In my opinion it was the wrong decision not to concentrate on selected hardware.
That is a two way street. If you choose a hardware configuration, by the time you have it settled, and working, the hardware is no longer available, and nobody wants to buy it anyway, because there is newer stuff available. The only way to make that work, is to do it like Apple does. Go to the manufacturers, and get the very first devices off the production line, test them, and make them work, then buy 200,000 of them at the tail end of the production run (probably a special run, just for Apple). I doubt that Mensys (or anybody else), would be able to sell enough product to do that. Then, you have the problem where selected devices are not available in all countries, so you need to go through the procedure for alternate devices, after you figure out what is available. Of course, notebook computers really don't have replaceable parts, in a lot of cases.
In fact, I think that most OS/2 (eCS) users already choose carefully. Unfortunately, the manufacturers keep changing what is available, and sometimes things don't work out as expected.
I tried to build an bootable USB stick using Linux, that automatically starts Linux and then OS/2 in a virtual machine.
When I first tried Linux Mint, I found out that it will install to a USB stick, so I did so. It works okay, but even USB 3.0 is pretty slow. I did not attempt to use VBox with that setup, but the (same) stick would boot on all of my "modern" machines, and managed to configure all of the devices. I only have one machine with a USB 3.0 adapter, and it worked okay. The rest, with USB 2.0, were painfully slow. After that, I put Linux Mint 15 cinnamon 64 onto my Lenovo ThinkPad L530, which was causing problems for native eCS. All of the devices work, and the speed is quite good. I then put VBox into that, and I have WinXP, eCS 2.1 and eCS 2.2 installed in it. The really surprising thing is that eCS boots about 50% faster in VBox, than it does in the real machine (that by itself causes boot problems). ECS performance is comparable to the real machine, and it seems to work okay, but I haven't used it much. I have not tried to make eCS start automatically at boot, but it should be possible. The difficult part, so far, has been to figure out Linux, and all of the new rules (not to mention having to enter the mandatory password about every 5th time I try to do something).
This exercise did point out what I said earlier. There is no point in trying to run something like Firefox, or VLC, in VBox, under Linux. Both work better in the native Linux environment (which is running anyway). I have been playing with that configuration, but I am still not convinced that Linux is ready for prime time. Some other distro might be better, but it would take a couple of months, doing nothing else, to check them all out. FWIW, Linux Mint is the first Linux, that I have tried, that sort of works, for me.
I really believe there are *a lot* of WPS classes that could be replaced/developed by basic to medium-skilled programmers but, as it happens to myself, they just have no time to figure out how to start.
That is one of the problems. Programing the WPS is a little different, and there is a learning curve. I would expect that once you figure out the basics, that it is not that difficult, after all, I seem to recall that Ulrich Möller is (was?) a lawyer, not a programer (perhaps tat is the secret). I think that the ultimate example of WPS programing is XWorkPlace (eWorkPlace is a subset of that). XWorkPlace is, of course, (mostly) just an extension of the WPS classes, not a complete replacement (although you CAN just replace an individual class). Perhaps that would be a place to start.
In fact, now that I think of it, XWorkPlace is really a good beginning to Martin's idea. What is a little different is that he seems to want to replace the root classes with something new, rather than just use the object oriented interface to fix, change, or replace the root classes. XWorkPlace could definitely use a bit of tweaking. The most annoying thing is that it shows a file size of 1 byte, for all files that are bigger than 2 GB. I suspect that that is caused by using the REXX DLLs, because REXX has the same problem.
