Yeah, I saw that. Although I thought there was talk of a reprive - community improving gcc port so that it could compile it properly or something? I've never tried Solaris so I can't comment - but there's also this StarPortal thing, which ought to work fine with OS/2 as well.
I do - both server and client - extensively. Why? Because for most things its far better/nicer than most other things. The GUI is the best I've ever seen - Gnome/KDE/Windows all seem very shallow in comparison. It is VERY stable & reliable & fast. It is still supported - new fixpacks and drivers just keep coming out - we now have full DVD & USB printer, keyboard, mouse support etc. There are plenty of software products - Lotus Smartsuite, Star Office, Netscape etc., and nearly all command-line UNIX software can now be compiled for it using EMX meaning we have Apache etc. Odin is making great progress; recent tests showed it to be the fastest Java platform available and the TCP/IP stack is excellent. Yes, I recognise that Linux beats it at some things, but I still use OS/2 for a lot of tasks. As a web server serving a large servlet-based website, for example. As a general-purpose client.
Definitely. OS/2 comes with IBM's Boot Manager which allows you to select a variety of OSs to boot at startup; it also works perfectly with lots of other boot managers. (My personal favourite is the GPLd XOSL - it has a proper point'n'click GUI etc. and does not require a separate partition - see www.xosl.org.) But that's not the only way it can do this things. OS/2 supports two different file systems - FAT and it's own excellent HPFS (one of the best things going for it over Windows etc. when it was first released was support for long file names - not to mention multitasking, the still superb GUI etc.) If you already have DOS/Win3.x/Win9x already installed on a FAT partition, you can install Warp 4 over the top - it will carefully not overwrite the existing operating systems, and then, from within OS/2, you can just type boot/dos and it will - boot/os2 to come back. Finally, the cleverest bit: it has a feature nicknamed 'Trapdoor'. This means that the system can save its state to disk and boot the other OS on the partition, then when that shuts down resume exactly where you were. You can even create an icon that just boots Windows to run a single app - you never have to see the stupid Start menu etc. OS/2 Warp 4 is really an excellent operating system; I use it and the new Warp Server for e-business extensively, and despite anything anyone says they ARE well-supported. Fixpacks every few months - new drivers from IBM all the time (it now has DVD support, full USB support for all printers, mice etc.) HTH.
First, my disclaimer: I have never tried this with Linux. All my experience with this has been with the OS/2 port of SANE, and eventually I had to give up because I couldn't make it work with my Microtek E3 scanner. That said, I believe that SANE ought to do what you want. It comes with a program called SANED - run that on the machine with the scanner and then, provided you use SANE on the clients to do the scanning it should all work beautifully, as if the scanner was locally attached. SANE is a command-line tool, but there are, I guess, plenty of X front-ends for it etc. HTH
Well, I don't know anything about Describe, but if you look at the OS/2 archive at http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ and do a search for Describe it comes up with all sorts of things, including an export macro to convert Describe files into HTML. Just a thought.
Warp 3.0, original version, has no networking support, true. But there was an updated version, called Warp Connect, which did. The latest client is now 4.0, which has full TCP/IP & SMB support, and very nice it is too. Netscape 4.61 etc. IBM recently released a new version of the server version, Warp Server for e-business, and a new client based on the same kernel is rumoured to coming in September. Whatever anyone says, OS/2 is NOT dead. There's still lots of us left using it, and the GUI beats anything I've seen before by miles. It's far more object-ified than ANYTHING else, much nicer. But I guess that's just my opinion. Linux is nice, too - so's this BeOS 5 I'm just playing with. But seriously, I would recommend OS/2 to anyone who's interested. Have a look at http://www.os2ss.com/
First of all, I'd like to point out that I am NOT hugely experienced with Linux; I have played with it a little, but I have been an OS/2 user all my life.
I was recently asked to do something similar to this for a friend's father: all he wanted was a simple office suite and e-mail and the web. In the end, I just got a spare 486/66 with a 100MB disk and put PC-DOS 2000 and Windows 3.1 on it then added Calmira (http://www.calmira.org/) to give it a Win9x-like look.. I also did things like adding WIN to autoexec.bat then, after it, adding
echo Please switch me off now ctty null (lock the keyboard)
Calmira is fairly flexible; you can disable all the fancy stuff and just have some nice big icons on the desktop and a shutdown button, which quits Windows and takes you back to my locked-up DOS.
I put on MS Works 3.0 (since we had that lying around and friends would be able to support him with that) and Netscape for web browsing and e-mail; to dial up I installed IE4 with as little as possible just to get the built-in dialer thing (which is quite nice, BTW).
The end result is a very easy-to-use system which is fast and simple - he seems pleased with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I saw that. Although I thought there was talk of a reprive - community improving gcc port so that it could compile it properly or something? I've never tried Solaris so I can't comment - but there's also this StarPortal thing, which ought to work fine with OS/2 as well.
I do - both server and client - extensively. Why? Because for most things its far better/nicer than most other things. The GUI is the best I've ever seen - Gnome/KDE/Windows all seem very shallow in comparison. It is VERY stable & reliable & fast. It is still supported - new fixpacks and drivers just keep coming out - we now have full DVD & USB printer, keyboard, mouse support etc. There are plenty of software products - Lotus Smartsuite, Star Office, Netscape etc., and nearly all command-line UNIX software can now be compiled for it using EMX meaning we have Apache etc. Odin is making great progress; recent tests showed it to be the fastest Java platform available and the TCP/IP stack is excellent. Yes, I recognise that Linux beats it at some things, but I still use OS/2 for a lot of tasks. As a web server serving a large servlet-based website, for example. As a general-purpose client.
HTH.
Definitely. OS/2 comes with IBM's Boot Manager which allows you to select a variety of OSs to boot at startup; it also works perfectly with lots of other boot managers. (My personal favourite is the GPLd XOSL - it has a proper point'n'click GUI etc. and does not require a separate partition - see www.xosl.org.) But that's not the only way it can do this things. OS/2 supports two different file systems - FAT and it's own excellent HPFS (one of the best things going for it over Windows etc. when it was first released was support for long file names - not to mention multitasking, the still superb GUI etc.) If you already have DOS/Win3.x/Win9x already installed on a FAT partition, you can install Warp 4 over the top - it will carefully not overwrite the existing operating systems, and then, from within OS/2, you can just type boot /dos and it will - boot /os2 to come back. Finally, the cleverest bit: it has a feature nicknamed 'Trapdoor'. This means that the system can save its state to disk and boot the other OS on the partition, then when that shuts down resume exactly where you were. You can even create an icon that just boots Windows to run a single app - you never have to see the stupid Start menu etc. OS/2 Warp 4 is really an excellent operating system; I use it and the new Warp Server for e-business extensively, and despite anything anyone says they ARE well-supported. Fixpacks every few months - new drivers from IBM all the time (it now has DVD support, full USB support for all printers, mice etc.) HTH.
First, my disclaimer: I have never tried this with Linux. All my experience with this has been with the OS/2 port of SANE, and eventually I had to give up because I couldn't make it work with my Microtek E3 scanner. That said, I believe that SANE ought to do what you want. It comes with a program called SANED - run that on the machine with the scanner and then, provided you use SANE on the clients to do the scanning it should all work beautifully, as if the scanner was locally attached. SANE is a command-line tool, but there are, I guess, plenty of X front-ends for it etc. HTH
Well, I don't know anything about Describe, but if you look at the OS/2 archive at http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ and do a search for Describe it comes up with all sorts of things, including an export macro to convert Describe files into HTML. Just a thought.
Warp 3.0, original version, has no networking support, true. But there was an updated version, called Warp Connect, which did. The latest client is now 4.0, which has full TCP/IP & SMB support, and very nice it is too. Netscape 4.61 etc. IBM recently released a new version of the server version, Warp Server for e-business, and a new client based on the same kernel is rumoured to coming in September. Whatever anyone says, OS/2 is NOT dead. There's still lots of us left using it, and the GUI beats anything I've seen before by miles. It's far more object-ified than ANYTHING else, much nicer. But I guess that's just my opinion. Linux is nice, too - so's this BeOS 5 I'm just playing with. But seriously, I would recommend OS/2 to anyone who's interested. Have a look at http://www.os2ss.com/
Someone moderate this up as 'Funny'...
First of all, I'd like to point out that I am NOT hugely experienced with Linux; I have played with it a little, but I have been an OS/2 user all my life.
I was recently asked to do something similar to this for a friend's father: all he wanted was a simple office suite and e-mail and the web. In the end, I just got a spare 486/66 with a 100MB disk and put PC-DOS 2000 and Windows 3.1 on it then added Calmira (http://www.calmira.org/) to give it a Win9x-like look.. I also did things like adding WIN to autoexec.bat then, after it, adding
echo Please switch me off now
ctty null (lock the keyboard)
Calmira is fairly flexible; you can disable all the fancy stuff and just have some nice big icons on the desktop and a shutdown button, which quits Windows and takes you back to my locked-up DOS.
I put on MS Works 3.0 (since we had that lying around and friends would be able to support him with that) and Netscape for web browsing and e-mail; to dial up I installed IE4 with as little as possible just to get the built-in dialer thing (which is quite nice, BTW).
The end result is a very easy-to-use system which is fast and simple - he seems pleased with it.
Just a thought.