eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions

[warp]

I tried quickly the cCS 2.2 Beta Demo CD on one of my 2 desktop pcs. I was happy, because it loaded well on the ASUS M4A88T-V EVO Mainboard.

The network card has been detected through the Realtek 8169 driver and I surfed on the Internet. The Flash plugin has not been installed and the wheel of the mouse didn't work. I scrolled the pages down, through the drag function. Now I would like to try the Beta Demo CD on the other pc, which has a Sabertooth 990 FX mainboard.

[djcaetano]

Well... some more results.
Tried to boot Demo CD on my old ASUS A7N8X-E DeLuxe (Athlon XP 2600+) but no luck on any mode (Modern, Modern with /VW, Safe mode, Legacy...). In fact, the boot always start as it should but after loading LOCATECD.SYS the boot process proceeds in such a slow pace that I was not in the mood to wait it finished (almost 5 minutes just to load the first 10 drivers.
Oddly enough, this system runs flawless eCS 2.0 (and also every older version of OS/2).

Booting on my "new" Intel DH67CL motherboard (i7 processor) seems to be improved compared to previous versions of eCS and OS/2 (which simply gave me a trap even before showing boot logo): now it boots to the options menu and then it proceeds to the system boot. It is very nice to see it running... but it "hangs" on network card "configuration" screen. Probably it is waiting for some key, but this is an impossible action, since it seems my USB keyboard is non operative. This "new" machine (which I bought two years ago, when I bought my eCS 2.0 license too) has no PS/2 or serial/keyboard ports... it has USB (EHCI) ports only. It is sad I was never able to run OS/2 nor eCS on this machine.

(I always took care of buying hardware that supported OS/2... every "external" device on these computers are supported; I just never thought that a motherboard could cause so much trouble when booting an operating system).

[djcaetano]

One more test: an old Soyo K7VTA-Pro motherboard with Athlon XP 2100+ (512MB RAM). Boot proceeds nicely until CACHE32 is loaded. Then the boot process becomes slow, something fails on creating desktop and after some time the system stops presenting some error regarding PMMERGE. Options selected just doesn´t matter, be it ACPI or non ACPI, enabling USB or not, the result is just the same.

[ivan]

I tried it on a couple more machines.  On one, Asus M2N68-VM it refuses to boot at all yet when that machine is booted to WSeB I can see all the files on the CD.

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.

I assume the failures are down to this being a beta version and will be sorted out in time for delivery of the finished product.

I do have to sat it is nice being able to see how eCS is setup to install having not seen this before as all my installs are either WSeB or Warp 4.

[jdeb]

Pretty much useless. Very disappointed. I tried it on a  (UEFI Off) Z77, B75, AM3+, A75, and A55 board. No go on any of them. Just hangs or traps. Same old stuff. I am sure I could get the AM3+ to go but no time to play around. It runs I my eCS rig but I expected that.

[Roderick Klein]

Pretty much useless. Very disappointed. I tried it on a  (UEFI Off) Z77, B75, AM3+, A75, and A55 board. No go on any of them. Just hangs or traps. Same old stuff. I am sure I could get the AM3+ to go but no time to play around. It runs I my eCS rig but I expected that.

What would be usefull to know is when it traps !? When PM comes up when the PSD loads (press ALT F2 key combination the preboot menu).

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.

[guzzi]

Tried on my Samsung netbook, booting (from USB CD) stops with os2lvm.add loaded. Both with acpi and safe mode. AHCI driver loads and dani too. Any idea what to try?

[jdeb]

Pretty much useless. Very disappointed. I tried it on a  (UEFI Off) Z77, B75, AM3+, A75, and A55 board. No go on any of them. Just hangs or traps. Same old stuff. I am sure I could get the AM3+ to go but no time to play around. It runs I my eCS rig but I expected that.

What would be usefull to know is when it traps !? When PM comes up when the PSD loads (press ALT F2 key combination the preboot menu).

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.

I will try that when I get time and let you know. Just frustrated. I probably should have done it when I had more time. Sorry for the vent because I want it to work.

[rooey]

Regarding point 1 - a workaround i've found is to specify (under advanced in vbox) the card to be an Intel Pro 1000 (Desktop) and selecting advanced boot from the demo CD.

Jump on over to the network card settings and tell it it's an Intel Pro 100/1000 card and it soldiers on and boots.

M.

The eCS 2.2 beta demo CD looks very similar to eCS 2.1.
The good things are it has the boot options just like eCS 2.1 to select which drivers to load (AHCI, ACPI, etc).
The icons looks slight changed, I haven't tried the rest yet.

My issues:

1)  Virtual Machine on VirtualBox as a Guest.

When I try to run on it on VirtualBox the boot procedure get locked when trying to load the network card.




2) On real hardware. Thinkpad L420.

- The trackpoint and trackpad does not work. I had been having this issue since I tried eCS 2.1 on this machine. An external USB Mouse is required.

- The Intel Centrino N 6205 wireless card is not recognized, of course.

I'm going to keep testing it.

[Roderick Klein]

The NIF file used for the NIC driver in Virtualbox is kind of not standard. There are two entry fields in the NIF file that lack a so called range filed.
OTOH hand the genproto code should deal with it. Defect found, fixed in the NIF file and genproto is being updated to work around.

The reason the crash at this moment in time is so serious is because (basically the only point in eCS where this happens) a small device driver is being loaded that loads a script to generate a protocol.ini on the fly. This has to happen at device driver load time as we need to load the proper NIC driver on the fly.

Would genproto be loaded as a run or call statement via the config.sys you could then CTRL C out of there.
So another bug fixed in the demo CD. Now I understand why the demo CD in virtualbox did not work :-)
New eCS 22 beta demo CD might be released this week or next week. With more fixes.

The people that select to boot with own value's and have a hang on genproto. The option to edit the fields for the NIF file
will be taken out. The hang is most likely happening as some modern PC's the BIOS keyboard support is switched off.
And in some cases in genproto you don't have keyboard input yet. This happens after the so called dev_init completes by the kernel.
(After the last device driver is loaded. That should also be fixed in the internal build today.

Roderick Klein
Mensys

[melf]

Just slightly OT Roderick, but when do we see the real eCS 2.2 beta?

[David McKenna]

  Demo CD works great on my desktop system (MSI H55M-E33 board with Intel i3). On my laptop (Gateway 7405X), in default mode it tries to load the VIA VT6102 Rhine II NIC, but gives an error about not being able to assign an IRQ. This adapter needs a parameter 'Accept IRQ level>15=YES' in order to use IRQ's over 15 (which is needed in default mode) which I suspect is not being set. Boot eventually hangs on a black screen (waiting for NETBIND?). Unfortunately, this computer will not boot with ACPI in any other mode (boots in legacy but with other IRQ problems - it only works properly with eCS 2.1 in ACPI mode). My WiFi (Broadcom with GenMac) is not recognized by the demo CD, but is with eCS 2.1 install.

[warp]

I tried eCS Beta Demo CD on my laptop. eCS works, but there is no Internet connection. The network card should be the SIS 900, but I would like to test it through the PCI.exe software.

[guzzi]

On my desktop it boots to the desktop when I change the driver order to first load the dani, and then the AHCI driver. Applications won't start except for one of the games. Firefox icon grays for a while when I double click on it, then goes to normal, without ff being launched.

[Roderick Klein]

Just slightly OT Roderick, but when do we see the real eCS 2.2 beta?

Next week. As we want to release the final product in the second week of april. But we have been slashing bugs out of it our self. We know what was modified so we have a pretty good estimate what needs to be fixed.

A new version of the USB stack I just need to trace one bug with David and we switch away from the IBM USB host controller drivers.
As bug 3221 we found a bug in the danis506.add dealing with disk geometries. This is now being tested and fixed.
(Yes that bug has always been there).

But it are bugs like this when we discover it. We rather fix this then release a beta. ACPI and Panorama will remain at the current version. Unless we find serious flaws on mayor amounts of equipment.

Regards,

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.