eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions

[melf]

Sounds nice. looking forward to try i out!

[Andy Willis]

I have tried the Demo CD in a Thinkpad W520, it booted up fine but with no network. 
Tried it in a Thinkpad W500 and it requires the BIOS to be put the SATA into compatibility mode (AHCI ticket #11). 
I'll have to do more testing but so far each time I have attempted to set my own options and tell it to use multiple CPUs it reboots during the boot process.

[melf]

I also tried it on an Lenovo R500. Booted half way and then asked me to put in the CD again.

[Andy Willis]

I also tried it on an Lenovo R500. Booted half way and then asked me to put in the CD again.

Go into the BIOS and change the SATA to compatibility... it can't drive the SATA CD.
Andy

[melf]

Can't try it, it's my son's and I just stole a moment of its capacity. However, the symptom was the same of  the much  older LG KS which I described earlier. I suspect the problem is another.

[Zigulec]

So far I have no first impressions unfortunately.

I have registered myself already two  times, but did not get any feedback yet for the last week

[guzzi]

You should get a download link immediately after registering. Perhaps it ended up in your spam box?

[Thomas M.]

Hello Stefan,

nor did I. No answer at all after three times asking.

Thomas

[Grimus]

Hi all. Just my 2 cents: I booted my eCS workstation from eCS demo CD and all went OK. This is an AMD Phenom II X6 with 4GB of RAM and ATI X850 PCIe video. Runs very well under eCS 1.2R so far.

eCS 2 demo boots with standard settings. Afterloading the Intel PRO/1000 PCIe MAC driver it sits and waits for quite a while (~30 secs) with keyboard being unresponsive - I was almost about to do a reset. Eventually installation continues, boots into the desktop and is usable by and large. Firefox 10.0.11 comes up nicely and connects to the internet using my LAN connection.

What did not work and works in my eCS installation:
- sound did not work (I am using an old PCI Nightingale PRO)
- ACPI 3.21.07 only initializes one of the 6 CPU cores (this might be by design)
- Flash is not working (seems not to be installed)
- HTML5 did not work - maybe due to missing sound

Just a first impression - will do some more extensive tests.

Cheers
Andreas

[Roderick Klein]

Hi all. Just my 2 cents: I booted my eCS workstation from eCS demo CD and all went OK. This is an AMD Phenom II X6 with 4GB of RAM and ATI X850 PCIe video. Runs very well under eCS 1.2R so far.

eCS 2 demo boots with standard settings. Afterloading the Intel PRO/1000 PCIe MAC driver it sits and waits for quite a while (~30 secs) with keyboard being unresponsive - I was almost about to do a reset. Eventually installation continues, boots into the desktop and is usable by and large. Firefox 10.0.11 comes up nicely and connects to the internet using my LAN connection.

What did not work and works in my eCS installation:
- sound did not work (I am using an old PCI Nightingale PRO)
- ACPI 3.21.07 only initializes one of the 6 CPU cores (this might be by design)
- Flash is not working (seems not to be installed)
- HTML5 did not work - maybe due to missing sound

Just a first impression - will do some more extensive tests.

Cheers
Andreas

We disabled THE smp support in THE boot by default. Some systems boot from cd trap when smp is enabled. This does not happen with the boot from hard disk. You can switch on the smp support in the preboot menu.

This hang you you experience for 30 seconds is most likely caused by a bug in the currently used USB drivers. We are down to 1 bug to replace the IBM
USB drivers. As mentioned this is a beta of the demo cd.

Roderick Klein
Mensys b.v.

[Alex Taylor]

My Asus M4A78LT-M boots to a desktop, the Intel Pro/1000 nic is seen and used and I can get to the internet BUT there is no way that I can do anything with the drives on the machine - every time I try to open a drive it gives a windows like message that the drive isn't formatted (they are HPFS and JFS).  As a demonstration that is useless.

Please remember this product is a demo CD - it is not a 'live' CD in the usual sense.  Certain features are disabled to ensure that people cannot use the CD as a substitute OS.  In some cases, IBM specifically required that we disable these features for the free demo. 

Access to OS/2 native fs (HPFS and JFS) drives is intentionally disabled.  Printing is also disabled, as is SMB (Peer and Samba) support.

[wsgibson]

eComStation 2.2 works fine on my ThinkPad T23.  Probably no surprise there.  My Parallels instance works (using eComStation 1.2 VM configuration) but it seems slower and prone to crash where my ThinkPad does not suffer from this.  The eCS 1.2 Demo did the same thing in my Parallels instance only it did not seem to do so as much.  I would have to say that it seems that Firefox is the reason for the crashes.

One thing with the 2.2 demo CD is that I am unable to download files using Firefox.  I always receive a "Z:\var\temp\#### could not be saved, because an unknown error occurred."  This happens no matter how I configure Firefox to save files.

Things are looking nice though.

Scott

[ivan]

Please remember this product is a demo CD - it is not a 'live' CD in the usual sense.  Certain features are disabled to ensure that people cannot use the CD as a substitute OS.  In some cases, IBM specifically required that we disable these features for the free demo. 

Access to OS/2 native fs (HPFS and JFS) drives is intentionally disabled.  Printing is also disabled, as is SMB (Peer and Samba) support.

So it is not really a demo that anyone can use to show how it will work because it doesn't.

I was considering using it to show some of my clients how they could upgrade but it can't even be used for that.

Also it would have been nice if those limitations were spelled out at the beginning - preferably on the download site but at least in readme on the CD.

I have to admit it is a good beta test to see if it works with some hardware but even to that end it lacks the reporting facility to make that effective.

Sorry to sound so negative but it was a real disappointment after all we have been told to expect.

[warp]

I tried the eCS 2.2 beta Demo cd on the desktop pc with the ASUS Sabertooth 990 FX mainboard.

The boot process goes ahead for a while, then I got the messages:

Processors Initialized: 1
OS2AHCI driver version 1.25

Insert eCS Demo Cd and press any key. If the CD is already inserted, try modifying the sotrage driver settings in the CD boot menu.

Perhaps there are some settings on the ACPI and on the AHCI driver which don't allow the boot process.

[guzzi]

I have a pc with ide cd-rom and sata drives. It stops the boot the same way unless I switch ahci and ide (dani) driver order in the pre-boot menu storage settings.