An encouraging note beforehand: this is not difficult AT ALL -- "other stuff" (e.g. to learn what I needed) took me WAY longer than getting everything up and running.

Thus, it is all summarized here for your convenience, in case you don't have a dependable connection or the time to keep jumping from site to site to gather every necessary bit of information and try out every release or beta of every tool out there. If you stick to the stuff I link, you should have no problems.

Building on OS/2-based platforms

(Without modifying a thing in the sources as they are in January 2022: r263)

Ingredients

To build eFTE2 on ArcaOS, OS/2, or eCS you will need:

• A Subversion client. ​Paul Smedley's SVN port, still at version 1.7.21, works for me.
• The source code for eFTE2. It is available ​here at Netlabs
• Some text editor. I use eFTE2 itself.
• Open Watcom 1.9 or newer. Check ​http://www.openwatcom.org/. You can find newer v2.0 betas ​here at Netlabs. Both 1.9 and 2.0 beta 1 worked for me (I will be switching to the upcoming beta 4 when it is out, and I haven't tested intermediate ones). This builds the eFTE2 EXE files.
• ​PMPrintF at %PMPRINTFDIR% or the default U:\PMPrintF. This aids with debugging the EXEs as you play with the sources. As of 2022, I have updated to v96.255 by Andreas Buchinger, but prior to this I was using v96.254 from 2017 without problems..
• A working Perl environment. I installed mine, a RPM packaged version, with ​ANPM. This will create .map files for the EXEs for debugging.
• IBM MapSym Version 4 (Symbol File Generator, 2001) from some OS/2 Toolkit (e.g. in eCS CD2). Will create .sym files for kernel debugging.
• MapXQS from ExceptQ 7.1+ by Steven H. Levine. This will create .XQS files from the .map ones to further help debugging. It is available either directly from ​Steven's site, or as part of the RPM 'exceptq-devel' package made available by our friends at ​BitWise Works GmbH at NetLabs ​(this is an outdated listing). This one you can install directly via rpm/yum or using ANPM (the easy way).
• LxLite from the same place(s), the RPM package name is 'lxlite'. This is an OS/2 linear EXE file (LX) compressor that will cut their size roughly in half.

It might be possible to build eFTE2 with other or newer tools, but I'd rather devote time to Get Shit Done™ first. The Perl requirement almost drove me off at first, for reasons unrelated to this project. Feel free to contact me through the mailing list and we can find out together.

How to mix

Once you have all of the above, the process is as simple as ChDiring to trunk/src in your local copy of the SVN source, and issuing the Open Watcomm command "wmake". This defaults to the first target in the makefile, which will generate efte.exe (the VIO executable), and eftepm.exe (the PM version), along with their .sym, .map, and .xqs symbol files.

You can build either of them individually with "wmake efte.exe" or "wmake eftepm.exe".

Or, you can start fiddling with your makefile, other targets, etc.

Building on/for other platforms (Win32)

This is work in progress. To be updated as I find out myself -- I would rather get one version running as I need it to first, then build others ;)