Submitted by eComStation has gotten a new VESA video driver and full ACPI support. The developers are working on user interface improvement as well. “In the beginning of the spring we updated: ACPI subsystem, eComStation kernel, USB Tools homepage, Hardware database, General Network Utilities, PMDownloader, eSchemes gallery, Panorama video drivers, Piano Launchpad and Imagination, Calculator for millionaire, Firewall ports setup, LANGE library.” Screenshots can be found here.
eComStation Gets New Vesa Driver, ACPI Support
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Great news, but the GUI still reminds me of KDE 1.1.2. There hasn’t been any innovative about it for years.
And there won’t be until some developer starts producing a Presentation Manager subsystem replacement. The whole UI is hardcoded. Writing a proper replacement, clean room or reverse-engineered, would be a huge task. But it’s doable by a single programmer. Properly motivated and all… lol
Judging by FixPack APAR lists, I fear is that Presention Manager is littered with quick fixes for badly developed OS/2 programs. And a re-write would basically break many OS/2 programs. A lot of time would be spent on fixing compability issues. Only people that have seen the source code knows for sure.
Appearance-wise, you’re right.
Feature-wise, there still hasn’t been anything else developed which touches the WPS in a number of ways.
It ain’t all about eye-candy ya know…
So it has full ACPI support, eh? I wish Ubuntu had that! My Latitude throws a tantrum when I try to suspend it.
Yes, how can they have full acpi support and linux can’t? Were they able to license it from someone (forgive my ignorance of it’s origins) and include it because it’s commercial, perhaps?
-m
Having IBM as a backer goes a long way. eComstation is an updated OS/2 Warp 4.
Technically it’s an updated Warp 4.52, which is quite a bit different from the Warp 4 you could buy as a retail package (comes with JFS, LVM, etc.).
Not quite, it is an updated 4.52.
The difference is big changes in the base system (For instance a brand new kernel with a new SMP implementation).
“Yes, how can they have full acpi support and linux can’t? ”
Perhaps it’s not as full as they say it is? Perhaps they have a different definition of “full”? What does “full ACPI support” mean anyway? That the entire specification is supported or that it actually *works* with all ACPI implementations?
Edited 2007-05-04 05:07
Perhaps Intel has been a little more helpful this time, since it AFAIR is a closed source project.
No matter what crappy colors you put there, it still looks like historical Windows 95 … and it’s year of 2007 today. VESA driver? Is it DOS based?
Yep, you cannot beat a great deal like $259 for full version of a Windows 98-like OS.
I mean its not like you can pick up Vista Ultimate Full for $20 more off TechBargains.
It’s not DOS based, it’s OS/2 based
I don’t want to be harsh, I enjoy obscure OSes as much as the next, but what good is OS/2 at this stage? Isn’t it just the DOA brother of Windows NT? I just don’t see what good a closed source Windows 95 prototype is.
OS/2 is a lot more than a “Windows 95 prototype”.
The desktop on OS/2 has a lot of functionality not in Windows – not even in Vista. AFAIK OS/2 is the only OS with a truly Object Oriented Desktop.
The look is outdated but the engine beneath is great.
“The desktop on OS/2 has a lot of functionality not in Windows – not even in Vista.”
There are even functions included in the older GeoWorks Ensemble 3 which “Vista” cannot show.
“AFAIK OS/2 is the only OS with a truly Object Oriented Desktop.”
This is correct, at least it claimed to be.
“The look is outdated but the engine beneath is great.”
It was impressing what you could get out of a 486 with OS/2 where “Windows” was just pain.
I’d love to install OS/2 Warp 3 or 4 or eComStation on my old IBM PS/ValuePoint 486SX (25MHz), but it only has 8MB of RAM, and I don’t think I can find more memory modules (that are compatible) today. Still boots up fine using FreeDOS and the monitor is still in use with another PC (AMD K6-III 500MHz).
Edited 2007-05-04 02:22
You could run OS/2 2.x on it.
Warp 3 should run fine (if a bit slowly) on an 8MB box.
One reason OS/2 should continue to exist is educational (as the serious confusion in your above posting amply demonstrates).
So many folks who use only Windows or only Linux have no clue about the history of even relatively mainstream operating systems from the past, and they seem to think that everything out there was derived from either DOS, Windows, or UNIX.
That simply isn’t true.
No, OS/2 isn’t a “DOA brother of Windows NT” — OS/2’s 32-bit kernel was developed independently by IBM in the early 1990’s after the split over OS/2 1.x while Cutler and friends wrote NT’s new 32-bit kernel in parallel over at Microsoft.
The two are completely seperate developments, they do not share any code, and they are no more similar to each other than either one is to Linux or Solaris.
Yes, OS/2 has some level of compatibility with DOS and Windows at the API and command processor level, but it ends there.
What good is it? Try using it. Then you’ll wonder why Windows and Linux are so slow on modern hardware while providing comparatively little in terms of basic desktop functionality.
Edited 2007-05-04 17:55
Well the driver is VESA compatible, with some 2D acceleation (R200).
Having a VESA compatibility mode is great if your GFX-card hasn’t got accelerated driversupport.
eCS is great, McVista and Linux cannot compete with the feeling – but at the moment I haven’t got the cash for upgrading to eCS 2.0 – could be interesting to see how it runs on an X2 processor
There is a project called Voyager to replace Presentation Manager – a.k.a. what most people know of the desktop.
Despite what most people think, OS/2 is still a very modern OS. Sure the desktop doesn’t look modern but I didn’t think it did back in 1992.
Too many people get stuck on “it isn’t pretty enough.” OS/2 was built to be an object oriented Mission Critical operating system where the expectations for the desktop/server versions were –expected– to be up and running 24 hours a day 365 days a year without reboots.
The best way I can describe the way it was designed, compared to Windows, is that engineers were in totally control of everything. And you know most engineers aren’t much into making things super pretty.
Meanwhile Microsoft was driven more by “look how pretty it is” compared to rock steady and secure.
In a lot of ways OS/2 (now eComStation) is a great OS. It runs must faster than Windows on the same hardware and you can literally run hundreds of programs (obviously not hundreds of large programs) on it at the same time and it doesn’t crash. Windows crashed after a couple dozen programs running at the same time.
I used to work at a bank where I was both a main frame programmer and PC programmer back in the early 90s and had two computers. One with OS/2 and one with Windows 3.1 (this is before Windows ’95).
I had multiple phone lines at my disposal and got my hands on a device that you plugged into one serial port on one side and had eight serial ports on the other. With a little help from IBM I was able to configure OS/2 to access all eight serial ports and connected eight modems to eight phone lines. I was then able to remote into eight different computers at the same time and upload or download files. Note that the remote connections NEVER crashed in OS/2.
In comparison I never got more than two modems working at the same time in Windows even with Windows ’95 or NT even with contacts in MS who I talked to about trying to get this to work.
Note that YEARS before MS enabled the ability to take two modems and phone lines and make them appear as one, I was able to get four to work as one while connecting to another OS/2 computer with another “serial board” that was located in another part of our building. This was also through the help of an IBM engineer that was having just as much fun with this idea as I was.
Why do that with modems? This was before the web and before there were high speed lines to everywhere. For most people the latter only started happening a few years ago. Check out AOL. They still think the world is dial-up.
2 Johann Chua: eComStation is oriented on Core 2 Duo, AMD X2 notebooks and desktops. I don’t think that you can run it on i486. Yes, you can run it on Pentium with 32 Mb
http://www.ecomstation.com/demo.phtml?url=nls/en/content/requiremen…
D’oh!