Virtualization & OS/2 - How are you using it (if any)?

[Neil Waldhauer]

I think this is the right place for OS/2 on virtual. I know my concern is how developed the OS/2 side of the virtual environment is. VirtualBox gives a decent set of OS/2 additions. VMWare abandoned theirs but it probably still works. Are any other hosts capable? Without a decent set of additions, OS/2 isn't really very nice to run in a virtual environment.

I'm on both virtual and hardware. I sell both hardware with ArcaOS and per-configured ArcaOS virtual machines on my website. I spend at most of my computer time on OS/2.

[Doug Bissett]

Personally, I have OS/2 working well, and it does almost everything that I need to do. The biggest problem is "modern", so called (I don't believe it) "secure" web sites. Our ancient Firefox is becoming less useful every day. Dooble has some improvement, but it is far from being usable, and some web sites won't accept it because it isn't based on Google Chrome (one of the main "spyware" programs). That sort of thing is the main "problem" with OS/2 today. Most of that is outside of our control, and it does take time, and a lot of effort, to catch up.

I hate to break it to you, but Dooble uses qtwebengine, which uses chromium as it's engine - same as Chrome....

Yes, I know that, and it is one of the reasons why I am not too excited about Dooble. I find a LOT of network access to Amazon, and Google, web sites is blocked by my firewall. Fortunately, blocking that stuff (along with the various offensive governments) doesn't affect the web content much, but the blocking (mostly on the way out) is pretty consistent.

[Rick Smith]

I can tell you proxmox will not install arca as VM, however you can install warp which is weird...

Rick

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Wow...I never knew we had 'conspiracy theorists' and 'against all I'm unfamiliar with' thinkers on our board! ...how the heck have you survived all these years???!!!

LOL, maybe I should have know that though?  ...but why the "sales pitch" accusations???

Regardless whether JTA is a real person or not, I think the posts provided clearly identified the thought process behind pushing OS/2 into a VM, and how that in turn would remove the 'hardware suitability' from the equation we all try to solve, all in a relatively self-contained package.

Anyways, it is good to have options while the standard blockers are being removed slowly, one piece at a time. 

The browser problem is the one thing, I fear, that has the real "stones" to hurt us badly. Superb efforts are ongoing to extend our viability, but I still struggle with why this hasn't become a prioritized deliverable for our platform - and by that I mean the apparent lack of official backing by the only commercial player in our space, that being AN.

[davidrg]

The browser problem is the one thing, I fear, that has the real "stones" to hurt us badly. Superb efforts are ongoing to extend our viability, but I still struggle with why this hasn't become a prioritized deliverable for our platform - and by that I mean the apparent lack of official backing by the only commercial player in our space, that being AN.

I think the lack of 64-bit will prove to be a bit of a problem sooner or later there; web browsers are pretty memory hungry these days.

[ppgrainbow]

I'm currently running OS/2 Warp 4 as a guest OS under VirtualBox 7.0.6 without any major problems and I like how support for OS/2 Warp under VirtualBox has significantly improved over the years.
My host machine is Windows 10 Pro 22H2 x64 on a AMD-FX 4300 quad-core processor with 32 GB of RAM (maxed out on the motherboard) and 2 GB VRAM.My guest OS is OS/2 Warp 4 FP17 (Internal Revision 14.104a_W4 Uniprocessor, 2005-08-11) running with 512 MB of RAM and 64 MB VRAM.

I used to run  OS/2 Warp 4 under Virtual PC 2007 SP! when I was on Windows 8.1 Pro, but I had to move it to a Windows 2000 VMware VM running it under Virtual PC 2004 SP1.

[Lars]

The browser problem is the one thing, I fear, that has the real "stones" to hurt us badly. Superb efforts are ongoing to extend our viability, but I still struggle with why this hasn't become a prioritized deliverable for our platform - and by that I mean the apparent lack of official backing by the only commercial player in our space, that being AN.

Maybe, AN is now putting the emphasis on business customers, then they do not have the need for a working browser.
For a business customer it is likely much more important to have their existing, custom OS/2 application run on native up-to-date HW.

[Neil Waldhauer]

I doubt Arca Noae has the resources to port a web browser. If you have used Microsoft Edge, you may also wonder if Microsoft has sufficient resources.

They have stated that running on modern hardware is a priority, as well as having a legal right to sell OS/2.

[Per E. Johannessen]

Maybe, AN is now putting the emphasis on business customers, then they do not have the need for a working browser.

As a "business user" I can confirm that we definitely need a working browser.

[Lars]

Maybe, AN is now putting the emphasis on business customers, then they do not have the need for a working browser.

As a "business user" I can confirm that we definitely need a working browser.

That's good news. Then business and private customers are in the same boat.

[Paul Smedley]

Maybe, AN is now putting the emphasis on business customers, then they do not have the need for a working browser.

As a "business user" I can confirm that we definitely need a working browser.

I'm doing my best to get Qt updated (and keep it updated) so that we have a reasonably modern browser. Sure, Dooble isn't as feature packed as Chrome or Firefox, but it seems pretty capable and keeps getting better.

[David McKenna]

 I quite like Dooble, it's nice and light... my only complaint now is if I open a link from a Web Folder, it opens a new instance of Dooble rather than open a new tab in the existing instance (and sucks up a bunch of memory). Any of you programmers know if this is something that can be corrected within Dooble, or is it in the nature of OS/2? I could raise an issue on the Dooble github if it is possible to correct there...

Regards,

[Dave Yeo]

I quite like Dooble, it's nice and light... my only complaint now is if I open a link from a Web Folder, it opens a new instance of Dooble rather than open a new tab in the existing instance (and sucks up a bunch of memory). Any of you programmers know if this is something that can be corrected within Dooble, or is it in the nature of OS/2? I could raise an issue on the Dooble github if it is possible to correct there...

Regards,

Open an issue. Textbrowser is pretty good about implementing things like this, often as a setting. It has the same problem opening from a cmd line, so mention that. I'd assume it has the same behaviour on all platforms.

[Paul Smedley]

Confirmed on linux - opened a dooble window - then from a command line tried 'dooble https://www.abc.net.au' and it opened in a new window rather than a new tab of the existing window.

[Dave Yeo]

Well, with SeaMonkey, and IIRC, also Firefox, there's a setting  under Browser-->Link Behaviour, Links from other applications with the choices of the current tab/window, a new tab in the current window or a new window. IIRC, the default is a new window.
To start another browser instance, need the parameter -no-remote along with -profilemanager or -profile=name or such.