Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by i336_ 3407 days ago
c2 recently became obsessed with "federated wikis" apparently due to some unimpressed person threatening to batch-delete the entire site. Unfortunately JavaScript-based solutions became interesting.

I'm mildly curious what would happen if you tried to build NetSurf on that thing. It compiles for AmigaOS and RISC OS...

1 comments

First let me apologize to the HPUX wizard that will very likely read this for being such a bumbling amateur. Anyway, here I go:

H3:54/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$ gmake --version

GNU Make 3.80

H3:55/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$ /usr/local/bin/gcc --version

gcc (GCC) 3.3.1

H3:55/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$ gmake BUILD_CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc

...

gmake[1]: Entering directory `/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/libwapcaplet'

/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/inst-gtk/share/netsurf-buildsystem /makefiles/Makefile.tools:403: /Makefile.gcc: No such file or directory

/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/inst-gtk/share/netsurf-buildsystem /makefiles/Makefile.tools:460: /Makefile.pkgconfig: No such file or directory

Makefile:40: /Makefile.top: No such file or directory

gmake[1]: * No rule to make target `/Makefile.top'. Stop.

gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/libwapcaplet'

gmake: * [/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/inst-gtk/build-stamp]

Error 2

H3:55/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$

Looks like some serious effort. To put things in context, I can't do remote X to a modern machine as in

$ DISPLAY=desktop:0 xterm&

This gives a protocol error. So instead I'm running it all through a vncserver, which uses a more legacy protocol. I've tried things like

$ Xnest -query hp :1

but I get the classic CDE hour glass, a black screen, and nothing more.

It's honestly nice to pull this thing out of the closet just to remember how unfriendly things used to be. You type a command and realize "well gee, this thing doesn't have that. Alright, here's a more painful way..." You don't even get things like arrow keys and backspace for free. Gotta stty them.

I must admit that I would _really_ love to have a go at this HP-UX box. I have some ideas about how to fix the X issues you mentioned, and getting remote CDE working to your normal X display would be awesome too.

To be completely fair, building NetSurf may simply not be possible with the toolchain the machine has - I was maybe-1/3-joking about trying it :P - but it would be an awesome challenge to see if it could be done. I suspect it may just be possible.

I emailed you.

"Looks like some serious effort. To put things in context, I can't do remote X to a modern machine as in

    "$ DISPLAY=desktop:0 xterm&
"This gives a protocol error."

Ok, I'm impressed. That's the first time I've seen that.

I believe it's relatively recent. I've heard second-hand from better men than me that they are dropping a lot of legacy things. As far as I can tell, the HP is running X11R5. It doesn't do -version, the man page is for R5 and the binary is dated "Oct 27 1997" ... so yeah, 20 years ago. It's honestly a reasonable thing to break.
X11R5 is older than I am (and I'm old). Wow.

That would explain it.