One of the best things about working on #plptools is that I get to work with developers who have far more experience in commercial software development than I do. I'm learning all the time and feel really grateful for it.*

On the flipside, it's solidified my want to work on the new #Psion #SIBOSDK by myself. I don't want collaborators for that project right now. Helpful hints and guidance is very much welcome, but I want to grow with this project in my own way. And yes, that will mean the development of the SDK will be slower. This might seem selfish in the grand scheme of FOSS development, but I know is the right thing for me right now.

* To be clear, I'm not a useless third wheel on the project. I have my things I'm good at. And I have ✨opinions✨! But still, always learning!

Riddle me this, Fediverse.

#plptools uses #gnulib. On #FreeBSD 14.x, everything compiles fine. However, on FreeBSD 15.0, I get the following error:

What's changed between 14 and 15 that would cause this? More likely, what's confused gnulib in FreeBSD 15?

#AskFedi #hivemind #LazyWeb

#plptools, the #Psion comms suite for Linux and other *NIX-related OSes (see below), is currently going through an overhaul.

We're currently wading through almost 30 years of technical debt, improving thread safety and code readability. Slowly, we're reintroducing abandoned features and adding new ones.

My co-conspirators @jbmorley and @captfab have done the bulk of the work on this. I've been doing a lot of testing with physical hardware, as well as working on the ports and getting a better understanding of the current build system (autotools with gnulib) to get a clearer idea of whether it still works for the project today.

Primary supported OSes:

• Linux
• macOS

Secondary supported OSes (stable, but support will be slower):

• #FreeBSD 14.x
• #NetBSD
• #HaikuOS (With caveats - Haiku's USB serial is broken, but the the main Git branch of plptools has a workaround. Regular hardware RS232 works well.)

Coming soon:

• #OpenBSD (mostly works, but some stability issues in plpftp)
• FreeBSD 15.0 (won't compile, possibly an issue with gnulib)

In the distant future:

• Windows

The current main branch feels stable to us (more stable than the last release). If you want to give it a go, you can get it from here:

https://github.com/plptools/plptools

I currently have #Obsidian installed via #ArchLinux's repos. I've just noticed that it depends on FUSE 2†, and I'm not sure why.

I have read that the AppImage version needs it, but I thought that's more because of AppImage than Obsidian.

So, questions:

† I noticed this because we're currently trying to migrate #plptools from FUSE 2 to FUSE 3, and I was wondering what other things on my system depended on FUSE 2.

EDIT: Solved! Thank you to @penguin42 for the guidance. I now have an aarch64 VM running Debian and "host-only" networking so I can SSH in easily. My next challenge will be to do the same with Arch or Alpine, and get serial over TCP or a UNIX socket working.

#HIVEMIND: Does anyone have any tips on running ARM VMs on AMD64? Preferably both 32 and 64-bit.

I've got a few apps (#plptools, the new #SIBOSDK) that I'd like to be able to compile and test while on-the-go.

I'm guessing something like #qemu would do the job, but I don't know where to begin.

#LazyWeb

Current main projects:

• #ecobj: Another piece of the #Psion SIBO SDK rewrite puzzle. ECOBJ.EXE takes an Intel OMF file (.OBJ) for a class and moves the class descriptor data into the code segment. I think I might be able to get this working by the end of the year.
• Get my website running #GoHugo (this is almost done!).
• #CTRAN: Still haven't started writing unit tests. Also, complete a full write-up of what it took to get the thing working.
• Research into compilers: I'm nowhere near ready to start yet, but I'm learning as much as I can.

Upcoming projects:

• #siboimg: Rewrite in Pascal, and add the ability to create and modify FEFS images.
• #plptools: I'd like to see two-way transfer working for EPOC16 -- I'm sure I'll need the help of the rest of the maintainers to get this working. I can't do much with the #HaikuOS port until the USB serial drivers are "fixed" (hardware flow control added) -- I don't think I have the skills for this, so it'll have to wait until some kind soul has the time to work on it.
• #PsiDrive: Add a ~17V boost converter to allow writing to Flash SSDs.
• NAS/home server: Rebuild or replacement of DEATH, my Microserver gen8. It's been over 18 months since DEATH's RAID died. It's lead me to thinking that maybe I don't need the sort of server I thought I need. TBD.

Maybe next year, maybe not:

• New Psion SSD with RP2350: I doubt I'll get anything made, but I'd like to experiment to see what can be done with the protocol.
• Rewrite the rest of the SIBO C SDK tools.
• Compiler: Recreation of the JPI/Clarion TopSpeed C compiler, targeting the SIBO/EPOC16 platform (8086 and V30). I was hoping to get going with this around July this year, but it just didn't happen. This is my Everest. I know I'm not ready yet. I need to train for it.
• Vine: New word processor for EPOC16. Trying to start this project in 2023 lead me to rewriting the SDK, so we're quite some way away from getting this done.
• Research into Objective-C: Not Foundation, just the syntax. For compiler shenanigans.

I've really struggled to get going with projects this year. That's fine, these things happen. But I'd like to find better ways to cope next year so that I can make a little more progress.

#plptools update!

Ports

The #HaikuOS port works with on-board serial ports. However, USB RS232 adapters do not work. This is because of an issue with the usb_serial driver in Haiku. DTR and RTS can't be set reliably, and RTS and CTS can't be detected.

There is still one small issue with the Haiku port. A GNU regex test in ./configure is segfaulting. This can be bypassed, but we want it fixed. That involves delving into autotools, so we'll see how I get on!

Both the #FreeBSD and #NetBSD ports are working! With a combination of brute force and the help of a few FediFolk, these now compile. (I did think that the NetBSD port was severely broken, but I was just using the wrong serial device. Sigh.)

MacOS is still stable and happy.

We're not planning on adding any more ports unless people really beg!

Bugs

Just a handful of small fixes, like plpftp not segfaulting any more when you press CTRL-C. I might have introduced a new bug into plpftp regarding Daylight Savings... I'll try to fix that soon. In my defence, Psion's implementation of DST is, to put it politely, rudimentary.

#Psion #retrocomputing #retrodev

We have a working #plptools port for #FreeBSD!

#retrocomputing #retrodev #psion #runbsd

#NetBSD people! I need some help. (EDIT: Answer found! Thank you, @kaveman !)

I'm trying to update the port of an old piece of software (#plptools), but I'm having issues with linking it to readline.

It's detecting libedit first, even though FSF readline is installed. The following does nothing:

Adding LIBS="-lreadline" throws an error early on in ./configure, saying that it can't find libreadline.so.8.

Do you have any advice at all?

The GitHub issue is here: https://github.com/plptools/plptools/issues/22#issuecomment-2954149613

#runbsd #bsd