David's Computer Blog

I've been testing out the R1B1 HaikuOS lately, and I decided to test drive its version 5 of LibreOffice. I used LibreWriter to work on a 28 page document that I copied over from the MacOS version of LibreWriter. My experience with LibreWriter is that it works fairly well on Haiku, but there are two problems that I encountered. The first problem is with the Copy-Paste functionality. Initially, if I copied data from either WebPositive or StyledEditor, then it would paste into the LibreWriter document successfully. However, if I performed a copy from within the document and pasted elsewhere in the document, then it seems that LibreWriter would no longer be able to access data from the system clipboard. The only way I found for LibreWriter to access the system clipboard was to restart the App. The second problem I encountered was when I attempted to export a LibreWriter document to a PDF. I encountered an App crash when attempting to export to PDF from the File>Export As... ...

It has been several years since I have experimented with FreeBSD . And lately I have been watching FreeBSD videos on YouTube as well as reading articles about it. I recon that my interest was perked recently when I read that the new package manager in the HaikuOS was designed similarly to the package manager in FreeBSD. So a few days ago, I downloaded the new FreeBSD 12.0 ISO and created a new VM to test it out. Well, I had forgotten that FreeBSD boots to a text login prompt as apposed to a graphical login prompt. As I was exploring and trying to get X working, the process was reminding me of the time several years ago (back in the 90's) when I first started learning Linux. Back then X had to be configured manually by editing config files. Configuring X became a little easier when I discovered xconfigurator . Thankfully the FreeBSD documentation helped walk me through setting up X and getting a window manager installed. I chose Xfce as a window manager since it is l...

The past few days I have been experimenting with the Beta 1 release of HaikuOS. This is how I got PostgreSQL 9.3 to work after installing in from the HaikuDepot App. There is a PostgreSQL 9.6 version but I was not able to get it working. The 9.6 package seems to be incomplete. So for this article, we will use PostgreSQL 9.3 instead. Install PostgreSQL Install PostgreSQL 9.3 from HaikuDepot with the following steps. 1. Open HaikuDepot from the Application menu on Tracker. 2. In the Tools menu, select Refresh repositories . 3. In HaikuDepot, ensure that the check box next to  Show only featured packages is empy and unchecked. 4. In the Search terms text box enter postgre . After a few seconds all the available PostgreSQL packages should be displayed. 5. In the list select postgresql.  To the left of the  Install  button ensure the version is 9.3.5-2. If not, select the next postgresql in the list and see if it is version 9.3.5-2. 6. Click the Ins...

There are several videos on YouTube that demonstrate Haiku, and its BeOS predecessor, running multimedia applications efficiently on old x86 desktop and laptop computers. See Haiku performance videos here and here , and see a performance video of its predecessor BeOS here . Such great performance makes Haiku a great Operating System with which to re-purpose old x86 desktop and laptop computers. See this video for a 10 minute demonstration produced by Be, Inc. for the original BeOS. It is quite impressive what could be done on a Pentium III back in 1999. So if you have any older x86 hardware laying around, then verify that it will still work and then download the new Beta version from Haiku's website and try out the OS. Once Haiku OS is installed, there are other application to download to get productive. For web browsing the OS includes a web browser called WebPositive . It is a decent web browser and should be able to work on most common websites.  For office applicati...

The Beta release of Haiku OS is now available . If you enjoy tinkering with computer software, then give it a try. There are several advantages of Haiku. In this post I'll only discuss one of the advantages.That advantage being the unity of the Haiku platform. I first used Haiku back when it was called BeOS, and I continued to use if for a few years after Be, Inc, which was the original developer, went bankrupt. I had stopped using it mainly because it lacked a decent web browser. Web surfing is a common pastime of mine, and the lack of a good web browser was annoying. But recently the web browser situation has been improving as the Haiku team has been slowly improving its web browser to the point of which is bearable for me. Although this is still an area that needs improvement and could be considered a disadvantage by some, it is much better than it has been in the past and it continues to show improvements. The biggest and, I think, the best advantage of Haiku OS is that i...

Several years ago I discovered the Be Operating System. I really enjoyed using BeOS , as it was commonly named. It was a light-weight OS that was very responsive. I had been an AmigaOS fan for several years, and at the time when I discovered BeOS, the AmigaOS was stagnant and no new hardware was being produced.  But time has progressed and software has been written for a BeOS replacement named Haiku OS . A beta version of the Operating System has been produced and is now available for download .  I will write more about Haiku in the future. For a good video overview of Haiku OS Beta 1, please see Bryan Lunduke's review on YouTube .

My recent success with finding a computer (an old Compaq S6100NX) on which to run Amithlon provided some motivation in connecting and powering up my old A1200 to do some file transfers. I haven't used the A1200 much as it is aging and the hard disk isn't doing well. A hard disk replacement has been on my "To Do" list for quite some time whenever I got around to it. Well, I've now got around to it. My old Commodore 1084 monitor has been MIA until this past Saturday. After finding my 1084 and after finding a dedicated computer that can run my copy of Amithlon, I brought my A1200 and 1084 out of storage. I wasn't sure any of it would still work because it has been several years since it was all powered on and used. I cleared a spot in my office where my MacBook laptops typically sit. While I was reconnecting the A1200 and 1084 I remembered that the small computer desk that it was on was the same desk that I had used the A1200 and 1084 on previously back in 1994...

Aside from the legal issues of the release of Amithlon in the previous Decade, last week I was going through some old CD-ROMs that I had in my collection. I stumbled across my copy of Amithlon. Two weeks ago I was doing some technical reading on the Internet in regard to Amithlon. When I first acquired Amithlon, I wasn't too aware of the differences between it and other emulated Amiga software such as WinUAE and E-UAE. After learning of many of the technical differences, I wanted to give it a try. I had two desktop computers on which I tried to boot Amithlon. An i3 Intel machine and an AMD machine. Amithlon wouldn't boot on either of them. After pondering an hour or two, I remembered that I had an old Pentium 4 Celeron computer (a Compaq S6100NX) that my mother-in-law had given me when they moved houses two years ago. It wasn't running anything anyways, so I decided to plug it in and try to boot Amithlon on it. The result? It booted with no problem! The only problem encoun...

It has been a while since I did some OpenGL testing with AmigaOS. A while meaning two to three years. I had tested OpenGL in WinUAE running AmigaOS 3.X and it worked fairly well in emulation. Since it had been a while that I last experimented with OpenGL, I decided to give it another go. Four months ago I downloaded an OpenGL lesson (the Linux version of lessons 5 and 6) from the NeHe OpenGL Tutorials website. I compiled them on Linux Mint and on Haiku. While it compiled on both Linux and Haiku, it wouldn't display the GL_QUAD object on the version of Haiku that I was running. I worked with the Haiku problem and found that the issue was related to a difference in Haiku versions. Eventually it was AmigaOS' turn. I copied the code for lesson5 to AmiKit 8.5 running AmigaOS 3.X. I downloaded the GCC based Amiga Development Environment (ADE-repack.lha) from Aminet and got it working and compiling. Once GCC was configured and successfully tested, I compiled NeHe's lesson5 code...

Early in 2017 I started having issues with my ASUS laptop. About three months after an upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, the touchpad stopped working. I reported the issue to Microsoft in one of their feedback options, all the while not expecting any resolution. I worked on the laptop with a wireless mouse, but that was annoying having to have an external pointer device. Eventually I stopped using the laptop and switched to using my wife's old MacOS X 10.6 laptop. About two weeks ago I had decided to downgrade from Windows 10 back to Windows 8.1 on the ASUS laptop. I was hoping that the touchpad would still work under Windows 8.1 like it did before the upgrade to Windows 10. The reason for deciding on the downgrade was that I was wanting to try out AmiKit 8 on my laptop. I had installed AmigaOS 4.1 PPC on the ASUS laptop early last year, but OS4 ran slower than what I was wanting, so I installed OS4.1 onto my desktop workstation instead. The laptop has an i3 processor and it...

Linked Lists can be quite annoying and troublesome. I'm working on an animation routine using Linked Lists to hold each frame image. I'm working with the SDL library, and C++ isn't making it much easier.