Virtual PC for OS/2 released

LordNimon writes "Who says OS/2 is dead? Not Innotek, apparently. They just released Virtual PC for OS/2 (aka VPC/2), which allows you to run any PC operating system inside OS/2. They also made available OS/2 "guest" support, which improves the support for running OS/2 under VPC for Windows. I just deleted my Linux partition amd reinstalled it under VPC/2, and now I never have to reboot again! I also heard that that OS/2 development team found a number of bugs in the core code, and the fixes were incorporated into the Windows version. Today is a great day for OS/2 users, especially those that want to try out Linux or run Windows apps that don't work with Odin."

Comments

Re:Semi-OT: Did OS/2 run faster on IBM machines?

[crawling_chaos]

I doubt that your machine had PCI slots, so what you were probably seeing was the faster graphical performance of a Microchannel video card. The bus was a hell of a lot faster than ISA.

OS/2 dead?

[rusty0101]

Well, perhaps as a product directly available from IBM, or retail chains, but you can still get OS/2 under it's new name e-com station, from the people woh convinced IBM that it would be a good idea to continue selling it even if IBM wasn't the marketing force behind it.

That company is Serenity Systems, http://www.serenity-systems.com

Whether or not you or I consider it to be a viable product is not really relevent. If Serenity Systems can survive on it, then for them it is a viable product.

BeOS is the only PC based OS that I have used that has handled threads as well as OS/2 does. This is coming from a user running Linux for the most part now. Your own experience may vary. And if you have political arguments against OS/2, BeOS, et all, because they were proprietary OS's, that's fine. That is one of the main reasons I have converted almost completely to Linux. In my own opinion, proprietary does not necesarily mean does nothing right. But you may take that position if you choose.

Then again this in my opinion. I get the option of being wrong.

-Rusty

Re:OS/2 may not be dead...

[Atomic Frog]

No, OS/2 can't be released as free abandoned ware because it isn't abandoned yet. At least not officially.

You can still purchase OS/2 online (from IBM, who else?), and IBM is still sending out regular updates to customers.
Yes, that includes single home-users like me. Every 6 months, I get a full CD install set of the latest revision, as well as CD's with update patches, features and programs.

All but 1 of the 5 biggest banks in Canada still run OS/2, and I haven't seen any "Windows transition" machines at a branch yet.

OS/2 Is used Weekly By Most Americans

[lostindenver]

For most americans OS/2 IS used in Most ATM's, Several Brands Of Gas Pumps, And A healthy Chunk of All Point of Sales Apllications. Any Update to Such a stable OS Is definatly Welcome.

Re:OS/2 - Where's it used?

[Hyped01]

> How many crackers do you think will try to crack OS/2 boxes? Not many.

Actually, the number is pretty high. And, it's not script kiddies either. It's real "pros" interested at a way in the largely-run-on-OS/2 banking and insurance networks.

To date number of vulnerabilities found? One. A certain attack on the first release of Warp Server for e-Business would make it shut down the TCP/IP stack and possibly crash the machine (no security or data jeopardized). It was fixed in 18 hours of being reported and the patch was made available that Saturday.

It's not like people dont try... they just dont succeeed... and very few companies run around reporting failed hack attempts. My servers get attacked around the clock with every means I can imagine and many I cant even find references of to break them. They were attacked with Code Red like virii long before it was released... (some of our servers are adult in nature, and it seems serious efforts are made to kill the competition... in talking with other small site owners, they notice the same problems... as ours is getting decent exporse, the attacks have occassionally hit 6 digits worth in a day. Including IRC spawned: DDOS, password and OS exploit hacks the likes of what Steve Gibson of grc.com reported months ago.)

What do I do? Nothing. I watch. I zip the log files. I laugh.

Well, not entirely true. Twice they managed to accumulate multiple gigabytes of httpd error logs in a day filling the log drive, which the server is then set to stop sending data out (in the event of). Changed that.

And I am changing my authentication engine from DominoGoWebserver's to something of my own devising (using a MySQL back end if it can keep up, and if not, then using a DB/2 back end).

There are still definitely things OS/2 does better - like be more secure. And play DiVX's - at least better than comparable Win__ hardware. Dunno about how Linux plays them...

Robert