileo | For the love of God, move to GitHub.

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 21:01:47 -0000

Didn't you read https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ ? I don't think NitrOS-9 is a flag-ship free-software project, or has to follow FSF, but I do sympathize with many of the points :)

Anyway, there are two things here. 1) Converting to git - I am all for that. But only after next NitrOS-9 release. I want to check and possibly do the conversion myself, I do care about history preservation and attribution. 2) Then where to host, possibly move from SF. It can also be multiple places, git is decentralized. It is indeed easy to review and comment on code changes on GitHub. For what we would need prominence, I don't know :)

I am working down a backlog of open-source work right now, I hope to get to ToolShed and NitrOS-9 soon, after some more "useful" (and prominent?) projects.

Aquileo | For the love of God, move to GitHub.

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 12:39:08 -0000

Tormod,

It's time to move this project to GitHub. Here are my big two reasons:

Visiblity - all of the momentum in open source projects is there. I think the NitrOS-9 project officially being hosted on GitHub would increase its prominence.
Collaboration - GitHub has a great interface for managing for pull requests which are great for change management. It's easy to see what has changed through the web interface. Viewing diffs is elegant and clear, as is commenting on those changes.

There's already one "fork" of NitrOS-9 on GitHub: https://github.com/n6il/nitros9. Just make it official.

Aquileo | Project Status

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 08:21:31 -0000

It is a long-lived project, and it is not unusual that it is quiet some months (or years!) at a time. It can also be considered mature, and more maintained than further developed.

Personally I have been hoping to get to make a new release for a while, and merge in some changes from the Ease of Use project, but I haven't had much time for retro-computing over the last years. Still hoping to get to this "soon". This would also include some release management coordination with ToolShed.

Otherwise, if you're mainly interested in CoCo 3, please follow and help out on the development of EoU. The NitrOS-9 project has a wider scope with support for more machines and hardware, but the idea is that most core improvements in EoU will trickle into NitrOS-9 sooner or later.

Aquileo | Project Status

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 01:02:33 -0000

Is this project dead? I have not seen any activity in a LONG time.

Aquileo | #35 makefiles fail is NITROS9DIR path has spaces in it.

Sun, 03 Jul 2022 22:09:59 -0000

https://nitros9.sourceforge.io/wiki/index.php/Building_NitrOS9
It says "prebuilt" but that means binaries.

Unix/etc allow spaces in filenames, but many tools are not so much at ease with it. If you do shell scripting, adding quotation marks all over (except where you shouldn't) works. If you do Makefiles, it is well, complicated.

Aquileo | #35 makefiles fail is NITROS9DIR path has spaces in it.

Sun, 03 Jul 2022 21:20:36 -0000

anyone with a modern Window PC would have defaulted to OneDrive

Good grief, I hope you are not right, and I think you aren't.

One could say that anyone with a Windows PC usually doesn't build his own software, and that's why we are providing release and snapshot binaries :)

And if it can be fixed simply by adding quotes around things in makefiles, why don't we just do that and solve it for everyone?

I think you tried that 2 years ago, and I think it is not so easy. GNU Make doesn't deal well with spaces, period. You will often see people install things like Cygwin, Python or many other cross-platform things on their C:\ root and that is for a reason. But here, also C:\Users\allen\Documents\nitros9 or anything like this will work too. Even Microsoft went way from using "Documents & Settings" or whatever stupid standard path element they used in the '95 days.

Anyway I think using relative paths instead of NITROS9DIR is a better way to solve this.

The days of paths without spaces is long, long gone.

That's why we like retro-computing!

At the very least, this needs to be documented.

Yes, please. If you don't have wiki access just post the text here and I'll copy it it.

Aquileo | #35 makefiles fail is NITROS9DIR path has spaces in it.

Sun, 03 Jul 2022 20:12:51 -0000

Is this documented?

As it stands today, anyone with a modern Window PC would have defaulted to OneDrive, and would be unable to build this.

Likewise, anyone with a modern Mac, with iCloud on by default, would be unable to build this.

At the very least, this needs to be documented. I consider myself a far more advanced user than most, and it's bitten me on both operating systems.

And if it can be fixed simply by adding quotes around things in makefiles, why don't we just do that and solve it for everyone?

The days of paths without spaces is long, long gone. That's been supported by OSes for so long, it's stunning this is still an issue with so many programs -- including commercial ones that cost $$$$.

Aquileo | #35 makefiles fail is NITROS9DIR path has spaces in it.

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 10:31:59 -0000

Go to a folder with no spaces in it, i.e. /Users/allen then create a soft link there:

cd
ln -s /Volumes/WhatNot/With Spaces/etc/nitros-9
cd nitros-9
make

Aquileo | #35 makefiles fail is NITROS9DIR path has spaces in it.

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 02:42:22 -0000

This hit me again tonight when I started trying to get NitrOS9 going ;-) It's the first time I've tried to build from an iCloud drive on Mac, and it has the same issue any Windows system with OneDrive has -- space in the path name, darnit.