Review of eComStation OS/2 1.0

JigSaw writes: "OSNews features a long and in-depth article about the latest version of eComStation OS/2 1.0. eCS 1.0 is developed by Serenity Systems after they licensed the technology from IBM when the latter had abandoned any hope for the success of OS/2. The article also has information about the future version of eCS, 1.10, which it will be branded as Entry level, Upgrade and WorkPlace. The Workplace version will include all the software one needs to run Java2, Win16 & DOS applications 'natively', and it also includes an X11 server plus a full copy of Connectix's Virtual PC that can run any flavour of Windows and Linux. In fact, eCS OS/2 Workplace will include a full Linux distribution as part of its VirtualPC package."

Comments

It'll be interesting to see where this goes ...

[Batou]

Until earlier this year, I worked at IBM Austin on the OS/2 base team, mostly analyzing core dumps and the like. I remember hearing about this there, and was surprised that no one - including anyone in development management - had ever heard of it. While I applaud Security Systems efforts to attempt to market this OS to the public (lets face it - IBM gave up years ago), I'd be very interested to see where this goes from a support perspective. None of the IBM coders who still provide defect support for OS/2 have any involvement in this. If a nasty bug appears in any of the code, IBM isn't likely to fix it, and I'd assume that OS/2 fixpaks won't work with this (last I heard, they were going to charge subscriptions to receive them, anyway). I would assume that SS doesn't have a full code license, as I can't believe M$ would allow anyone a full code license - and FYI, yes they still have a say - even if they completely yanked out the Win-OS/2 code, it's so tightly integrated within PMShell, you'd never be completely free of it as it would most likely require a complete re-write. That's a few million lines of code, large portions of which are entirely in x86 assembly. Hardly a weekend job. ;-)

A few corrections: Unless the guys at SS made some substantial modifications to the boot loader (not very likely), the bit about having to boot off of a HPFS partition is blatently false. Os/2 supports boot off of fat, fat32 (with the danidasd freeware fat32 IFS driver - I forget who made it, but VERY nice), or HPFS386 (the filesystem the eBusiness and earlier server versions could utiliza, albeit you had to purchase it as a seperate license). IIRC, JFS partitions were non-bootable, but there were so many problems with the IFS driver, you'd be insane to try it, anyway.

I can also appreciate what the reviewer was mentioning about LVM - while it is extremely powerful and flexible, it is an absolute bitch. In fact, you can't completely get rid of it once installed on a drive without doing a low-level format (at least for the versions that shipped with MCP/ACP - this might have changed since). It was an in-joke with the support staff that a virus (LVM) had made it into the release build.

Anyway, best of luck to these guys. I might consider purchasing it if it weren't so damn much. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, and if there are still enough OS/2 nuts out there to provide a niche market for it.