Web Browser

[toncho11]

In general we could have a Nano-X compatible browser (that uses Nano-X API) that executes on a contemporary machine, but is displayed on a Nano X server running under ELKS. So you:

• telnet to a modern computer or Rasberry PI
• you configure the a Nano-X browser to use the network IP of the Nano X server running under ELKS
• you start the browser over telnet on the remote computer, it shows on ELKS and Nano X

So it is like finally using the advantages of the client/server architecture of the X graphical systems. I used to do a lot of X server ssh port forwarding.

Also the browser needs to compile on contemporary systems, not ELKS, which probably makes it easier to develop.
We could say that it is not limited by the memory available to ELKS, but indeed it is. Showing an image on the X server under ELKS will still consume a lot of memory.

[toncho11]

So the first missing piece is the networking to ELKS Nano-X server?

[lpsantil]

You're only targeting 16-bit x86 CPUs on ELKS, right? Depending on what your goal is, there might be other better options. ssh2dos was a hack of the putty sources to enable ssh on DOS machines. Doing SSL/TLS on 16-bit CPUs takes quite a bit of CPU time. Even ssh2dos using DJGPP and optimized for 32-bit CPUs makes ssh seem a bit laggy.

Other browser options might be:

Links2 (graphical and text mode, supports DOS, Linux, X11, HTML 4.0, HTTP/1.1, may need 32-bit clean up.)

Dillo (formerly ran on Nano-X and in DOS & Linux, graphical only, incongruent feature set, may need 32-bit clean up)

NetSurf (ran on X11, Linux, Windows, graphical only, may no longer be active as I see the website has been down since Oct 2025).

Line Mode Browser (very old, simplified text mode only browser, should not require much to port Nano-X)

MicroWeb (a newer browser directly targeting 16-bit x86 CPUs on DOS with as little as 640KB of RAM, graphical only, will need to be ported to Nano-X)

Or maybe port a VNC viewer?
https://web.archive.org/web/20210411145849/https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/nino/dosvnc.html

https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/2022/07/29/using-dos-freedos-as-a-vnc-client/

https://github.com/sheumann/VNCviewGS

https://vncviewer8086.sourceforge.net/