The Icon Bar: News and features: ArgoNet's Voyager to become open source?
Posted by Richard Goodwin on 09:44, 28/3/2001
| RISC OS, Internet, Acorn, The Vigay
"The" Paul Vigay, RISC OS support to ISP Argo Net, has posted on Usenet that they are planning to make the Voyager, the ArgoNet internet suite, open source. Posting on argonet.acorn.voyager this morning, Paul has said that he's still looking for some of the source code and has yet to secure full agreement with some of the authors, but the release of the source should happen at the end of the month. Keep watching http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/paul/ for more info, and let's hope it's not an early April Fools joke!
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ArgoNet's Voyager to become open source? |
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(21:30 28/3/2001) rob (00:04 29/3/2001) Rob Kendrick (03:23 29/3/2001) Ian (09:51 29/3/2001) Richard Goodwin (10:42 29/3/2001) Rob Kendrick (14:34 29/3/2001) Richard Goodwin (17:00 29/3/2001) Michael Stubbs (03:22 31/3/2001) Michael Stubbs (03:23 31/3/2001) Rob Kendrick (14:10 31/3/2001) bonze (22:12 31/3/2001) John Campbell Rees (00:20 1/4/2001) Richard Walker (16:06 1/4/2001) Rob Kendrick (16:32 1/4/2001) Rob (23:40 1/4/2001) Richard Goodwin (10:07 2/4/2001)
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Jon Hall |
Message #88410, posted at 21:30, 28/3/2001 |
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I think it's a joke.... |
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rob |
Message #88411, posted at 00:04, 29/3/2001, in reply to message #88410 |
Unregistered user
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I take it that Fresco isn't included ;-)
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Rob Kendrick |
Message #88412, posted at 03:23, 29/3/2001, in reply to message #88411 |
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Nor FreeTerm... |
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Ian |
Message #88413, posted at 09:51, 29/3/2001, in reply to message #88412 |
Unregistered user
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Perhaps this would be a good oportunity to ditch !Fresco and optimise !Voyager to use !Oregano ;-) |
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Richard Goodwin |
Message #88414, posted at 10:42, 29/3/2001, in reply to message #88413 |
Unregistered user
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I know for certain it's not a joke, as I'm actually in the same office for the next few days ;) I have to be a bit careful what I can write up though, as they're paying me for some Perl work. Let's just say I expect to be writing another article tomorrow or monday.
Fresco won't be included (obviously), and there may be a new telnet client (although that might take a while longer).
I think the main point of the excercise is to get work done on the dialler, email client and news client I think. Richard Murray has some hacks, Paul has some hacks, there's the official stuff... put it all together, get a few clever coders interested, and everyone might get a nifty internet suite out of it. |
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Rob Kendrick |
Message #88415, posted at 14:34, 29/3/2001, in reply to message #88414 |
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I assume things like Sergio's PPP won't be included. Also, from the looks of things when I last saw it, Posty needs a rewrite from scratch :) |
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Richard Goodwin |
Message #88416, posted at 17:00, 29/3/2001, in reply to message #88415 |
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Ah yes, I knew I'd forgotten something, PPP.
And yes, Posty needed a complete re-write about five years ago ;) it's nice and easy to use, but the insides are a bit icky and it needs bringing up-to-date. I still use it day-to-day though (because I can hack around any problems ;) |
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Michael Stubbs |
Message #88417, posted at 03:22, 31/3/2001, in reply to message #88416 |
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I thought for a moment that they were throwing Fresco into the public domain. Shame no company feels like paying ANT to port the current version ot RISC OS. I mean, Oregano Networks didn't port Oregano to RISC OS off their own backs, Castle payed them to and subsequently sold thousands of copies.
This news item is good news though :) |
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Michael Stubbs |
Message #88418, posted at 03:23, 31/3/2001, in reply to message #88417 |
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Excuse my crap typing in that last posting please ;) |
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Rob Kendrick |
Message #88419, posted at 14:10, 31/3/2001, in reply to message #88418 |
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Porting Oregano to RISC OS was simpler than porting newer Frescos to RISC OS would be, because Oregano is designed to run under RISC OS anyway. (Just not in a desktop) |
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bonze |
Message #88420, posted at 22:12, 31/3/2001, in reply to message #88419 |
Unregistered user
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So what is a Fresco? and what would it be replacing?
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John Campbell Rees |
Message #88421, posted at 00:20, 1/4/2001, in reply to message #88420 |
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So, if we see something running Oregano, it will always have RISC OS under the bonnet? That's interesting to know. |
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Richard Walker |
Message #88422, posted at 16:06, 1/4/2001, in reply to message #88421 |
Unregistered user
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Chaps... I believe that Fresco is highly portable. Take a look at http://www.ant.co.uk and read all about it. In theory, you could compile it for RISC OS, just like you could with, say, Mozilla or the GIMP.
See, for example, http://www.ant.co.uk/body/press01_27_11_2000.html
As for Oregano (known as 'TV Interactor' in Oregan's STB-world), it's not obvious how portable this is. However, remember that Fresco started off as a RISC OS application, and gradually moved to cross-platform.
I believe that Oregano were once looking into creating their own OS (to replace RISC OS in their STBs), to be called 'Zen RTOS'. It looks like this is dead, and they are keen on this royalty-free Nucleus thing...
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Rob Kendrick |
Message #88423, posted at 16:32, 1/4/2001, in reply to message #88422 |
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Fresco is written entirely in ANSI C, and uses a layer to allow it to talk to the hardware. This is the layer you write when porting it. Mozilla and The GIMP are not written in ANSI C. Porting them would be *much* more complex.
Oregano was originally written to run under RISC OS style NC OS. |
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Rob |
Message #88424, posted at 23:40, 1/4/2001, in reply to message #88423 |
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How much has Fresco improved though? I think the main gripe with Fresco is the bugs. |
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Richard Goodwin |
Message #88425, posted at 10:07, 2/4/2001, in reply to message #88424 |
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Although I'm probably not allowed to say anything, in a job I had earlier this year I had a play with the Windows NT desktop version of Fresco used in developing stuff for set top boxes; although it was an improvement over the RISC OS desktop version (even had table background support of sorts), it looked for all the world like an emulated RISC OS version - complete with blue pointer when you moved over the browser window and anti-aliased fonts. Groovy. |
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The Icon Bar: News and features: ArgoNet's Voyager to become open source? |