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...

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.

Seeing Macromedia's logo really hit me in the nostalgia.

I remember tinkering with Flash back in the day, even before it was Adobe.

I'm not sure this entire stack has been updated since the early 2000s. No SSL/TLS, and check the HTTP headers.

Wow, that was a thorough testing.