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EComStation 2.0 GA To Be Released May 14
martiniturbide writes "After a long delay, eComStation 2.0 GA will finally become reality. It will be released in time to be presented at the Warpstock Europe 2010 event which will be held in Trier, Germany, from May 14 to 16. We consider eComStation 2.0 to be the biggest overhaul of OS/2 so far. Together with a team of both hired and volunteer developers, we have extended the functionality, removed limitations, updated hardware support as far as possible, and resolved close to 1000 issues that had been reported since the release of eComStation 1.2R. The new eComStation 2.0 GA is the result of several years of combined efforts and investments."
I'll be able to format floppies again without slowing down the rest of my work.
Short answer, no.
Long answer, nooooooooooooooooooooo.
OS/2 is still used quite extensively in Australia by banking institutions, who claim it is still more reliable than the Windows equivalents. Much of the critical banking infrastructure reliant on OS/2 has since been ported to Linux (Mostly running atop RHEL.) The combination of high stability. the very configurable and flexible workplace shell with REXX IPC, at a time when the NT kernel was still being sorted ensured rapid uptake and penetration in some vertical markets. Like the AmigaOS it was very economical of system resources and had a very consistent UI. There are still lessons in the Workplace Shell (OS/2) and Intuition (Amiga) for both KDE and GNOME. Window managers with some of the WS features for Linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Shell and related http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7822082064.html
Wrong. Short answer, yes. Long answer, definitely yes.
There are still a lot of large companies out there using OS/2 installs who are attempting to replace aging hardware without having to have all their specialized software ported to something else. One such company is a Fortune 50-ish (it's in the 50-55 range) company that has a massive OS/2 install to this very day.
Do you have any idea how many specialized pieces of equipment out there are controlled by OS/2? Or the MASSIVE cost involved in having the software ported to Windows or Linux? Or the large amounts of time testing the stuff because it cant EVER fail while running? I, on the other hand, have some idea about that sort of thing... there are lots of such setups.
People dont hear about those types of setups, or even know about them, because they aren't desktop clients where some 9-5'er is running Word or whatever on it. They are systems that sit quietly in the background and run entire production lines, run automated machinery, run power plants, run transit systems, run elevators and so on.
In addition, there are new companies that are using OS/2 for specialized apps or as servers that have gotten fed up with Windows, and find the various fragmented releases of Linux to be too daunting. I know... I install eCS boxes at a few of them. And, they couldnt be happier. I install em... come every few months to clean em (of dust and stuff) and otherwise no one ever touches them. They never had that type of a positive experience on their Windows server/app server boxes.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
That's true, but there are only a handful of people out there interested in buying new Windows.
It's the installed base that forces the issue.
Well, one decently large site I run for a client runs on Warp Server for e-Business. It runs on an ancient box (10 years old) with a whoppingly fast set of 550MHz CPUs (Quad XEON 3's) and 4GB of RAM. It runs at an average of 3% CPU utilization. The site was originally hosted on a Windows Server 2003 box 4 or 5 years ago when traffic was one tenth of what it currently is. The Win2003 box was 4 times more powerful - and either bogged down or crashed repeatedly due to load.
When I do the final video transcoding for Star Trek New Voyages: Phase 2, it's generally done on an OS/2 box using mEncoder or FFMPEG... even on a much slower box than the one Windows machine here, those apps run far better, and even faster than the equivalent Windows versions (ie: it seems Linux ports run much much better on OS/2 than on Windows) and unlike on the Windows box, where the desktop becomes near unusable, OS/2's WPS is still snappy (even though the OS/2 box has 1/4 the CPU power). When I start using a "bunch" of threads on the Windows box (a "whopping" four) to do the transcodes, Windows slows to a crawl. Simple web pages in Firefox take 10 times as long to load. Windows takes forever to launch apps. The apps become unresponsive... all while the transcoder is set to normal priority. No such problems on OS/2. Windows XP and Windows Vista do not alleviate these problems - I dont know about Windows 7 as I have not tried it on that... but that still indicates that OS/2 seems to have a far better thread scheduler (coupled with the possibility that Linux ports simply run a lot better on OS/2).
So... as the site I host keeps gaining popularity, I could either get a FEW big 8 way state of the art system each running Windows Server 2008 to serve the web requests for it (and a bunch more IP addresses)... or I can simply keep running the website on ONE ancient Netfinity 7000 M10 and Warp Server for e-Business.
I've got a few clients who were tired of their Windows Server boxes... those boxes were replaced with eComStation, and run custom server side web based apps. For four years now. You have no idea how thrilled they are that they never have to call me because of a problem. And they only see me once every 3 months to clean the boxes out (ie: remove dust, clean fans, etc).
They dont care what such things are running. The only thing they care about is that they dont need to call me to fix some new issue that has arisen (server infected, machine restarted on it's own because MS forced an update even though automatic updates is disabled, some idiotic WGA error and limited functionality because some new WGA update was broken, machine is running horrendously slow for some reason, and on and on - those are actual problems the clients had with their previous installation and their previous support team).
Which do you think gets my market share?
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
There may be a market, but it's most definitely a dying market.
The vibrant Linux community, with all of its options, daunting, while the OS/2 community which died like a decade ago before BeOS was even around, looks better? If your shit needs OS/2 to run, that is what we call obsolete. Port it to Linux. If that's too daunting, find a vendor that sells stuff made some time in the last ten or 15 years.
Ummm... what version of Linux do you select to run a bunch of specialized hardware? What GUI? What development toolkit(s)? Who will write the drivers necessary? What happens if the current OS/2 apps are simply WPS extensions for which Linux has absolutely NO equivalent? Or even simply just true OS/2 GUI apps?
On top of that, the OS/2 API hasnt really changed. No need to select one of... how many? APIs/toolkits used by the various Linux implentations/dev tools.
Gotta remember, porting a Linux app to OS/2 is "pretty easy" (Apache, PHP, MySQL, VLC, KMP, mPlayer/mEncoder, FFMPEG, Squid, Rsycn, ISC Bind, Scribus, Quassel, Postgres, GutenPrint, CUPS, Ghostscript, cURL, Python, Subversion, GCC, Cmake, GNU Core Utils, bzip, wGet, Perl, OpenLDAP, STunnel, Tar, VirtualBox - and those are only a FEW of the ports maintained by ONE OR TWO people - and a small list of the total Linux to OS/2 ports (GUI and non-GUI).
Porting an OS/2 GUI app to Linux? If it's a true OS/2 app that utilizes the WPS, it's near impossible to totally impossible. Most of these older specialized apps for the types of systems I was discussing fit that category.
I'd call that daunting. Wouldn't you?
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!