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

I'll bet Sears will be happy.

[Cyberdeck]

I was there last week, and it looked like their package and warehouse tracking system was running OS/2 warp.

Ouch

[FurryFeet]

I'd love to finally move to OS/2 but I need my Windows apps. This might be the solution... except 239 euros+tax seems a little steep for a home user...
Also, has anyone got any idea what will happen when Windows crashes (as it is liable to do) while running on top of this?

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

[MrHat]

No, BeOS is dead. Not dying, dead. The company which owned is was dissolved and all of the code is now the property of Palm, Inc. Palm will continue development on the x86 BeOS during a cold day in hell.

That said, there are a lot of OSS projects trying to create an OS based upon the BeOS APIs and 'kits'.

All of the above is quite a shame. If BeOS rose from the dead today with support for modern chipsets, it'd immediately be the primary OS on my workstation.

As a former OS/2 user...

[Spoing]

...I'm deeply puzzled who would buy this now. I can see some sales to specific customers, but not enough to field a COTS product release. Anyone want to enlighten me?

(BTW...the file system monitor tools fam and imon add a feature to Linux that was missing for way too long; generic and instant update of file status for X. This effectively ties the desktop and the current file system state together eliminating the need to 'refresh' an application to find out what's really there. After having this under OS/2 and seeing how poorly it was handled under Windows (9x & NT forks), I was glad to see SGI port and support this for Linux and IRIX (other Unix-like systems can add this support as well if they don't have something like it already).)

Re:As a former OS/2 user...

[Atomic Frog]

...because you are too North American centric perhaps?
Innotek is based in Germany, I believe, and way over in that island called Europe, there are apparently a lot of OS/2 users (i.e. companies) with deep enough pockets to fund this.

If you were still an OS/2 user, you'd know that IBM still offers updates to OS/2, and the past few rounds, they have been heavily subscribed that they can't press enough CD's in time.

Re:As a former OS/2 user...

[Spoing]

If you were still an OS/2 user, you'd know that IBM still offers updates to OS/2, and the past few rounds, they have been heavily subscribed that they can't press enough CD's in time.

Were is the operative word. Over a year ago -- well after IBM promoted migration strategies and recommended customers move off of OS/2 -- I posted a few messages to a local news group offering all my OS/2 software. After about a week, and a couple bites from non-local current OS/2 users, one person who is local to me (Washington DC-Metro) agreed to drop by and take the box of software off my hands. I think I handed over a dozen titles plus 3 boxed versions of OS/2.

At the point that I dumped my OS/2 software, I hadn't used any of it for three or more years.

Since then, I've had zero interest in following OS/2; it's just not a viable platform for any new development. The argument that Europeans use it isn't convincing; I didn't see it at all in three seperate European countries where I worked on banking projects over the past 10 years. The 'OS/2 is popular in Europe' argument has also been used by Amiga advocates yet I noticed only a one Amiga used for slide shows in a public lobby over those same 10 years.

Admitedly none of those contracts delt with automatic teller machines, so maybe OS/2 is still widely deployed there. Personally, I don't care.

If you see OS/2 as viable now, even when IBM hasn't for many years, you'd have a hard time convincing me.

I liked OS/2, I used OS/2, and some of it's features are still not duplicated properly on any other OS. None of the remaining features are compelling, though.

OS/2 Guest Support

[QuantumG]

That's no easy feat. At VMWare they use OS/2 as a part of the internal test suite. If you changed something in the monitor (the core of a virtualizer) you had to boot/halt OS/2 and a bunch of other operating systems before you could check it into cvs. Apart from the business case, the main reason OS/2 isn't supported on VMWare is because it is so damn wacky that it was considered too unstable to publically support. Virtual PC on the other had can support it because they have dual operation modes. They virtualize the processor until something breaks, you get a popup box saying the VM is going to reboot and then it starts up in 100% emulation mode (ie slow). I figure it must have taken a hell of a lot of effort to keep OS/2 running to be able to release it as a product, or maybe it is just especially dodgy/slow.

Re:OS/2 Guest Support

[3rdof5]

It's neiter slow nor does it run in 100% emulation mode. But fact is the VMWare has a bad design it doesn't realy inherit to the V in it's name while VPC does. Yes this might steal some performance but with 2Ghz on every desk who cares about 20% perf. los. The problems VMware had with OS/2 is that OS/2's kernel uses every litle trick in the book that some intel attendum mentioned on page 378 in the fineprint, some of these are even patented. Also keep in mind that even VMware might exist longer on the PC but Connectix has more than 10 years exp with virtualizing Intel CPUs. And just for the Fun I once installed VPC/2 on OS/2 in it run WinNT in that run VPC/Windows which run OS/2 which did run VPC/2 which did run linux. So their design is rock solid. And Connectix only needed to fix 2 things they didn't virtualise properly to get OS/2 running. Inital porting it from Windows to OS/2 was done in less then 3 months.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a small kiosk type Bank of America ATM at work. (they never want you to leave :) One day I went down, and found it crashed with an odd error message, fiugring it was just like any other computer that was crashed I tried to pull the power and reboot. After WAY too much debug information on the way up, an OS/2 warp banner comes up, it then launched into the gui, then started a remote dialin app, then shot some additional debug info, then started the ATM app, and prompted for a passcode. I wonder how many if not all BOA ATM's are running it. I also wonder if the app is native, or OS/2 is just the host OS, and it runs out of a secure hardware card ala IBM.

Fun stuff.

Re:OS/2 Sightings

[Hyped01]

IBM cant get rid of OS/2 quite just yet even if they wanted to as some of their big or mid sized metal run "controllers" inside of them that run OS/2 (I think the z/Series for one, including it's previous incarnation). The "controller" is actually a very specialized PC that runs all the busses (hardware, memory, disk, networking, "BIOS", etc) of the machine... it sort of acts like a bus mastering chip and I/O controller. It runs OS/2 and has for ages.

I doubt IBM is yet ready (especially since the other OS alternatives out there have been as mature as they are long enough for the deed to have been done already) to switch those controllers from OS/2 to something else. The machines need 100% uptime (or at least IBM's guaranteeed 99.997%) so the controllers that make them run need to be neat little boxes that sit inside the machine, keep running and nobody needs to know about, running an OS that they have full control over to interact with their proprietary hardware and big metal OS.

I think they'll be keeping it around at least till the promised 2007 via maintenance, etc. And many OS/2 divisions in IBM seem to have decided it's worth more than just keeping it around... OS/2 just got fingerprint login recognition last week from IBM Germany who has been regulary cranking out OS/2 related things (and just recently started training seminars on it, and the new networking components... not things you'd expect for an OS you'd think they are trying to kill...)

Just my 1/2 pence

Robert

good times when i worked with OS/2

[fabiolrs]

Once I worked as admin in a company near my home. OS/2 was the OS on the servers and I always thought if was a great product... it almost never crashed (I saw it crashing once and i dont even remember how it was... BSOD? :)))... ok, it was almost a decade ago I really dont remember) we used to compile some unix softwares on it... it was great... our system was a dual-boot of OS/2 and windows NT (i dont even remember de version, one of the first maybe) and OS/2 was hell lot faster! much more reliable (in terms im not even going to mention)! and much, much, much more easy to deal with!

great product! :)))

Re:Cool!

[NickIQ]

Just making sure.... But isn't Innotek the name of the bogus company that gets burned down in Office Space? Yeah..... Peter? What's this I hear about you having problems with your TPS reports?