Web browsing with CosmosEx?

[wongck]

Ah... QWK.... brings back memory....

[joska]

I also used Okami for a while. Powerful stuff, but insanely difficult to set up.

[mikro]

If you run CE_CONF, press F8 (console), can you ping something from the RPi's command line?

I tried it, but how can I stop ping? If I press control+C, CE_CONF return to desktop.

Ouch. :) IIRC ping can be told to do only N pings and stop. But the important thing is whether its working (i.e. your internet setup is OK and it's really a bug in CE_STING) or not (and you have to debug it).

[xfalcon]

Ouch. IIRC ping can be told to do only N pings and stop.

Thanks. That helps a lot.

The internet setup of the Raspberry seems to be Ok.
I have made a screenshot

[mikro]

Great. Now, what happens if you try to ping the same IP/domain from STiNG's ping?

[xfalcon]

Great. Now, what happens if you try to ping the same IP/domain from STiNG's ping?

It's the same . STiNG's ping work, but STiNG's ping can only test the ip.
Is there a tool for testing the nameserver?

[kolli]

Great. Now, what happens if you try to ping the same IP/domain from STiNG's ping?

It's the same . STiNG's ping work, but STiNG's ping can only test the ip.
Is there a tool for testing the nameserver?

I got my CE a few days ago and testet networking today. The PI is connected to the router with ethernet cable and gets it's IP, nameserver etc. by DHCP. Name resolution is working. Litchi ftp runs without any problem. My CAB is the free version, I think it is 1.5, with the only working ca.ovl I could find. Don't know what version that is. Name resolution is working, www.google.de is displayed, few other sites also. But most sites are not displayed at all or even crash CAB.

Is there any other browser for TOS that I could try out?

[simonsunnyboy]

No, CAB is the only browser for SingleTOS and STs. Try accessing mobile versions of websites, most work better with CAB than their full modern versions.

[Shredder11]

On my oldest Pocket PC a Mitac Mio 168 with its XScale ARM CPU, it was really slow and terrible ten years ago let alone these days. However there was a website called Skweezer I could use on it, that converted whatever page you wished to view into a PDA friendly format and that made surfing the web quite useable. So are there any modern day web formatting portals or transcoding sites, that can send modern websites to the Atari in a much faster and more efficient way?

[kolli]

So are there any modern day web formatting portals or transcoding sites, that can send modern websites to the Atari in a much faster and more efficient way?

I found "Web Rendering Proxy", a small python program available for qt webkit here: https://github.com/tenox7/wrp/blob/master/wrp-qt.py.
Running that on my Linux box and configuring CAB for proxy usage, I was able to get some nice monochrome rendered views of modern web sites.

How does it work? Shortly said, it takes the requested web page and renders a picture of it. Then it serves the picture as clickable jpg bitmap to the browser. The only configuration options are pixel width, height and jpg compression rate of the image. I used 600x350 at 50%.

It does not work very good with CAB, because it takes a lot of time for the ST to render a monochrome bitmap of the color jpg. And the clickable bitmap does not work as described. WRP was made for usage with older Netscape Browsers etc. on retro PCs, not for our slow Atari. But the idea is very good!

Maybe some developer could make it into something useful? Could it work better with monochrome GIF instead of color JPG?

Could it be made a part of the CE Software with the PI doing the job?

[Jookie]

Maybe some developer could make it into something useful? Could it work better with monochrome GIF instead of color JPG?
Could it be made a part of the CE Software with the PI doing the job?

Yes, this could be one of the ways how to do it

[kolli]

Yes, this could be one of the ways how to do it

I was up trying the WRP script on the PI in the CE, but the PI has the same IP address as the Atari. So no go for proxying, I think...

[mikro]

Great. Now, what happens if you try to ping the same IP/domain from STiNG's ping?

It's the same . STiNG's ping work, but STiNG's ping can only test the ip.
Is there a tool for testing the nameserver?

Doesn't it provide traceroute? Or that's also IP-only?

Anyways, if you can ping google's IP that indicates that something does work. :) What about FTP? Can you open Litchi, enter an ftp server's IP address and connect?

[mikro]

No, CAB is the only browser for SingleTOS and STs. Try accessing mobile versions of websites, most work better with CAB than their full modern versions.

What about Highwire? I used to test my network card in Falcon with it but I'm not 100% sure the last builds aren't 020+.

[xfalcon]

In the meantime I could make some more tests.

Litchi is working, great.
I have found a ovl for CAB that work partly. Many thanks to kolli. CAB find the website, but it freeze by receiving date. It don't happen with STING.
So it seams to be a problem between ce_sting and the ovl for cab.

I have test three ovl's

CAB.OVL by Oliver Booklage; error #-311
CAB.OVL MINTnet OVerLay; version 1.86 ->The modem disconnected (ok it's TOS not MINT) but the source is existing
CAb.OVL by Dan Ackermann : CAB find the website, but it freeze by receiving date.

[simonsunnyboy]

No, CAB is the only browser for SingleTOS and STs. Try accessing mobile versions of websites, most work better with CAB than their full modern versions.

What about Highwire? I used to test my network card in Falcon with it but I'm not 100% sure the last builds aren't 020+.

IIRC Highwire needs Mintnet and Multitasking....not really up to be run on an ST with CosmosEx.

[mikro]

No way. Highwire supports all network stacks and I'm 100% sure I ran it in plain TOS about 3 weeks ago. Maybe it needed NVDI.

[kolli]

No way. Highwire supports all network stacks and I'm 100% sure I ran it in plain TOS about 3 weeks ago. Maybe it needed NVDI.

Sounds good!
Would you load it up somewhere? The download link on the Highwire web site is down. Only daily builds from 2010 can be downloaded, but they don't work on ST in plain TOS.

[mikro]

Sorry, I have been busy. Well, just checked. I have hw100529 available from their website and it does work with Sting in TOS. I guess you overlooked something: either renaming .000 binary to .prg (I guess default is 030) and/or renaming stik.ovl to network.ovl in MODULES directory. And oh, it does need NVDI.

[simonsunnyboy]

All in all hogging up even a 4MB ST

I personally propose a new browser that is more text-only, a Lynx style one in a GEM window. Opening images on demand with a viewer app, understanding CSS correctly but not necessarily rendering it.

Something like a mobile phone browser from 10 years ago. I'm sure it could more quite well, replace CAB and still run on an ST with Sting. Modern webpages get back to logical definitions of content so the core idea of HTML with a seperate rendering definition could be used to advantage on the ST.

CAB tried to do as much as Netscape 2.0 back in its day. Back to something like ViolaWWW understanding modern CSS input or so....sadly I suck at doing GUI apps and do not have any AES expertise.

[joska]

Maybe some developer could make it into something useful? Could it work better with monochrome GIF instead of color JPG?
Could it be made a part of the CE Software with the PI doing the job?

Yes, this could be one of the ways how to do it

Yes, it's a starting point. But there must be some way to handle forms as well. And the bitmap should be converted to framebuffer format on the server so no conversion is needed on the ST.

With such a solution you don't need a web-browser on the ST at all. Just some advanced image viewer.

[Jookie]

With such a solution you don't need a web-browser on the ST at all. Just some advanced image viewer.

Yes... This is one of the nice projects for CosmosEx - there's no assembler programming required, very little Atari programming, data transfer between Atari and Raspberry Pi is there, the html and image processing libraries and tools for linux (Raspberry Pi) are there, enough power and RAM of RPi are there, only thing needed is... the passionate C (C++) developer who will do it Volunteers, please?

[Gunstick]

I had the crazy idea to run the webbroser on the RaspberryPi, and transmit the graphics to the ST. Maybe just with a dumb program displaying stuff directly read from a linux file via ACSI in an endless loop.

[MiggyMog]

That would be cool, I had the same idea, but you actually have the skill to make it happen! (in fullscreen )

[Estrayk]

After reading this thread, I was a bit scared but I really only have copied CE_STING in AUTO that's all. It works!.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2f6bGN8ApQ