# Ports from Unix to OS/2

## General

On this page you can find and download programs and applications which I have compiled for XFree86/OS2. I am not a programmer and in most cases this was very easy. Just a xmkmf -a and so on. Anyway, some others took me some time and there were also some programs, where I had no success. I am saying this, because I want to encourage you just to try to compile the programs you need instead of looking on the ported software page and waiting for your app.

My aim was to get an environment under XFree86/os2, where I can do my work and don't have to switch back to the pm. This means especially LaTeX and internet-stuff. So if you try out some of the programs here, you will see, that they are not perfect (in fact some a very instabil). But in a way they work for me. I am reading news with knews since months and think it is one of the finest news-readers (funny word, I read the news not the news-reader) for os2. Also I prefer using Xdvi instead of dvipm, because of its ability to display postscript.

Expect the programs here to look for typical unix apps like sh.exe, rm.exe etc. You should have them in your path. From my point of view it is also a good idea, to have a unix like directory structure with all the essentials under /usr and so on. It may be, that this is still hard-coded in a lot of programs on this page. Another hint would be to have the /usr tree, the /home tree with your data, the /emx tree, the /emtex tree and the /xfree86 tree on one drive, because most xfree86 apps have never heard something about drive-letters (and I told only a view about this stupid old DOS-thing). I played some time with tvfs to ship around this problem, but got some new problems when ill-behaved programs tried to create files at the root level of the tvfs drive or when I tried to dump emacs. So now I am using ext2fs, which gives me also the ability to create links and is very stable (for me).

Of course, this page would be a good place to say thank you to all the people who wrote all the applications here, they have done the work and to Eberhard Mattes and Holger Veit for creating this great Unix-like environment for os/2.

## Programs ported to XFree86/OS2

### Internet stuff

- knews (250k), the well-known GUI-Newsreader.

This was one of my first ports. I use it off-line together with changi.

- Mosaic (537k), guess what: the web browser.

Because there is still no motif for os/2 available, I compiled it with lesstif, I think you need the latest version, which should be available on http://www.ime.rwth-aachen.de/~michael/os2/lt/lesstif.html. The compiled version is the last 2.7b5 beta prerelease version, which has many bugs.

If you encounter tons of error messages at startup, check for the file XKeysymDB in your xfree86/lib/X11 directory. This file is now also in the *.zip archiv.

If you have a unix like shell (like sh.exe from pdksh.zip on leo), you should set the environment variable COMSPEC to this shell before starting mosaic, because cmd.exe will not understand the unix like statements which mosaic uses to start other processes like helper apps.

There are also bugs in lesstif, so Mosaic will disappear from time to time, when trying to display more complicated web-pages. But it looks nice and you can browse leo and other important pages directly from your X11 desktop. I have not spent to much time into the configuration, but a lot of things are configurable, so you should look in the NCSA Documentation, which is available on the web.

- XFMail (293k), A GUI-Mailprogram.

Version 1.1. You need latest xforms 0.86 to use it. While my port of XFMail 1.0 seemed to be unstable and only partially functional, it looks like this one is pretty stable und usable. XFMail is a feature-rich mail client with support for PGP, MIME and other Goodies.

- Xarchie (149k), An archie Client

This one seems to work fine.

### Text related stuff

- Xdvi(125k), the well-known dvi-viewer.

I have made some enhancements to this port (compared to my previous port): Xdvi can no handle drive-letters in filenames, can call gsftopk and display postscript. Therefore, you need a special version of ghostscript (1317k), which can handle the -sDEVICE=x11 switch. The port provided here is the recent version 4.03 (fonts not included) and can also use the -sDEVICE=os2pm switch to display on the presentation manager. But there seems to be a problem with ghostview for pm (gvpm), which cannot load my dll (it gets an error in DosLoadModule(), I and also Russel Lang have no Idea why). So I have patched the gvpm source (I just try to load the dll a second time, which works), you can download the patched file gvpdll.c (13k) here and then recompile gvpm with this file, if you want to use xdvi and gvpm with one version of ghostscript. Also you should set the gs_lib environment variable properly, if you have not done so allready.

This is the ghostscript homepage, where you might look for further information.

If you have set these things up correctly, you should also be able to use

- ghostview (86k)

To preview postscript files on your X11 desktop. If you have downloaded my earlier port, you should really get this one, it fixes the problem of long loading times with large documents.

- GV (184k)

This is an enhanced version of ghostview, which is a little bit slower, but has some features (for example anti-aliasing), which are missing in ghostview. It requires Xaw3d, os Xaw95 (see below).

- Xpdf (174k) A PDF Previewer

This is an alternative to the big acrobat reader and can be used as helper application for mosaic.

### Games

- Xpool(22k), a pool-billard simulator.

There is not much to say to this one. I think it compiled out of the box, like

- Xpacman(13k)

I used this one to show somebody, how easy porting Xapps to OS/2 is. But I don't know how to use this program (I mean the right keys and so on), so for me it is not very usefull. Maybe for you ?

Then we have:

- Xboard and gnuchess (1059k), now in one package: The chess game

The Errors of the previous version are (hopefully) corrected now. Warning: Gnuchessx will need a powerfull computer !

Two other games I compiled are Xpilot, where I could not get the client talking to my local server, so it is not here. But if you need it, compile it yourself, the client is talking fine to remote servers. And Xrisk, this one compiled also fine (maybe some small changes), but drive letters were built into the source-code during compilation and so my copy will be useless for you. Compile it, if you want to play !

### Other Stuff

- xdaliclock(30k), another clock for X, but pretty nice.
- Xli(330k), an image viewer.

- Xaw95 (129k)

A must, if you are using gnuwget(404k) The Gnu Web retriever. With Full source Code.

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