Here I'm republishing an old blog post of mine originally from December 2014. The article has been slightly improved.
2014 is nearly over and for the last post this year I have something special for you again. Last year I posted an interview with the EDE developer and I thought that another interview would conclude this year of blogging quite fine.
Interview with the EDE developer (2013 article)
In the previous post I reviewed Nanolinux (and two years ago XFDOS). Since I was in mail contact with the author about another project as well, it suggested itself that I'd ask him if he'd agree to give me an interview. He did!
So here's an interview with Georg Potthast (known for a variety of projects: DOSUSB, Nanolinux and Netrider - to just name some of them) about his projects, the FLTK toolkit, DOS and developing Open Source software in general. Enjoy!
The following interview was conducted via email.
Please introduce yourself first: How old are you and where are you from?
I am 61 years old and live in Ahlen, Germany. This is about 30 minutes drive from Dortmund where they used to brew beer and where the BVB Dortmund soccer team is currently struggling.
Do you have any hobbies which have nothing to do with the IT sector?
Not really. I did some Genealogy, which has to do a lot with IT these days. But now I have several IT projects I am working on.
You're involved in the FreeDOS community and have put a lot of effort into XFDOS. A lot of people shake their heads and mumble something like "It's 2014 now and not 1994..." - you know the score. What is your motivation to keep DOS alive?
I have been using DOS for a long time and wish it would not go away completely. So I developed these DOS applications, hoping to get more people to use DOS. But I have to agree that I have not been successful with that.
Potential software developers find only very few users for their applications which is demotivating. Also there is simply no hardware available today that is limited so much that you better use DOS on it. Everything is 32/64 bit, has at least 4 GB of memory and terabytes of disk space. And even the desktop PC market is suffering from people moving to tablets and smartphones.
People are still buying my DOSUSB driver frequently. They are using it mostly for embedded applications which shall not be ported to a different operating system for one reason or another.
Do you have any current plans regarding DOS?
I usually port my FLTK applications to DOS if it is not too much effort to do so. So they are available for Linux, Windows and DOS. Such as my FlDev IDE.
Recently I made a Qemu/FreeDOS bundle named DOS4WIN64 that you can run as an application on any Windows 7/8 machine. This includes XFDOS. I see this as a path to run 16bit applications on 64bit Windows.
How complicated and time consuming is porting FLTK applications from Linux to DOS or vice versa?
It depends on the size and the dependencies on external libraries. I usually run ./configure on Linux and then copy the makefile to DOS where I replace -lXlib with -lNXlib plus -lnano-X. Then, provided the required external libraries could be downloaded from the djgpp site, it will compile if the makefile is not too complicated (recursive). Sometimes I also compile needed libraries for DOS which is usually not difficult if they have a command line interface.
You then have to test if all the features of the application work on DOS and make some adjustments here and there. Often you can use the Windows branch if available for the path definitions.
Porting DOS applications to Linux can be more complicated than vice versa.
For how long have you been using Linux?
I have been using Linux on and off. I began using SCO-Unix. However, I did not like setting things up with configuration files (case sensitive) scattered over many directories. It took me over a week to get serial communications to work to connect a modem. When I asked Linux developers for help they recommended to recompile the kernel first - which means they did not know how to do that either. So I returned to DOS at that time. But I have been using Linux a lot for several years now.
What is your distribution of choice and why?
I mainly use SUSE but I think Ubuntu may work just as well. This may sound dull but you do not have to spend time on adding drivers to the operating system or porting the libraries you need. The mainstream Linux distributions are well tested and documented and you do not have to spend the time to tailor the distro to your needs. They do just much more than you need so you are all set to start right away.
My own distro, Nanolinux, is a specialized distro which is meant to show how small a working Linux distro can be. It can be used on a flash disk, as an embedded system, a download on demand system or to quickly switch to Linux from within Windows.
However, if you have a 2 Terabyte hard disk available I would not use Nanolinux as the main distribution.
Which programming languages do you prefer?
I like Assembler. To be able to use X11 and FLTK I learned C and C++ which I currently use. I have not done any assembler in a while though.
You seem to like the idea of minimalism. Do you do use those minimalist applications on a daily base or are they more of a nice hobby?
Having a DOS and assembler background I always try not use more disk space than necessary. Programming is just my hobby.
Many of your projects use the FLTK toolkit. Why did you choose this one and not e.g. FOX?
I had ported Nano-X to DOS to provide an Xlib alternative for DOS developers. In addition I ported FLTK to DOS as well since FLTK can be used on the basis of Nano-X. So I am now used to FLTK.
Compared to the more common toolkits, FLTK suffers from a lack of applications. Which three FLTK applications that don't exist (yet) do you miss the most?
I think FLTK is a GUI toolkit for developers, so it is not so important what applications are available based on FLTK.
If you look at my Nanolinux - given I add the NetRider browser and my FlMail program to the distro - it comes with all the main office applications done in FLTK. However, the quality of these applications is not as good as Libre Office, Firefox or Gimp. I do not expect anyone to write Libre Office with a FLTK GUI.
When you awake at night, a strange light surrounds you. The good FOSS fairy floats in the air before you! She can do absolutely everything FOSS related; whether it's FLTK 3 being completed and released this year, a packaging standard that all Linux distros agree on or something a bit less unlikely. 😉 She grants you three wishes!
As with FLTK 3 I wish it would change its name and the development would concentrate on FLTK 1.3.
Regarding the floating fairy I would wish the internet would be used by nice and friendly people only. Currently I see it endangered by massive spam, viruses, criminals and even cyber war as North Korea apparently did regarding the movie the ruling dictator wanted to stop being shown.
Back to serious. What do you think: Why is FLTK such a little known toolkit? And what could be done about that?
I do not think it is little known, just most people use GTK and so this is the "market leader". If you work in a professional team this will usually decide to go for GTK since most members will be familiar with that.
What could be done about that? If KDE and Gnome would be based on FLTK I think the situation will change.
From your perspective of a developer: What do you miss about FLTK that the toolkit really should provide?
Frankly speaking, as a DOS developer the alternative would be to write your own GUI. And FLTK provides more features than you could ever develop on your own.
What I do not like is the lack of support for third party schemes. Dimitrj, a Russian FLTK developer who frequently posts as "kdiman" on the FLTK forums, created a very nice Oxy scheme. But it is not added to FLTK since the developers do not have the time to test all the changes he made to make FLTK look that good.
What do you think about the unfortunate FLTK 2 and the direction of FLTK 3?
I think these branches have been very unfortunate for FLTK. Many developers expected FLTK 2 to supersede FLTK 1.1 and waited for FLTK 2 to finish before developing an FLTK application. But FLTK 2 never got into a state where it could replace FLTK 1.1. Now the same seems to happen with FLTK 3.
So they should have named FLTK2/3 the XYZ-Toolkit and not FLTK 2 to avoid stopping people to choose FLTK 1.1.
Currently there is no development on FLTK 2/3 that I am aware of and I think the developers should concentrate on one version only. FLTK 1.3 works very well and does all that you need as a software developer as far as I can say.
Somebody with a bit of programming experience and some free time would like to get into FLTK. Any tips for him/her?
I wrote a tutorial which should allow even beginners in C++ programming to use FLTK successfully.
Georg's FLTK tutorial (Internet Archive)
You've written quite a number of such applications yourself. Which of your projects is the most popular one (in terms of downloads or feedback)?
This is the Nanolinux distro. It has been downloaded 30.000 times this year.
NanoLinux... Can you describe what it is?
Let me cite Distrowatch, I cannot describe it better: Nanolinux is an open-source, free and very lightweight Linux distribution that requires only 14 MB of disk space. It includes tiny versions of the most common desktop applications and several games. It is based on the "MicroCore" edition of the Tiny Core Linux distribution. Nanolinux uses BusyBox, Nano-X instead of X.Org, FLTK 1.3.x as the default GUI toolkit, and the super-lightweight SLWM window manager. The included applications are mainly based on FLTK.
After compiling the XFDOS distro I thought I would gain more users if I would port it to Linux. The size makes Nanolinux quite different from the others and I got a lot of downloads and reviews for it.
The project is based on TinyCore which makes use of FLTK itself. Is that the reason you chose this distro?
TinyCore was done by the former main developer of Damn Small Linux. So he had a lot of experience and did set up a very stable distro. Since I wanted to make a very small distro this was a good choice to use as a base. And I did not have to start from scratch and test that part of the distro forever.
NanoLinux uses an alternative windowing system. What can you tell us about the differences between NanoX and Xorg's X11?
Nano-X is simply a tiny Xlib compatible library which has been used in a number of embedded Linux projects. Development started about 15 years ago as far as I recall. At that time many Linux application developers used X11 directly and therefore were willing to use an alternative like nano-X for their projects.
Since nano-X is not fully compatible to X11, a wrapper called NXlib was developed, which provides this compatibility and allows to base FLTK and other X11 applications on nano-X without code change. The compatibility is not 100% of cause, but it is sufficient for FLTK and many X11 applications.
Since nano-X supported DOS in the early days I took this library and ported the current version to DOS again.
The project you are working on currently is NetRider, a browser based on webkit and FLTK. Please tell us how you came up with the idea for it.
Over the years I looked at other browser applications and thought how I could build my own browser, just out of interest. Finally Laura, another developer from the US, and I discussed it together. She came up with additional ideas and thoughts. That made me have a go at WebKit with FLTK.
What are your aims for NetRider?
I wanted to add a better browser to my Nanolinux distro replacing the Dillo browser. Also, as a FLTK user I wanted to provide a FLTK GUI for the WebKit package as an alternative to GTK and Qt.
There's also the Fifth project which has quite similar aims at first sight. Why don't you work together?
Lauri, the author of Fifth, and I started out about the same time with our FLTK browser projects, not knowing of each other's plans. Now our projects run in parallel. Even though we both use FLTK, the projects are quite different.
We have not discussed working together yet and our objectives are different. He wants to write an Opera compatible browser and competes with the Otter browser while I am satisfied to come up with something better than Dillo.
I did not ask Lauri whether he thinks we should combine the projects. I am also not sure if this would help us both because we implemented different WebKit APIs for our browsers so we would have to make a WebKit library featuring two APIs. This could be done though. Also he is not interested in supporting Windows which Laura and I want to support.
Would you say that NetRider is your biggest project so far? And what plans do you have for it?
Setting up Nanolinux and developing/porting all the applications for it was a big project too, and I plan to make a new release beginning of next year.
As with NetRider it depends if people like to use it or are interested to develop for / port it. Depending on the feedback I will make my plans. Recently I added some of the observations I got from beta testers, did support for additional languages, initial printing support etc.
The last one is yours: Which question would you have liked me to ask in addition to those and what is the answer to it?
I think you already asked more questions than I would have been able to come up with. Thank you for the interesting questions.
Thanks a lot Georg, for answering these questions! Best wishes for your current and future projects!
I have a few things in mind… But I don’t know yet which one I’ll write about next. A happy new year to all my readers!