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

Cross Platform AND runs MS Products

[RogrWilco]

If it won't bluescreen, then I'm sold!

Platforms

[Traxton1]

For those of you who just can't pick one platform. Not, dual booting, what is that, like the equivalent of quadruple booting?

How to make software projects fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Are these two the same story ?

Whats in a name?

[swordboy]

eComStation

Wow... That is the most "buzzword compliant" name that I have ever heard.

Who do I make the check out to?

Re:Whats in a name?

[bonzoesc]

Sounds like eNetiConAppliance Online. But one of them is from IBM, and the other is from sweet merciful Lowtax, hero among men.

This is not a goatsex link, either

[Bi()hazard]

You can find a lot of information on ecomstation here. They have information on product contents, options, and availability, as well as support, previews, and links to reviews, distributors and resellers.

that'll be fun

[NMerriam]

which it will be branded as Entry level, Upgrade and WorkPlace

I can't imagine what a nightmare this idiotic Laurel and Hardy naming scheme going to be to support.

Which version do you have? Upgrade? An Entry level upgrade? you can't upgrade from workplace, thats a lower version. You want to buy an upgrade? Do you want the full version of upgrade or the upgrade of the entry level version of workplace?

marketing integration

[Alien54]

Unfortunately application compatibility has always been the key.

heck, I feel like a rant tonight.

Yep, unfortunately, MS quality control seems to have been aimed at the level of how many things we can we get away breaking ( like Lotius, etc) without people running away in terror.

right now, they could put out complete crap, and people would still buy it because they have to, not because of any apparent merit. Marketing and accounting love it, but it is a complete insult to the engineers, not that account or marketing would care much.

It is like engineering a new hardware widget. Some cool engineer invents something and does a damn good job. the prototype is excellent. it then gets fed to the production engineer, who work damn hard at trying to produce the widget as cheaply as possible, and still have it work.

MS engineers probably produce great shit, then it hits the marketing integration tem, and the result is crap. It doesn't survive well being integrated with the Microsft marketing vision.

It would be like seeing borgified art.

Good kernel...

[WasterDave]

I always thought the OS/2 (warp onwards) kernel sounded good, purely from the idea of a fully re-entrant kernel that booted (including GUI) in 4Mb. So, this came as a pleasant surprise:

Another cool trick you can do with OS/2 is that you can turn off and on any additional CPUs you may have, on the fly.

Holy shit. And....

OS/2 (reportedly) scales wonderfully on machines up to 64 CPUs.

And so runs a good chance of being a kick arse server kernel. Are we going to see Debian/OS2?

With a price of $299 for the normal version and $399 for the version that supports SMP

So that's a no then. Oh well.

Dave

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.

IBM can't kill off OS/2!

[nbvb]

Seriously.

OS/2 is what the supervisor PC's that control the zSeries mainframes run!

Open up a mainframe and inside is a Thinkpad running OS/2 to control it...

It's not going anywhere anytime soon...

--NBVB

Re:IBM can't kill off OS/2!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify this...

Yes.. the service element (SE) runs OS/2, as does the Host Management Console (HMC).

The SE is used to monitor the processor, as well as providing system control functions (such as telling the processor to power down, or to run a diagnostic tool against an I/O Channel, etc.). The SE orchistrates the monitoring of the physical system (such as how all the power supplies are doing, how the cooling units are doing, etc.).

The HMC is used to centralize the access to one or more systems. It also handles making backups of the SE, as well as calling "home" to IBM to retrieve any microcode maintenance for the processor, as well as calling "home" if there is a problem. The HMC is the main system operator access point to the processor (again allowing the operator to power down or power up and initialize the processor, or allowing a systems admin to configure LPARs (logical partitions), or to monitor overall system activity (how busy the system is).

What the SE and HMC are not. They do not "run" any of the mainframe operating systems. Think of the SE as the souped up holder of the ROM BIOS with a softkey power switch.

Technically, the HMC and the SE can be powered off and the processor will still function (though some control functions may not be available -- such as dynamically updating the I/O configuration, and of course the ability to "control" the system).

The SE is really just the evolution of the service console that has been used for decades in the S/370, S/390, z/Series processors.

But the comment that

"It's not going anywhere anytime soon..." is true.

Favorite Bumper Sticker from 1993

[3ryon]

OS/2 on a PS/2, half an operating system on half a comptuer.

They Amplified the Original Flaw

[KarmaBlackballed]

OS/2 was cool because you could run OS/2 native applications (there were not many) and you could run Windows applications. Why didn't OS/2 specific applications take off? Because it was stupid to write OS/2 applications if you could get by with the inferior multitasking of Win 3.1.

Think about it (back in the early 90's): Write a program in Windows and all the OS/2 & Warp users can run it AND all the Windows 3.1 users can too. Write a native application for OS/2 and you will see the difference in sales pretty quick.

Producing an OS/2 that runs native Windows + Linux ironically makes their previous business model flaw larger in that there is NO incentive for developers to write native OS/2 applications.

Sorry, this one is destined to die again ... slowly with vestiges kept alive for a while by islands of hobbyists that appreciate it or keep it for snob appeal. The market is not big enough to sustain an OS development and support effort without users that must have THAT OS to run their critical apps.

Re:They Amplified the Original Flaw

[DrXym]

Certainly that was a problem, but others and possibly the biggest by far were:

1. IBM
   
   I contracted for them for 8 months and I have never seen such disorganized company. The PC division was promoting Win3.1 while another division was trying to sell OS/2. Our group never got to reuse code from another group and the OS/2 developers played second fiddle to the Win3.1 ones. The left hand hadn't a clue what the right was doing. By the time they started putting it in the hands of home users with discounts and cover CDs it was already way, way too late.
2. Usability
   
   The UI for OS/2 - the Workplace Shell was fine in principle, but crap in practice. It looked drab, was inconsistent, it needed too many mouse buttons and it was only "logical" if someone taught you the WPS logic. I think usability was a dirty word in IBM since the WPS was just perverse; commonly used options being buried in the fifth page of some settings dialog, and usused appearing in the popup menus. And no two OS/2 applications looked or behaved alike because apparantly no one in IBM saw fit to share code such as toolbar classes. Apps did have to comply to a bizzaro UI compliance standard called CUA which meant they handled Shift+Insert the same way and other superficial similarities but that was it. I have a sneaking suspicion that some genius in the upper echelons of IBM actually thought unfriendly apps was a good idea to drum sales from selling training.
3. Microsoft
   
   We know all about that one. They put the boot in and IBM (the world's largest computer company) mumbled not very convincingly about unfair competition. But whatever dirty tricks Microsoft were playing, they still had more of a clue about usability. They have people an easy to use (certainly easier than OS/2) operating system. And apps such as MS Office looked consistent and clean.
   

Now I programmed OS/2 and loved the thing, but it was and is screamingly obvious why it was doomed. IBM had its head up its butt (just like Commodore with the Amiga) and simply dithered around wondering why every one was buying someone elses supposedly inferior product.

An analogy would be a master chef wondering why people doesn't buy his delicious cakes when makes them to look like a giant dog turd. I wonder why not...

Re:Howard Stern

[Rude Turnip]

He used to talk about it *a lot* and the alt.fan.howard-stern newsgroup actually turned into on OS/2 advocacy group for quite some time. Howard saying "Jeff Schick from IBM" 1,000x is burned into my mind permanently. I got into OS/2 around 1994/1995 because of Howard Stern. I even called into his show as "King of All OS/2 Users" and talked about the OS/2 command prompt. Howard described me as "another geek who can't get laid." For several years after that, he was right.

Odin libraries got Opera ported perfectly to OS2

[DABANSHEE]

Check this out.

Like WINE, Odin in a Win32 API, so OS2 can be natively Win32 compatible.

Odin has the potential to work much better than WINE, because OS2 & Windows share a bit of the same gene pool.

The OS2 version of Opera is a semi-ported Windows app that utilises Odin libraries, as a shortcut to save on the work involved in a full port.

That's my take.

I assume its similar to the way some Windows games that have been ported to Linux utilise WINE libraries.

Information on developing for OS/2?

[Dr. Manhattan]

I made the mistake of making my app too portable. It already runs on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, AIX (yuck), and even VMS. Now management wants SGI (easy enough), AS/400 (EBCDIC?!?!?), and OS/2 (should be simple...).

I have a boxed set of OS/2 Warp Connect, and VA C++ Pro 4.0, but boy is documentation of the OS/2 API hard to come by. Not much on the web, either. If I wanted to write an app for OS/2, where the heck would I find any documentation, hints, FAQs, etc.?

Re:Technical superiority isn't everything

[Greyfox]

OS/2 forced Microsoft to evolve. While OS/2 was gaining on Microsoft in the market share department, Microsoft was busily improving their OS. Meanwhile IBM was sitting there with its thumb up its collective butt. If OS/2 had been improving at the same rate as Windows, it would easily have come out on top. Instead of redesigning some of the core areas where there were major problems, they elected for mostly cosmetic changes to the UI. Any attempts to address real issues, such as the problems with the single system input queue or the ease with which the desktop could be corrupted were simply hack jobs.

Very few developers made use of the advanced features of the OS either, especially inside IBM. There were ports of various programs which were obviously simple recompiles of Windows 3.1 code. I wouldn't touch many of IBM's GUI apps for OS/2 because they'd go off to do processing and bog down the system input queue. So even though you had this way cool multi-tasking multi-threaded OS, it was still very easy to bog down the whole OS by simpily not processing messages on the system input queue.

Politics was the death blow to OS/2 though. If you couldn't even get an OS/2 PC pre-installed from IBM's PC division, there was no way anyone else was going to offer it. The install was hideous enough that your average end user did NOT want to deal with that and IBM was not about to address shortcomings of the PC archectecture that made the install process so bad -- and there WERE things that could have been done to work around a lot of those problems.

OS/2's death can be entirely blamed on IBM's inability to keep up with Microsoft. They were outmaneuvered, plain and simple. OS/2's current reanimation as the walking dead and probable eventual rise to Amiga-like hype-godhood can probably be blamed on a few users who don't want to let go. The same sorts of people, no doubt, who freeze dry their pets once they die.