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New OS/2 Warp client
Anonymous Coward wrote to tell us about a definite new version of Warp. This is a bit odd-no one really knows whether IBM or Stardock Systems will be developing it. Stardock has been pushing to "Linux-ize" it, but has encountered problems with the royalties setup.
OS/2 out there free for us coders to munch on would be great.
And as for that first comment moron well we all know who will end up with something shoved up their butt one day, be it from some prison lovin' or from someone's boot up your ass, either or doesn't matter to me as you'll be the one begging for vaseline first.
Just when I was beginning to think I would
have to stop using OS/2, along comes a new
version. Additional driver support is all it needs, as many experienced OS/2 users will agree "OS/2 is still ahead of the Windows system"
Or the other one... ;)
Why can't you people say "unixize" instead of "linuxize" when you are talking about gaining unix-like traits?
Oh, don't mind answering - I know already. I am Linustorvaldus of Borg and all other os:es will be assimilated to LINSUX! The new windows instead of windows.
AFAIK most of OS/2's PM was made (or at least designed) by IBM. My question is, Does M$ really own that much of OS/2's code, that IBM (or Stardock) can't rewrite those parts, to get rid of M$.
A.Grandt
OS/2 is pretty rooted to the HPFS file system (using things like spaces and resources) that just aren't available in the EXT2 format. Plus, IBM would have to figure out how to work with a permitions-based file system, instead of their more typical HPFS system.
By the way, for all of you who have been saying we should get the OS/2 desktop on Linux, I have a better idea: build in an X server and GNOME support into OS/2, plus give it the ability to run Linux binaries. Then, you could run OS/2, Open32-compliant code, and Linux apps. Note, I'm not saying UNIX OS/2; I'm just saying make it Linux-compatible. (If the GNOME project and 2.2 kernels get finished before my social security kicks in, I'd be happy to reconsider this proposal.)
And, for those of you who have recommended opening the Win32s-OS/2 code for working with WINE, etc.: the code is copyright M$. Sorry.
Warp will crash. Especially with Navigator 2.02. The biggest problem comes when you are trying to run a lot of 16-bit DOS or Win3.1 programs. The Virtual Machines are too much like DOS/Win3.1 in that they crash fairly regularly.
Using native warp programs takes care of most of it.
Matt
Slashdot prevents cut-and-paste operations on its pages recently under Netscape. ZDNet also implements this same no-copy HTML.
I have to go to "Page Source" to copy text now as result.
This is very annoying.
Can Slashdot please remove it and return to the previous plain old copy-able HTML code you were using?
It'll crash if you make setup errors. However, IBM has been diligent at making improvements to the client. I found the old non-converged MPTS to cause true crashes; the new one might have a few problems but instead of crashing, the symptom of problems I've had is os/2 *rebuilds the desktop* without killing the kernel. It's amazing to see that happen. I've had the desktop rebuild itself underneath a dialup session without touching NS 4.04 or interfering with the link. NS 2.02 used to exit with a SYS3175 but it never did screw up the desktop.
Many would have thought IBM would have been one of the last corporations to embrace Open Source. It seems they have some sharp visionaries, because they're probably doing more than any other "main-stream" company- except maybe Intel. Go IBM!
I really like OS/2 Warp's interface- would die to run it under Linux. It makes me want to cry that MS dumped OS/2, can you imagine all these computers that currently run Win95 running OS/2. Sure it may not be *my* first pick for an operating system, but it sure is the first OS I'd install for a new user... Truth be told I personally like the interface better than anything except WindowMaker/Gnome.
-Seth N. (snickell@bigfoot.com)
3.04 all ok.
Though the color scheme for selected text makes it really hard to see what is selected. Many sites suffer from this problem...How about making selected text white on bright purple? Yellow on black? Black on yellow?
(this is probably not the right forum for this suggestion...)
PROTECTONLY=YES only means that DOS (and therefore Windows) support is disabled: you can't run DOS or Windows apps, VDD's don't load, etc.
16-bit OS/2 apps and drivers still load and run.
Well, one comes to my mind, but I think that
debate is covered very well in another thread
that started on Friday 10:31 PM. Guess what
I prefer..
Today, I think Linux is a much better system than OS/2. Linux has GUIs, a huge set of tools, standards-conforming APIs (POSIX, partial Win32), excellent support for SMP and distributed computing, and a standard system-wide object model (CORBA), if you want it. OS/2 is full of proprietary, non-standard, and often downright clunky bits and pieces. And IBM never really managed to get it out for hardware other than the PC.
OS/2 has had played its part in computing history. There have been some things about it that were really good, and there have been some aspects of it that were really bad. Let it rest.
If you're on an unstable network or are running any of a number of very badly coded (mostly direct Windows ports) programs. The Single System Input Queue problem (Mentioned numerous times here) is probably the number one biggest problem with the OS and something users have been begging IBM to fix for YEARS now. IBM refuses, claiming that doing so would break older programs. The recent asynchronous focus change fix is no help at all.
IBM might do better to embrace Linux cautiously and offer users an upgrade path at some point, rather than trying to fix all the OS/2 bletcherisms.
There has been an EXT2 filesystem driver for OS/2 for many years. Last time I was paying attention to OS/2, you could use EXT2 as the root filesystem. He must have done something about EAs.
Anyone who knows much about Linux should remember how fully the Linux weenies flamed the author of EXT2 for OS/2 because he wanted to wait until the driver was stable before releasing source.
Ho !oh Hohohohohoho !!
.... so many broken banners. Hope people aren't being charged for them.
Now that slapdash has it's OWN ad engine, it can afford to post rumors as actual news stories. Injunction. But
MEEPT!!
Eh, huh?
I would, however, love to see IBM open-source what they can of the WPS/SOM. It would improve the state of desktop environments in UNIX quite a bit...after a healthy about of bug-squashing, that is (in the WPS...it was always kind of buggy, but very cool and configurable).
I'm sure there are many happy users of OS/2 (I was one) who swear by HPFS, so don't take my observations as a flame against OS/2. It would be easy enough to design a statistically valid experiment to test the hypothesis.
Let's face it, OS/2 is quite dead these days. Heck even Linux gets more commercial-grade application than Warp does. However, there is one thing that I have wanted to get ever since I had to give up my beloved Warp: The WPS. The WPS is the greatest user-interface that has ever been created. It has everything; ease of use, good looks.. I loved the WPS. Gnome, KDE, none come even close to the WPS. I know it will never happen, but give me the WPS for Linux and I will be happy.
OS/2 probably works OK to control industrial equipment. But anyone who has used OS/2 in an interactive GUI manner will have experienced many system hangs and lockups--keyboard dead, mouse dead. The computer doesn't crash. Many background processes continue to run fine. But there is no way to regain control other than a hard reboot. Well, it might be possible to telnet into the OS/2 machine and fix something. But OS/2 CLI process utilities are crude or non-existant. The third party tools aren't much better. And killing and restarting the OS/2 GUI from the command line would require a fair amount of guruhood (if it is possible).
The Virtual DOS Machine technology in OS/2 is unparalleled in the PC operating system world (it has its own emulated DOS kernel, or you can create a Virtual Machine Boot and boot any version of DOS from a disk image sort of like DOSEMU). The main reason I still use OS/2 at home is because it's the only environment I know of that lets me play Red Alert and Quake, use XFree86 and the GIMP, and use slrn to read news all at the same time.
Also, the OS/2 kernel is VERY good at doing multithreading, and performancewise it's easily on par with Linux on lower-end hardware.
BeOS costs about $70.
Linux costs about $30 (free if you want to download it).
Isn't IBM a bit unrealistic in their pricing of OS/2?
Just to clarify, there are no way to port M$ Office or any Win32 real app (forget Quake2!) due the current memory model which limits the application memory segment in 512Mb (I'm wondering if M$ deliberately forced Office to load over the
512Mb to avoid an easy port to OS/2 - this could kill Win95). Warp Server and Aurora uses another OS/2 kernel supporting up to 2Gb of address space per app, like Windows Neanderthal Technology, and if there will be an Aurora client, then the greatest barrier to support Win32 under OS/2 will fall.
Select the text normally, with the left mouse button, to copy it. To paste, just click the middle button. No keys :)
What are you talking about? The PM interface is much better than the Windows interface in many many ways, and it isn't very buggy, multiple input queues would be nice but would be very hard to do without ditching compatibility. OS/2 Warp Server for e-business on my machine is much better than previous versions, with a couple exceptions. Such as the PARTFILT.FLT driver fails to operate with the LVM. And why all this talk about using the OS/2 source with Linux? The OS/2 kernel is at least as functional as the OS/2 one. The OS/2 one is actually better at quite a few things, like SMP, plug and play and threading. Ever try writing a multithreaded application in Linux??? Good luck! I wrote gtkBitchX and PMBitchX (GUI interfaces to panasync's BitchX) and threads are pitiful in Linux! I would think more about adding Linux code to the OS/2 codebase instead! That would make much more sense. Fix what's broken, not dissect it and add it to a screwed up Linux kernel.
Brian Smith
dbsoft@technologist.com
I'm glad you gave reasons for saying that. I have not seen any reason to believe it's dead. :) Seems pretty damn live to me!
Brian Smith
dbsoft@technologist.com
Umm excuse me! SOM is CORBA compliant. Warp supports SMP, distributed computing, has the same GUIs available on Linux (heck XFree86 is not a Linux GUI it was developed for one of the BSDs (FreeBSD I think)). Proprietary and non standard is complete bull. IBM supports as many standards as Linux does if not more. The only thing it really lacks is a complete multiuser environment. yet IBM covered this point to adding ISS (Installable Security System) API in Warp 4 to allow third party vendors to supply process level and filesystem level security. I wish you people would get your facts straight before posting this crap!!!!!!
Brian Smith
dbsoft@technologist.com
1998 brought two new OS/2 versions.
The OS/2 Warp Server for e-business and a Workspace-on-demand update.
This year we will see a new OS/2 Warp client.
I already pre-ordered my copy.
OS/2 dead? Yeah, right!
It was only a beta? Glad to hear. I got that in the mail, too. It even crashed a couple of times. The drive letters just scare me, though.
Why not make it more gnude, then?
> I'm a real old school OS/2 user (since 2.0 from memory)
Stop making me feel old. I used that. I can't even legally get intoxicated. The single message queue is definitely the failing point of WPS. Also, it's odd how the mouse is much more erratic under WinOS/2 (fullscreen) than normal WPS or XFree86.
And I mean it really crashed. Blue Screen. Register dumps. Just like NT.
Once I saw a guy crash HP-UX. Once.
I don't know... Linux is the only one I have to pay for CDs for (which I'm quite willing to do). IBM, Be, and MS send me their respective OSes for free. I do write programs for those environments from time to time, though.
It's as dead as the Amiga. Maybe a little deader than Macintosh, but not much.
DDE... wasn't that originally a hack on Windows messages? Upon which OLE was further based.
As a former Os2 developer I can attest that the PM user interface did lock up frequently, often corrupting ini files which contain user and system settings. When these files are corrupted, the only solution is often to reboot to a full-screen cli and replace them with default ini's, losing weeks or months of customization. Otherwise the gui shell didn't work at all.
These ini files, like the Windows registry, are binary and cannot be fixed with a text editor. Often it was not even possible to force a reboot with CTRL-ALT-DELETE. One must turn off the power switch or unplug the machine. Now, that's LOCKED.
Most of these problems are due to the PM's single message queue, and the use of binary ini's. I understand that IBM has fixed the lockup problem not by using multiple queues but by allowing a user to force a window which isn't responding to messages into the background and kill it, consistently. I have no way to know for sure as I haven't used Os2 in several years. It was possible to do that SOMETIMES even with the early versions of Os2 with CTRL-ESC to bring up a task list and end task, but not consistently.
Os2 has a lot of good features, but it offers no solution for Linux. SOM and the workplace shell are far from ideal, but the concepts are good. Os2's design and implementation of threads was really good, though.
PM, but not the workplace shell, was developed jointly by MS and IBM. Windows 3.1 was just a dumbed-down version of PM sitting on top of DOS instead of Os2. In many ways the MS-IBM design for PM still is superior to X-Windows -
for example, real child windows (windows within windows). You don't see that on the Linux desktop except in a few rare apps like CoolEdit where it is custom-coded. On the other hand, an outstanding weakness of both Os2 and Windows is that both rely too much on invisible windows sending messages to each other to do things which should be done at a more basic level in a more secure way. These invisible windows can lock up and crash, just like any other windows.
The workplace shell (for Os2 2.0) was developed almost entirely by consultants, and was never really finished. Many features which were already coded were left out (like tear-off menus) and others needed more work and testing, but IBM said "enough". There have been some improvements with 2.1 and the Warps, but the initial morale was damaged by IBM's lack of committment to a job well done.
KDE already uses some of the best concepts from the workplace shell like templates for desktop objects, etc., without any Os2 code whatsoever I certainly wouldn't want to take code from Os2 and port it to Linux, even if IBM made it freely available. Use the concepts - yes, but apply them to what is more natural to unix (and works better to boot).
MS did just that in the design of Windows 95 - use of right mouse button for popups, an expanded registry mimicing Os2's binary inis, an improved DOS box, etc. BeOS may also have learned a thing or two from Os2.
There are additional problems with OS2's multitasking when the PM gui isn't used. In order to get multiple cli's, one must go through PM to bring up a new session. While multiple tasks can run without PM, it's hard to access or monitor them except one at a time, through a single full-screen cli. And, when PM is used, lockups are frequent, making Os2 less than industrial strength for many kinds of applications. If the PM lockup problems is really fixed, Os2 can perhaps be more attractive as an alternative to NT, which has largely taken over the role originally planned for Os2.
Let IBM and the consultants it may pay to improve Os2 do their thing, but Linux and other unix-based operating systems are too far ahead to get sidetracked by false hopes and expectations of what Os2 code may have to offer.
What really killed Os2 in the consumer market was IBM's refusal to write device drivers for some of the most common video and sound cards, insisting that manufacturers do that. IBM certainly had the expertise and the manufacturers would have been happy to supply the specs, and IBM has paid the price for its stinginess. When you could get 16 million colors in Windows but only 16 with Os2 with a given video card, which system would you use? IBM did not even write device drivers for Os2 for some of its own video cards, forcing them to use the default 16 color VGA driver.
Os2 still has a small but loyal following, and occasionally tosses a concession or two to those who want Os2 to be more attractive to home users, not just a gateway in corporate networks or a java client in banking and insurance. A large part of the code was written by consultants, and/or by Microsoft, not by IBM staff. When these people moved on the continuity needed for sustained development was lost. IBM has never been willing to keep enough Os2 developers on board to keep the ball rolling. The developers on its staff have been first-rate, though, and some of IBM's free "employee-written software", with source, produced some of the best apps ever written for Os2. This was long before "open source" became a buzz-word, and was truly a labor of love, being written by IBM employees in their spare time.
PS. Please don't forget that the original plan for Os2 was for it to replace and kill unix, creating a 100% IBM enterprise from mainframe to desktop. NT was not even in existence in those days. I don't think the developers who created Os2 felt that way (witness Os2's excellent boot manager which is so friendly to other systems) but IBM's management sure did.
X is not a GUI, it's a network transparent window system. The GUI is implemented by Gnome or KDE, and both of them are high-quality and powerful system.s
Linux is getting not one but three powerful GUIs: Gnome, KDE, and Java. Pick the one you most like. The good thing is: even if they are not entirely consistent, they still interoperate.
If you like the OS/2 GUI so much, it's easy to reimplement for Linux with the modern tools available now (Gnome, GTK, Qt, CORBA, Java, PTk, DPS, ...).
I find it to be quite stable. In addition, you can largely avoid some of the problems with using drive letters by installing tvfs. Linux isn't good enough to replace OS/2 yet for me, so I obviously have a different priority set than you do. :-)
Multithreaded OS/2 apps can easily overcome the limitations of the single message queue!
Rene Pawlitzek
Delphi R&D Engineer
Hi,
...).
I remember that IBM once said that it were considering releasing OpenDoc as OpenSource?
For all of you who missed OpenDoc
- made by IBM and Apple.
- implemented on MAC, OS/2 and WinNT.
- COMPONENT based (heavily with Corba, you could embed multimedia and other data sources,
clocks, stocks
- Arch independent storage.
It was neat!
Anyone knows if it was released?
BTW IBM holds some patents concerning component
based documents...
/RogerL
Does OS/2 have things like *real* OpenGL? If SGI teamed up with IBM like they teamed up with Apple... maybe IBM could see more mainstream support for things like games and high end graphics applications...
I think Warp might be as close to a "java os" as we will get. I'd like to see IBM keep doing java based things also.
You're right. OS/2 would do much better as a desktop operating system. Linux really needs to get the act together and settle on a standard desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE (OPTIONAL standard). To do well in the desktop, there needs to be a consistent interface between applications, much like the KDE or GNOME applications. And, of course, vendors will have to start bundling Linux with some of their desktop models.
One of the good things Linux has going on the desktop is the proliferation of applications that OS/2 might not necessarily have, such as the GIMP, Netscape 4.5, ApplixWare, and Corel WordPerfect.
Seems to me that it would be easier to OS/2-ize Linux, rather than go the other way around.. Probably could avoid some licensing troubles, too..
Copy'n'paste works fine here, Communicator 4.5 under Linux glibc2. What are you running?
\\'
OS/2's core is quite stable, assuming stable drivers. The Workplace Shell needs a major rewrite, though....
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
I've developed Kiosk Applications for OS/2, and it is rock solid. A nice environment to work in and fairly consistant throughout. I ran a BBS under OS/2 for half a decade...runing Maximus, Binkleyterm with a Fidonet and PODnet node. I only moved away from OS/2 when I took down my BBS. Now, you can run Max and Bink under DOSEMU, by the Gods! it is a FOSSIL driver!, and might just put my BBS, Solsbury Hill, back up. It was one of the first 500 or so Fidonet BBSs, and one of the first dozen PODNet BBSs...
Yes, I admit, I am an early adopter...I mean, I started using Linux with version 0.12 kernel...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Sure, Linux has GUIs. However, OS/2's GUI is *far* superior to X. X is just plain pathetic when compared to OS/2.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by The [not so] Little Hacker:
Why would Linux need a "system wide clipboard"????
Posted by lamikr:
OS/2 has OpenGL 1.0 and 1.1 support as software.
OpenGL 1.1 should also support hardware OpenGL,
unfortunately no one has not yet released
drivers supporting that.
IBM has released an OpenGL driver kit, but
in order to get it, you need to prove you
have a OpenGL licence from Silicon Graphics.
(Read: Cost lot of money...)
More info can be found from
http://service.software.ibm.com/ddk/
Sometime last spring an Australian reseller magazine interviewed the VP in charge of software at IBM. One of the questions they asked was why IBM hadn't killed OS/2 since they didn't seem to want to promote it.
He answered that their top 2000 OS/2 sites had generated $23,000,000,000 in the last fiscal year. Microsoft's total revenues were ~$12 billion...
WPS has a few bugs, die hards will tell you that making WPS crash is different from making OS/2 crash. I would agree with that if there was any way to make your system come back without a reboot. Doing exotic object operations with WPS can cause crashes.
I've caused the whole system to lockup hard programming the serial interface and doing lowlevel serial access in a DOS box. This would be a misbehaving application taking down the whole system.
There are also ways to screw up your system
Other than that, OS/2 is remarkably solid. If you have a job for it and you get it working, it will stay working until you change something. If you put it in to protectedmodeonly, it might not crash ever. Even the problems above aren't that bad, IBM could have fixed them (may have, but I doubt it with OS/2's funding) if they wanted to and had the money. OS/2 life and death (or near death if that idea offends you) can be summed up with only a few problems:
A lot of it was stupidity. IBM paid Borland to port Borland C++ to OS/2, this was good because Borland dominated the market at that time but IBM never secured any kind of future development so Borland produced a product and ran with the money instead of upgrading it. It also jaded the competition because now they think that IBM is partners with Borland and so they will have a disadvantage or worse yet, they feel entitled to a pay check from IBM to port their product because IBM is paying other people to do it.
I the sad thing is that there are a lot of devlopers who put in long hours and long weeks building OS/2 and fighting to get code added and OS/2 does have a loyal core set of users and the lessons never seem to be learned by IBM. OS/2 was really a labor of love for a lot of people and IBM just throws it away. It's only a matter of time before IBM dives into that market again, it is inevitable. Hopefully they will learn from those mistakes.
HTML does not provide for a mechanism to prevent cut/paste in documents. This is a browser bug and should be brought to the attention of the browser authors.
I have no problems cutting/pasting slashdot or any ZDnet article (even the URL given in the comment above).
Now that IBM is Linux happy, it would be nice if they assisted the OSS community in making a decent read/write implementation for Linux. I wouldn't mind having my root filesystem as HPFS. Don't know if this would work or not, but it would help Linux get an "enterprise" file system a lot faster.
Here are a couple of tidbits that you might not know:
1. Warp 3 was supposed to be a "performance update" only - no new features. That's where the name "Warp" came from - IBM used Star Trek terms as codenames for OS/2 products (the security component was called Odo, for instance). Warp 3 (aka OS/2 Version 3) was supposed to be just like OS/2 2.x, but run in 4MB on a 386. Well, along the way, they added tons of new features, including a much improved user interface.
2. Six months before Warp 4 was released, it wasn't even on the planning board. Of course, a lot of the work was already done on OS/2 PPC, and much of easily transfered over, but it just goes to show how long IBM delays before making up its mind.
And IBM has said that Warp 5 won't have that much new, besides what's in the server (SMP, Journalled File System, etc). Somehow, I think there may be some goodies snuck in.
--
Timur "too sexy for my code" Tabi, timur@tabi.org, http://www.tabi.org
A manufacturing line at work has been controlled by Warp for about 3 years and I have noticed that it has never crashed itself or the process program. It runs on an old dirt slow IBM "industrial" computer that controls a network of PLC's. It controls a machine that slowly makes a product that will be worth over a million dollars. I can imagine how long NT would last in that setting; however, what is remarkable, this setup has never crashed. Is OS/2 like this in all settings?
Not being able to copy and paste from Netscape sounds interesting. Are you using xfree? I am not aware of anything in a page's source that could trigger a bug like that. I say that is a bug, because if that feature does exist, it can be fixed! ;)
What I find interesting about the article is the implication near the end that IBM might very likely have released OS/2 as Open Source were it not for Microsoft's legal block. Is anyone else getting the feeling that IBM is pushing (or at least is going to be pushing) very hard for Open Source (see: Apache team help, etc.)? I think it would be great if IBM could release chunks of OS/2 that might prove useful to Linux. But, this becomes legally difficult for a large organization so I don't know how practically feasible this is.
David E. Weekly (dew)
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
I've seen this happen often in Navigator when a
site is coded with bad HTML and/or lots of
useless align="left"'s about the place (don't
people realize that in a table cell, that's the
default behavior? *sigh*) It would be great if
people would use something like weblint to
validate the HTML coming out of their super-duper
extra-fancy database.
Well, IBM isn't exactly the titan of industry it once was -- and as much as I love Open Source, it does seem that the corporations (with the exception of Intel) that are embracing Open Source at present are the once mighty that have fallen -- Corel, Netscape, IBM, etc.
what does "linux-ize" mean -
... this has me confused.
The UI in Warp IMO, is very easy and quite flexible. Lightyears ahead of anything else on the planet. The workplace shell's biggest fault was the fact that OS/2 only had a Single Message Queue, thereby causing a lot of hangs in PM. I never have understood why IBM didnt fix that. The SMQ is OS/2's biggest fault IMO. It forced me to start using Linux which doesnt have that problem 8)
Ron
You have been assimilated.
OS/2 has some flaws. The biggest flaw is it's single message queue (SMQ) which quite frequently can cause the Work Place Shell to hang, forcing a reboot. Additionally IBM needs to do some work on the Warp kernel. There is still not true kill -9 capability. While Os/2's memory management works well most of the time, *sometimes* it can commit pages to the swapfile but never release the memory back to the system correctly. Warp as a stand alone server is very very reliable. As a client, unless IBM incorporates multiple message queues, it can be quite frustrating to use depending upon your application mix. Using Netscape under Warp can be quite a nausating experience at times. The OS/2 SMQ problem is the primary reason I have migrated to Linux. Having to reboot the system in order to clear a clogged message queue in PM is simply unacceptable behavor period.
You have been assimilated.
Warp 4.0 comes with OpenGL 1.0 in the base package.IBM has eluded that they are dropping support for it though. As for a gaming platform.
Warp is probably the best DOS-based gaming platform made. OS/2 has so much going for it including native XFree86 support. If IBM just spend a quarter of the resources other competitors used there is no doubt in my mind what we all would be using right now.
-- Ted tsikora@powerusersbbs.com
I been using OS/2 since MS bailed out(around MS Windows386)time. I have to agree the base system is very stable and robust. Easily competes with Linux and may even out-pace it. Look at Norloffs BBS etc..To test this theory one has to only install XFree86 on OS/2. The stability is even greater thsn Linux's. The WPS is definitely the source of all maladies even though one of it's best features.
-- Ted tsikora@powerusersbbs.com
I think MS stills owns most of HPFS or at least the LAN server version of it HPFS.386
Well it depends what you mean. On the server side whether you're using LAN server or TCP applications only Warp & Warp server are rock solid & it's not unusual to boot them every 3 months or so. On the other hand the stability of WPS is well known. So while OS/2 as a desktop provides some great function - sometimes it doesn't work well. The other problem with OS/2 is that when it works it works great but when it breaks then things go disasterously and tragically bad. Mess up WPS and find yourself rebuilding the machine from scratch? Remember to backup all of your WPS customizations? Remember to reapply fixpacks and CSDs? remember the workarounds to patches that caused problems of their own?
Well, there seems to be a hierarchy of users in the computing world. This is how I have seen it over the years. Please understand that this is a broad generalization & not meant to be fodder for a flame war, just my observations:
UNIX - (to include Linux, BSD etc.) Programming & Engineering types, they know the internals of the kernals, & have the programming expertise to fix any problems (real or perceived).
OS/2 - Power users - Most of us don't have programming expertise (so we don't write all that much software & constantly whine about what software is available). Of course for END USERS we have the best OS, too bad we can't convince anyone to try it out.
Windows (of any variety) Annoying & obnoxious - Convinced that personal computing began with the release of Windows 3.1. They spend most of their time on the upgrade mill, foolishly upgrading all of their products regardless of whether the new product answers a need or fixes a problem. They also tend to tell everyone that uses anything other than MS products that they are behind the times, yet can't give one technical reason as to why anyone should buy the product that they use (other than "it is made by MS"). Their ingnorance of computer history, the inner workings of their computers (both hardware & software) is legendary.
Worst of all, they feel that their opinions matter.
Mac - View the computer as a "black box". They don't care how the computer works. They just want to do what ever the task is at hand (play games, do incredible work in graphics, or DTP).
Of course, this is just my opinion & I could be wrong.
M$ is famous for making royalties disappear; I understand that's what they did to Spyglass when they reduced the price of Exploder to 0 (Spyglass got a percentage of sales, not a per unit royalty). So maybe IBM should release as much of the OS/2 source as possible; at least enough that OS/2 users could migrate the desktop parts they want on top of Linux. Then M$ would get no royalties.
:-)
Well, it's an idea. I don't know how the royalties are calculated. It would be lots of fun if it did happen
--
Infuriate left and right
Couple of thoughts.
:) :) :) I don't think they've got Office running yet - but it's only a matter of time. :) Check out http://www.os2ss.com/win32-os2/
Firstly, I secured one of the bata copies of the new version of OS/2 Server for E-Commerce and was very dissappointed. The sooner they realise that all the wonderful technology and features in the world are useless when the PM (User interface) is almost as broken as it was in OS/2 2.0 back in 1992, the sooner they'll be able to make a useable product. The PM is incredibly buggy and there is still no task manager that I know of. At least when NT dies you can use a keypress to bring up a utilities screen. Not so with OS/2 - the only keys that work are c-alt-esc, and that just reboots the machine.
Secondly - just think of the implications of OS/2 Open Source. You could apply Win32-OS/2 and just think... most native Win32 applications could run under Linux. That's one to dream about, huh
Believe with me, my saplings.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a real old school OS/2 user (since 2.0 from memory) and even OS/2 User Group member, but I thought the interface was OS/2's biggest disadvantage: it sucked! Everything else was amazing: the multitasking, connectivity, speed, hardware (I had two tracker players streaming through two sound cards at the same time - I haven't even done that under linux yet) I've moved on to BeOS now - sick of waiting for IBM to fix up the PM which has never worked properly. But if this release is good - Stardock have done some amazingthings in the past - then I could set aside some apartition space again...
Believe with me, my saplings.
I know about the focus change, etc, and I haven't found it reliable enough to be happy with it. I *didn't* know about the task manager - thanks for that - I'll try to get hold of a demo. Nevertheless - this is bread and butter stuff that IBM has no good excuse for excluding.
Believe with me, my saplings.
OS/2 is dead. Move on folks.
My dream OS ....
... there's no harm in dreaming :)
- Linux CORE (kernel/filesystem/drivers etc)
- OS/2 interface
The interface in Warp4 was slick and with the enhancements from Stardock it was deluxe. As a bonus the learning curve for interface programming in OS/2 is simple for Win32 programmers.
IBM releasing OS/2's code start by releasing the Warp4 code
ext2fs is insanely fast, and linux is so stable that as long as you have clean power you will probably never have a crash that can hose the fs. /usr ext2 and read-only and /tmp ext2 though.
However there are times when you have things that REALLY need to be reliable and it would be really nice to mount on a fully journaled fs. I am not sure if HPFS is a journaling fs but if it is it would be usefull. I would probably still have
An Object at rest CANNOT BE STOPPED! -The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight
Well, while a JFS is very cool, I have never been impressed with half-assed data recovery in a file-system. ext2 is built around SPEED it pays attention to safety whenever possible but mainly its SPEED. Non-journaling FS that take time out of every operation to support improved safety always kinda struck me as like using a cotton condom.
Basically if your not going to commit() your going to get fsck'ed.
An Object at rest CANNOT BE STOPPED! -The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight
I know of nothing called "Win32s-OS/2". There is the original Win-OS2, aka Windows 3.1, which is included in Warp 4, optional with Warp 3. That may well have MS copyright issues. Win32-OS2 is Timur Tabi and company's effort to reproduce the Win32 API in Warp. Their page is at http://www.os2ss.com/win32-os2/, and they have a brief comparison of Win32 and Win32s. I believe that their project is the one people have been referring to.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Actually, OS/2's Workplace Shell is based on IBM's System Object Model (SOM) technology, which is a CORBA-compliant ORB. From what I read, GNOME is using CORBA too. A better fit, I think... I was an OS/2 user (Warp 3 and 4), and I really miss the Workplace shell. If anyone wants ports of any part of OS/2 to linux, workplace shell is the first thing that should be done. It would be the most useful thing. Perhaps next would be DAX (Developer's API eXtensions)...basically, it was parts of the Win32 API that were ported to OS/2 to make it easier for Win32 programmers to port programs. I suspect there would be a lot of work in that that would be useful to WINE.
-- John Truong
If Presentation Manager has licencing issues, perhaps WPS itself might be unladen with those. The thing is, WPS is an application that runs on Presentation Manager, but it's combined into PMSHELL.EXE. I think IBM should separate WPS out if possible (in terms of licensing), and then release it as open source for OS/2 and also help port it to Linux as part of a window manager using a free CORBA-compliant ORB that runs on Linux. Also, IBM could try making an OS/2 personality for Linux that is also open-source (separately from the WPS-window manager)
A lot of people have discussed how Linux and its community could benefit from opensourcing OS/2, but what would IBM be getting out of this?
1) Development of WPS goes under the Open Source model, and I don't have to go over those benefits here.
2) The IBM WPS environment comes to Linux, so IBM can start migrating clients to Linux with less training costs. Eventually, Linux could replace OS/2 as a desktop client and IBM could simply focus on supporting Linux.
3) WPS as a window manager would be very portable to other environments, like AIX or X on windows. IBM could use the WPS window manager to create a standardized interface that they can support over all of their platforms. This was one of the original goals of the Workplace Shell, and it could become a reality for them, via open source.
A lot of people are touting the benefits of WPS here, and there's a good reason why. At first, WPS can seem frustrating, especially if you're coming from an environment where you drag with the left mouse button. But give it time and get used to it, and you find WPS is very deep, and very powerful for users and programmers alike. After all, a lot of people have trouble using 'ls' instead of 'dir' at first too.
-- John Truong
Warp 4 fixpack 3 may be "fixes only" but the later Warp 4 fixpacks start adding and enhancing many features such as Open32 (or whatever they called their subset of Win32 api thunking to ease porting) and a more and more 32-bit internals. Maybe with a new release, the main device drivers will no longer be 16-bit.. wow.
:)
As for Stardock, they're good. Well, better than IBM at intelligent marketing anyways. But who isn't?
I always wondered how ext2fs compared to HPFS. Also, what features are planned for the 2.3 version of ext2fs? I remember hearing that there were some neat toys in store.
-matt
I REALLY hate to encourage this kind of crap but... I feel the need to defend KDE. It is not in the slightest bit broken, I've been using it since last feb. with very few problems. It's not the greatest desktop, at the time I started using it, it seemed like the only one. It works however. It provides the end user with an easy to use desktop and many tools that all have the same "look and feel". Gnome is more broken only in the sense that it has less maturity than KDE. I feel Gnome is a very nice desktop, but I don't use it as much. It is far more aesthetically pleasing than kde is, however. If you don't mind mr. smith tell me one thing that's "broken" about kde (other than the QT license).
-matt
ZDnet is locking out cut and paste operations in the main browser window in Communicator 4.07 for the main text of the article. IE 4.72.3110 copies it just fine, though. (IE 4 has always been superior for quoting text, unfortunately).
5 230,00.html
Try http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,218
I don't know enough html to say from the source how they are doing it. Anyone else want to enlighten us?
Linux base with a Warp4 desktop. KDE is getting
there. Sincerely wish that Stardock can join the
KDE project and inject some of their ideas. The OS/2 SOM and consistency on the desktop is fantastic. They've taken drag and drop to new heights. I really hope to have the os2 voice recoqnition capabilities available on the kde desktop. In the beginning it feels a bit funny talking to your computer, after a while it is a natural extention to your keyboard and mouse...
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If I remember correctly, HPFS is copyrighted by Microsoft, so it might be a bit complicated to accomplish that.
I don't think IBM will ever choose to Linux'ize OS/2. Comments coming out of IBM seem to indicate that its a upgrade to keep its current cliental happy, and not to compete on the desktop.
After having seen the Beta, its got some new features that make it more like Novell 5. It's nice, but its still no Novell or NT killer.
I've always loved OS/2 since I started using it in '93. The biggest mistake IBM ever made was not introducing true Win32 support.
Linux'izing OS/2 would be wrong. OS/2 technically does everything better than Linux anyways, except, the multi-user stuff. If IBM added multi-user functionality to OS/2, I'd be a great OS. It just needs more 'real' applications.
The biggest problem when it comes to OS/2's stability is the WPS. And the cause of 99% of all WPS problems is the display drivers. Get a good display adapter with good OS/2 drivers, and you're safe.. I'm running the beta of the new Warp Server (Aurora), and I've NEVER had a WPS crash so far. Been running it since October....
OS/2 - It works.
Love over Gold.