Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 4th Dec 2001 17:47 UTC
IBM's OS/2 has a great history as a workstation operating system, it was a major alternative OS in the '90s. At its peak time in the mid-'90s OS/2 had about 2 million users but the Windows NT and Windows 95 releases broke its further development. This year Serenity Systems has released a new client version of OS/2. This article will introduce you to what OS/2 is all about. You will learn its history, its user interface, and its power under the hood. The article is also accompanied by a number of screenshots.
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"Needs beautifying. Needs a real artist to work on it."
Not to say that it's not needed (we all want to look pretty, don't we?). It all depend on your point of view. Many OS/2 systems in use today do not run the shell *at all* (don't try that with Windows). In the consumer area, beauty might be king but in a business environment, there are many other considerations.
">Besides installation went like a breeze
Funny, because I got two emails from people who had the same probs as me. And yes, they were OS/2
old timers. "
What you see in eCS GA is only the first pass of rewriting the installer (in what, 15 years? :=)). "problems" falls mainly in a few areas:
a) LVM
This is where we get most of the trouble reports. LVM - as IBM delivered it - is in fact very solid in itself. It's that user interface that cause majority of the problems. You can actually run LVM from the command line and you will find that the LVM engine itself is very solid. Work is underway to completely rewrite the LVM user interface. By using the new user interface, I can assure you that LVM will become much less of an issue than it really is.
b) Pre-boot
Depending on your hardware, if you can get through pre-boot using the default options, things generally are very smooth - with the exception of the IDE controller driver. Just by a draw of luck, the particular version of the enhanced IDE device driver included in eCS GA is.....in the word of the author of the driver: Not one of her better piece. While it functions fine in a great variety of hardware, it does do "funny" things on certain hardware. A later version of that driver does not display some of the odd behaviors.
The pre-boot screen is a 1.0 attempt to deal with the great variety of hardware in the market today. It cuts down the need to use boot floppies tremendously . A new version is near completion which acts capablities such as multi-page configuration screens and auto-matic device detections. The 1.0 version of the pre-boot function (call OS2CSM) can only handle one screenful of user interface and there is no room for putting any sort of words on there to explain the options. As a result, far too many people then we like to see are getting confused, and fustrated by the inability to boot pass config.sys. In addition, by addition automatic device detection (PCI, anyway), we will be able to change the default settings base on what's detected, rather than requiring the user to know what option to select. This is a much needed feature that simply didn't made it into 1.0.
c) Network installation
Work is underway to incorporate automatic NIC detection and setup of the TCP/IP network. With supported NIC cards, the installer will be able to detect the PCI id and set up the associated TCP/IP network automatically. We would like to set up the peer and client/server requesters automatically as well but the first priority is the TCP/IP network. The goal is to get rid of phase 2 installation completely.
d) Loader and Kernel
After eCS GA was frozen, IBM released versions of the loader that can handle some additional hardware out in the field. Unfortunately, these releases never reached "official support" level until the eCS GA masters were made. We had no choice but to include these as "un-official" code. Some of the problems people reported could have been addressed with the newer loader (and kernel).
No, I wouldn't say that there is not more work that need to be done to the installer. We are busy working on it.
Regards,