Guest post by Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV have announced the immediate availability of eComStation 2.0 Silver Release for download on August 28th, 2009. This beta release RC7, codenamed “Silver Release”, is available to Software Subscription subscribers.
This release of eComStation 2.0 has been under development for a long time. This is demonstrated in the amount of issues resolved and the amount of code committed. For example, 259 bugs were resolved, of which 174 were “fixed” since the previous beta release (eCS 2.0 RC6a). Over 1450 commits were made since the release of eComStation v2.0 RC6a (beta).
I used to use OS/2 a few years ago, shortly before IBM killed it. At the time it was still kind of cool, especially for something that ran on a PentiumMMX at 166MHz, but I tried eCS RC5 a couple months ago and it really shows its age. Hardware compatibility is awful, things like changing the screen resolution require a reboot, and the UI is ancient and barely usable. I wish they would just release the OS/2 code; the open source folks could probably do something with it.
eComStation wouldn’t even boot up now on my VM’s [I wouldn’t even DARE to install it onto the hard drive, because it’s a closed-source, corporate model OS].
As far as I recall, I didn’t like it a year ago, when I tested it. It was quite weird and the interface was completely out of this epoch.
Edited 2009-08-31 21:32 UTC
@ marcp
It’s fairly known that eComStation and VM solutions don’t play along very well, since the times of OS/2. According to Wikipedia:
“(…) OS/2 has historically been more difficult to run in a virtual machine than most other legacy x86 operating systems because of its extensive reliance on the full set of features of the x86 CPU. (…) During a pre-launch session (ESX3) with VMware in Oslo, Norway, December 2005, they specifically said that OS/2’s use of the CPU’s ring 2 was the reason that it would not run in VMware.(…)
Also interesting to note is that Parallels Inc., the virtualization technology company that we know today, was born in great part thanks to this particular problem between OS/2 / eComStation and existing VM solutions.
“(…) A large German bank needed a way to use OS/2 on newer hardware that OS/2 did not support. As virtualization software is an easy way around this, the company desired to run OS/2 under a hypervisor. Once it was determined that VMware was not a possibility, it hired a group of Russian software developers to write a host-based hypervisor that would officially support OS/2. Thus, the Parallels, Inc. company and their Parallels Workstation was born. (…)”
More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os2_warp#Virtualization
Edited 2009-08-31 22:25 UTC
Thank you for this information. I’ll gladly download it again to check the whole thing via normal livecd boot procedure.
I wasn’t really that much into the eComStation stuff, so I didn’t get the facts about its problems related to VMs.
Sadly to say, the eComStation doesn’t work on my machine properly. It boots up and then just freezes forever, disabling mouse and – partialy – a keyboard.
while it’s long term relivance is indeed an issue, i still really like the OS. For what it is capable of it si lighting fast and your average user (surfing the web, IM, email, etc) could use it without a lot of problem. eCom 2.0 is pretty neat, especially now that some of the ACPI issues have been ironed out. Keep up the good work.
also, how is the near 2.0 release of a major OS (since it is the only one of it’s kind, OS/2 based) not front page news?
Edited 2009-08-31 21:58 UTC
OS/2 is huge in the insurance industry and its not something that can be readily replaced. That’s one reason why it’s developed; there is money to be made.
Much like Plan9 or AmigaOS, it also has die hards willing to pay for eComstation.