IBM

Hello,

Someone from the forum convinced me to try eComStation 2.1 (2.2 is due soon?), I was very skeptical, but since there's still a few DOS applications I am still using, I figured I might give it a shot.

Therefore, I dug up a rusty x86 machine (difficult to find around here) and gave it a spin. This is what I thought about it.

Installation
No surprise, it's an old pc (1.2Ghz Via, IDE CDROM and 8GB IDE harddrive, VIA Rhine network interface), and everything was supported out of the box, it was trivial and took about 30 minutes. I haven't tried to install more than one operating system on the drive, I imagine it's possible, but I was seeking well deserved instant gratification.

There's no progress bar on the installer, so you never know how long it will take, that's quite alright. I formatted the drive with JFS, so eventually I can read it from linux should I want to (but I haven't tried that).

First boot & configuration
Again, no surprise, a "configuration" dialog appears, where you set the resolution and few other nifty things, then you reboot the machine. I imagine that if you know your way around you can setup everything in one shot and don't have (like me) to reboot a few times.

I found the configuration a little counter-intuitive at times, but this is due to my lack of knowledge and understanding of eComStation/OS2, for example the TCP/IP administration panel is located in Desktop->Local System->System Setup->Network->TCP/IP->TCP/IP Configuration; for which, after setting the IP address, you will need to reboot (twice, because I forgot to enter the DNS information first). But it's quite alright.

Everything looks very "square", IBM style. Not Irix cute. I'm very happy no extra driver was required for my relatively old PC, this is great, I'm not sure if they publish a HCL, I would have to check.

Usage
Ships with "the basics" and more (Firefox, Java, VNC server, FTP client, ntp support, file sharing, top, unzip, bzip2, gzip etc.), but no ssh and few other essentials, no problem, those can be found on hobbes, even if the versions available are often relatively old, and therefore, don't have the latest security fixes. I imagine those can be built manually. I think it would have been appreciable to ship ssh and perhaps even sshd.

My old dos applications work GREAT, and I mean, much better than with dosbox/softwindow/etc, and that's fantastic. Games work fine too, although I couldn't figure out how to get DOS games to have sound, I'm probably missing a DOS driver, although my eComStation system has sound itself. I haven't researched this. Win 16 applications work great, and that's all I really need or want, no bloated software.

After a few hours of use, I'm completely sold, this is a great system, and I really like it. I really want to invest more time into it, and learn what it can do for me, and possibly, upgrade to a faster machine when time allows. Go check it out.

Yes OS/2 is a good solid system, though like BeOS totally missed out on the concept of users and security. IBM took a long time to twig that networking should be part of the operating system with OS/2. Also had no system concept of installable software packages ( unless you count fix packs).

eComStation, because of its commitment to preserve dos compatibility makes it a very compelling platform, most of the applications can be used for free (dbaseIII plus 1.1, 4dos/4os2, wordstar, 1-2-3, norton commander, turbo c/pascal and many many others) or even to run old games, such as the old lucasart games or early RPGs. And, since those apps were designed for sub 100Mhz computers, they run really really fast, which is a big plus.

And undoubtedly, applications are sandboxed, no really, I'm digging it. It's not super cute, but it's super fun and very usable. If I were to chose only one non-unix OS at home, besides plan9, it would be eComStation or OS2. What else? They have a downloadable demo of 2.2, which is great to qualify hardware easily and give it a spin, on real or emulated boxens.

The OS/2 Firefox port has run off the rails, though. It doesn't look like they're going to be able to jump to 17.

There. Fixed that for you

OS/2 has had optional networking support in the EE/Connect editions for a long time, since well before I saw it (1.2 or so). IBM even put in TCP/IP support eventually (2.0EE?) for those who couldn't or wouldn't see the light and use SNA.

Does Serenity have the whole codebase to update, or are they still just doing driver and some userspace hacking a la BeOS MAX?

Always got the impression that the original was aimed more at stoners than the stars.... though this one added at least a little more lyrical plausibility .

The scary thing is that in the dusty stacks of at least one university library there is a paper on the sociocultrual meanings and implications of the "Major Tom" character. No, I didn't put it there, but someone else did. Can't recall if it was master's or doctorate.

Since we're here talking DOS and OS/2, is there any particular application worth checking, either for OS/2 or DOS that I might not know of, I've recently "discovered" dbase-III plus 1.1 and I really really enjoyed it. Are they any OS/2 specific applications worth taking a look at?

A lot of the best OS/2 programs were tools such as mail servers and the like, not too sexy to look at. MR/2 ICE (I think) was a very good mail client. DeScribe was a popular and capable word processor. I had a whole mix-n-match setup with DOS, Win 3.1 and OS/2 apps all mingled together - that was pretty nice, you could pick the program you liked best and run it, no operating-system-prison. There's a spreadsheet that takes live inputs, which can be pretty cool. Not too much on the graphics end. Look through Hobbes, many good (if dated-looking) programs there.

What you might not notice at first is that everything is an object ... for instance, a printer is not just a dumb script. Take your printer object, drag a copy off it and change the properties, now you have two printers, one for letter and one for A4. Do again, one for envelopes, one for color, one for double-sided tabloid. It's harder to describe why this is so useful but if you do it a bit, you'll fall in love.

AND if you don't install crappy Windows-developer-written software, the responsiveness of OS/2 is super. Better than Irix ... App A does not screech to a halt or lock you out when App B gets busy. That's dependent on the application code tho At least IBM tried to make people write programs properly. You'll really see OS/2's strengths if you go to dual-core or more. The scheduler kicks ass.

Oh. If you install X/Free86 you can X to your Irix boxes. There are no SGI extensions in XFree so running Irix apps from OS/2 is not as good as going the other way. You won't get the workplace shell that way but it's still fun.