The Search for A community Project

Hi guys I am on a quest endorsed by Wendell to try and get a community project started. I am looking for any ideas of a group project that programmers or engineers from this community could work together to accomplish . Anything from a non profit to a small business or even just a cool concept.
@wendell
@Eden
@FaunCB

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Well you could help me work on the Icaros network stack. That'd be neat.

what is that?

http://vmwaros.blogspot.com

Its an amiga-like desktop. Its a pretty great platform to be honest, and with a little work it could be really great. PRoblem is it has shit support for network and the newest of the ATi cards it can support is the HD2400. For Nvidia you can use a 9800 but I dunno about anything higher than that.

Its pretty great though. Its dependant on clockspeed and sse / sse-like instructions. You don't need AVX or similar bullshit. Even 3DNow! is super useful. Its purpose is to bring the amiga desktop to the modern x86 computer and its best feature is the ability to use 8mb ram at idle and use any processor P3 and up. What I would like to do is work on GPU and wifi drivers, then laptop support starting with the old macbooks. Sadly though there aren't many people working on the driver stack and even less working on the apps that are requested to be ported. But the 2.2.13 release came out at christmas so thats good at least.

As for apps I want to port over something like shotcut, openshot, or kdenlive, libreoffice, VLC, and a light web browser (or add to OWB so its somewhat competent). Theres not a lot of devs working on it currently, just the base devs fiddling with stuff when they have time.

I haven't done anything with drivers before but I have done a decent amount of C programming and limited knowledge of system architecture. What driver would you want work done on first?

Another project idea is a linux app to handle GPU switching with the intel iGPU to dGPU setups. I can't for the life of me get PRIME to work on my Y40-70 and an app that would just do it for me would be great. Maybe select games to push straight to the dGPU or something in a window and maybe launch them from there. Even make a KDE applet that pops up as a menu, and a gnome applet thats a drop down. I don't want to do command line bullshit to make my 250X work in my laptop.

Hmmmmm, probably starting with some old wireless G card like a DLink G650 PCMCIA card or some dumb shit. I mean I could even just leave a machine plugged in with the remote desktop server running to test for anyone to work on it.

By the way its a system completely built on C.

I have no idea how wifi works but I like C. Would you know where I could get the source code for the driver? I might not be the best for the job since I have never done driver work before so maby if we could bring some people that has before I could work with them. Until then I will take a look.

I've done it before I'm just bored of digging through shit. I was just going to port the driver stack for the intel chips over from linux and adapt it to the icaros stack.

I would be curious to see the code for this. Have you considered a design pattern so that changing it in the future wouldn't require a lot of effort?

Uhh, well seeing as how the code base for the drivers is exactly the same as original AmigaOS, where everything is loaded in with the kernel and changes take a reboot like in windows, it'll be a pain in the ass to change either way. Its not a mdular kernel.

Plus is though that drivers are drop in libs sometiwes, so it may be possible to drop it in just like a filetype. That, though, I don't know how it would work....

There is relatively open documentation and lots of info on their forums (AROS-Exec)

Maby I will consider it. I am trying to get some other CS people together thought to do a community project so if we could get some more people to contribute.

this may sound simple but why dont you make a Level1Linux distro?
i mean this is a kickass community from what ive seen, i can only imagine what yall could come up with

or something to fix bricked original xbox hard drives when hotswapping doesnt work. ok im being selfish with that one but still itd ALSO be really great...

2 Likes

I've suggested a shared opensuse studio account before but :I

well, theyre asking now.....i think just need to get enough other people in on it....im fairly new here wouldnt even know where to start but....maybe...?

Setting up our own game servers? maybe a Counter Strike, Quake etc, maybe get a password to these servers after doing a certain task on the forum. I would think that is a good idea, and it could allow for a twitch stream / YouTube series to spawn, plus I make Counter Strike maps, so I would like if they were actually played on :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

I'm not sure a distro is a good idea. We have to many, and to do it properly would require emense work, I'm not sure we have an area to fill that isn't already filled.

A shared project around code would be interesting, especially with people who have knowledge to share as I've a lot to learn (especially in C).

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When I said that I got my butt kicked. :stuck_out_tongue:

I would be all for a Level1Linux distro.

Possible Ideas


  • Or helping out an existing Linux distro.

  • Or maybe we could help out the guys that create the BFS and/or BFQ scheduler ( BFQ is programmed by university students in Italy, and of course by others from around the world )

  • Or help out OpenOffice. Even tho they say they are not dying, they kinda are. We could provide that motivational spark. They have a great forum community that provides excellent help. It would be sad to see them kick the bucket.

  • Or help out Discourse.

  • Or Clang. Then maybe one of you could get found and work for one of them big companies. Or maybe if you are in high school you could get into a Uni.

    • A little excerpt from the wiki of contributors to Clang.

Its contributors include Apple, Microsoft, Google, ARM, Sony, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

  • Or even a project that supports a hobby OS. There are plenty of small hobby OS' out there. RedoxOS is cool as well as Haiku and KolibriOS/MenuetOS.

RedoxOS website and wiki

https://www.redox-os.org/

Haiku website and wiki

https://www.haiku-os.org/

MenuetOS website and wiki

http://www.menuetos.net/

kolibriOS website and wiki

http://kolibrios.org/en/

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My current focus is on web applications. Read: single page applications using Angular framework. I would prefer to contribute from this area.

I can code C but it is basic stuff. We are talking Fizz Buzz level.

1 Like