OpenGEM > Interviews > Blair Campbell
Blair is a major contributor to the FreeDOS project, helping to port a lot of GPL applications from other operating system environments, and testing systems like OpenGEM.
Who are you, and where do you live?
Blair Campbell, British Columbia, Canada.
What's your favourite operating system?
GNU/Linux as a desktop OS for faster computers, and if FreeDOS had
multitasking and more network card drivers, it would probably be my
favorite OS for slower computers (like a P133). However, until my NIC
is supported and there is multitasking, Win98 seems to be the best
choice for my P133.
How did you find out about OpenGEM?
Through FreeDOS.org.
What's your involvement with OpenGEM?
I like to test things and point out things that could be improved or
extra features that could be added.
What's your favourite thing about OpenGEM?
It's small, fast, and 16-bit.
In your opinion, what is OpenGEM best suited for?
Bringing older computers back to life and giving FreeDOS added momentum.
What would you like to see in OpenGEM in the future?
A multitasking API, and it would be especially nice if this
implemented pthreads, so that multithreading apps could be ported more
easily from Windows or Linux. Also, (this would be impossible (or
highly unlikely), but really nice) a GTK-compatible set of headers and
a Windows-compatible set of headers that would make porting GTK 1 and
Windows 3.1 apps to GEM very easy; this could make the move from
Windows 3.1 on MS-DOS to GEM on FreeDOS much easier, and would
encourage more software development. Also, I am interested in seeing
a much easier API for GEM (I looked at a hello world program's source
code for GEM and decided that GEM programming will have to wait until
I am better :) ), something like the API that was mentioned for ATARI
GEM that is open-source. I would personally like to make some GEM
frontends to software (like Ghostscript or ZIP), but I have found
GEScript to be buggy (and Heinz said that he wouldn't be likely to fix
the bugs) and C programming for GEM much too difficult.
Do you have any gripes with OpenGEM?
It needs more applications, and more development being put into it to
make it better (such as bugfixes for multitasking GEM (GEM/XM)).
