Sorry for the long time since the last update- I wrote one several
months ago, but never released it, as the students were coming to the end
of their projects, and needed a lot of help with them. Also, I had time
free to try and get AmiZilla compiling- so wanted to go hard on that
first, to try and have something more concrete to announce- see below for
my endeavours, such as they are! :)
The students have finished their projects, but they didn't end up with
much concrete work. For the most part, it wasn't really their fault, as
the projects were quite hard for their level of experience, and I was
expecting the AmiZilla team to be able to provide more help than they
did in the end. :/ You also have to remember, the students had a huge
amount of things to get familiar with first- from learning to use Bash
and it's commands, then GCC, and setting up a cross-compiling
environment, before they could even start with Configure and Make for AmiZilla
(which can be scary for the first time!).
What was achieved though, was some documentation, and they sorted out a
lot of little problems compiling the NSPR! Captain Moo-Moo and one of
his students, tracked down lots of missing non-standard Amiga GCC libs,
and commented out a2ixlibrary calls (as we're going back to creating
one static exe first, to simplify things)- this has helped with compiling
the NSPR.
And because of all the research done for and by them, we now have a
reasonable idea of how everything is structured, and what needs doing.
Most of the code is platform independent- we really only have to worry
about the areas that contact the underlying OS. The three main areas where
this happens, is the NSPR, XPCOM and XUL.
So far the NSPR is basically complete- it may need some extra work
tweaking or adding to it. XPCOM needs platform specific code done in
assembler, mainly specifying how an OS passes it's parameters to functions- I
have some assembler experience, so with a little help it shouldn't be
too hard. The other major hurdle is the GUI- oli's GTK-MUI project would
require a lot of extra work to provide all the GTK and GDK functions
AmiZilla needs (as it requires hundreds!). But what we'll try first, is
to compile AmiZilla with the GTK GUI option, use an X-Server and create
GTK/GDK libs from the Linux code, and see if that works. A developer
has used some basic GTK programs to test the X11/GTK on OS4, and reports
that the system runs well, and at a good speed. We could later look at
doing a native XUL layer using MUI/Reaction; but as V3 of Firefox will
dump the XUL GUI layer in favor of using Cairo, and having inbuilt
gadgets/widgets, we may just work towards getting our code into the V3 code
base instead.
We'll be using oli's port of GLib to AROS within AmiZilla- a couple of
other devs have ported it to OS4 and MorphOS- they're in the process of
restructuring the headers, so it will fit into one source tree- but
we'll still need to port it to OS3.
Currently, we have one experienced developer (George Livingston),
playing around with the source code, trying to get bits to compile under
OS4. He's got the NSPR compiling, but the tests aren't working yet- so
some debugging will be involved, but it's great to get it to this stage!
I'm currently attempting to compile a Linux exe of Firefox, just to get
familiar with the process, before trying to cross-compile it for OS3.
So far I've managed to compile the NSPR and test it- I haven't been able
to fully compile a Linux version of Firefox yet, as I suspect the
version of GCC I'm using has a bug in it (the C++ code it doesn't like, is a
quite complex combination of a Template, Namespace and an Iterator!).
Soon, I intend to work on the AmiZilla website, with a new design, and
lots of developer documentation. :-)
If we can get the NSPR passing the tests, then it shouldn't take long
to get it running with a GTK GUI, using an native X11 server. But as it
could take awhile to get it running properly (along with XPCom), I
can't give you any definite time frames on a Beta just yet (it may take 1-3
months, possibly more).
Any developers are welcome to join the project- to join the AmiZilla
list, either send an email to
amizilla-subscribe@yahoogroups.com,
or go to the Yahoo
AmiZilla website (but you need to create a Yahoo account, to do it
this way).
Also, donations to help encourage more developers, are most welcome
too! :)
- DiscreetFX's
AmiZilla donation page.
- AmiZilla home page
Ants
Coordinator
AmiZilla Project
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