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WebSite Information => Article Discussions => Topic started by: Martin Iturbide on March 01, 2013, 01:30:26 pm

Title: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Martin Iturbide on March 01, 2013, 01:30:26 pm
Does anybody wants to share their first impressions about the "eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD".

I will be trying it today and post something back.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Martin Iturbide on March 01, 2013, 03:29:42 pm
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.

(http://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=72.0;attach=38)


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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 01, 2013, 03:48:19 pm
I did a brief test on my old T43, a Dell inspiron 531, in VPC51 and on my wifes old LG K5 (som years newer than the T43).

T43: Booted fine with standard values, no identification of network cards. Seem to work alright though.

Dell Inspiron: Booted fine with standard values. Did not identify network cards, and not the dual cores (Athlonx2). Manually setting SMP made the boot hang very early. Jerky mouse pointer behavior - very hard to make it point where one wishes.

LG K5: Did not boot, requesting CD once again and suggest to look over CD boot setting in premenu. Manipulating that makes no difference.

VPC51: Boots fine, identifies a network card, but network doesn't work.

Overall impression: Well, the same old desktop, no png:s, but with som blue/yellow folders - not very attractive. Functionality - as you ca see - not so impressive. Maybe all this just relfelcts the beta stage, but...well I hadn't been eager to buy it if I was new to the OS.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Martin Iturbide on March 01, 2013, 03:50:46 pm

1)  Virtual Machine on VirtualBox as a Guest.

Ok, if I switch the adapter to Intel PRO 1000 (In the guest VM options), the boot procedure just go fine.

The Demo looks good, it has:
- OpenJDK, QT, Odin preinstalled.
- Firefox 10.0.11
- QMetro, Blubbels, SeaHaven Towers, SimSu, QSoloCards
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Martin Iturbide on March 01, 2013, 03:55:30 pm
Hi Melf.

I don't know how old is your LG K5. Do you think it can be a AHCI missing driver error?
Can you check enabling it?

(http://)
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 01, 2013, 04:14:19 pm
I can try that in the weekend, but it should be automatic AFAIK. The DEll is newer, but no AHCI is installed there either.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Alex Taylor on March 01, 2013, 08:20:27 pm
If ATA hardware is detected, it will always load the OS2AHCI driver by default (and the DANI driver second) - unless it's running under a virtual machine.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 02, 2013, 12:32:29 am
Well, it seems that it is impossible to force use of AHCI driver. I chose it in the pre-menu, but eCS announced that it was not installed. By the way it is called KS-2.AAMMV and not K5.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: ivan on March 02, 2013, 01:26:33 am
So far I have not had much success with it.

I burnt a CD and tried it on 5 computers here ranging from an Intel Pentium 4 powered HP to an AMD AM3 x4 processor om an ASUS M4A78LT-M board.

On 4 of the 5 it hung at some point in the boot process.  On the one that did manage to produce a desktop none of the drives were available, nor was the network or USB.

I suppose the best I can say is that it is a beta version that, in theory, should get better.

Tomorrow I will try it on some friends computers and see if it works any better.  Maybe I should also say that all the computers I tried it on are running WSeB without any problems at all.   
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Holger Schuett on March 02, 2013, 06:12:56 pm
Boots here on an Edge E130.
Network-Driver is installed, I did not try if  it works.
On one boot I the battery/power icon appeared in e-center and worked, on other boots it did not appear.I could add the widget but it showed 0% all the time.
Mouse seems to work.
Audio does not seem to work and no function-keys seem to work (i could not control the display setting f.e.)
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Holger Schuett on March 02, 2013, 07:18:25 pm
Hi again,
tried the network on the edge e130.
It seems to work, but the system freezes starting firefox, might be an issue with flash.
USB works fine
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: djcaetano on March 02, 2013, 10:03:28 pm
I was able to boot Demo CD on a HP i5 box, but had to disablle USB (boot always hang on R0STUB when USB EHCI is turned on). On that computer UniAud does not recognize Realtek HD Audio, GenMac doesnot recognize Intel Gigabit Ethernet 82579LM (8086:1502) and when SMP is enabled thhe computer almost finish the boot proccess, but reset the computer when the desktop should be displayed. Boot succesfull if: disable USB and disable SMP, but no audio nor network access.

I will do some tests on my i7 box (Intel motherboard - DH67CL) and on my old ASUS motherboard (A78NX-E DeLuxe) + Atlhon XP (which is currently running eCS 2.0).
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Doug Bissett on March 02, 2013, 10:21:25 pm
I first tried the demo in a VBox running under eCS. No go.

Then, I tried in a more modern VBox under Win7 64 bit. Works pretty good, but no serious testing done.

Okay, so I made a real CD, and tried it in my old 800 mhz Athlon system. Not so good. The system has a SYM8XX SCSI card in it (for my scanner). I did not analyze every attempt, but it looks like ACPI is not set to use the /VW parameter. I just disabled ACPI, and it finally booted. That was as far as I went.

Then, i tried on my new Lenovo ThinkPad L530. Surprisingly, it went straight to the desktop, with no complaints, using the default setup. Unfortunately, the Realtek Multimac driver has a bug that causes major problems on this machine, so it hung hard (same as what the real eCS 2.1 does).  So, I tried the preboot menu options. One of which is an alternate driver for Realtek 8169 (no other indications of what that might be). It turns out that it is the RTGNDA driver, which does work pretty good in eCS 2.1. Unfortunately, it seems that RTGNDA.NIF and RTGNDA.OS2 do not exist on the demo, so it doesn't load. Anyway, it gets to the, pretty good looking, desktop. At that point the stick mouse works fine. The touchpad also works (but I hate those things, and there is no way to turn it off). My USB wireless mouse goes crazy. In the preboot menu AMouse is selected, but AMouse is not used.

So far, not too bad, but there is still some serious work to be done.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 02, 2013, 11:07:50 pm
Tested my Acer One also: Not able to boot. I have to use it with USB CD and make the necessary configuration in the preboot menu. I t halts at os2cdrom.dmd. If I also activate SMP (it's a dual core) it halts at resource.sys, i.e exactly where the earlier reported Dell Inspiron with Athlon x2 halts. So no luck.

Should be added that eCS 2.1 is installed on this computer and as far as I can remember this install was flawless.

Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Doug Bissett on March 03, 2013, 12:08:16 am
I tried my Asus M3A78-EM, with quad core AMD Phenom processor. The Realtek 8168 on the motherboard is dead, so i replaced it with a PCI card with a Realtek 8169 chip. It seems to work pretty good, but the mouse tracking is set way to high (it was at maximum). I was able to adjust that, and then it worked okay.

I also tried my IBM ThinkPad T43 (1871-W8M). It didn't do very well at setting up the NICS (both are well supported by GENMAC), otherwise, it looks okay (I didn't try the preboot menu).

Then, I tried my Lenovo ThinkPad T510. Works great, and looks great, using the default setup.No WiFi, of course.

My comment is, that the demo seems to work pretty well on modern hardware (as long as it is not too new), but has a few problems on older hardware. Pretty much the opposite of previous demos.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: warp on March 03, 2013, 12:36:51 pm
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.

Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: djcaetano on March 04, 2013, 02:26:17 am
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).
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: djcaetano on March 04, 2013, 03:36:43 am
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: ivan on March 04, 2013, 02:07:57 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: jdeb on March 04, 2013, 05:14:10 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Roderick Klein on March 04, 2013, 09:07:26 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: guzzi on March 05, 2013, 12:48:17 am
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?
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: jdeb on March 05, 2013, 04:59:05 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: rooey on March 05, 2013, 07:25:53 pm
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.

(http://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=72.0;attach=38)


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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Roderick Klein on March 05, 2013, 09:21:33 pm
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

Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 06, 2013, 12:01:28 am
Just slightly OT Roderick, but when do we see the real eCS 2.2 beta?
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: David McKenna on March 06, 2013, 02:28:55 am
  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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: warp on March 07, 2013, 08:59:09 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: guzzi on March 07, 2013, 11:27:20 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Roderick Klein on March 08, 2013, 11:43:06 am
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 08, 2013, 01:09:16 pm
Sounds nice. looking forward to try i out!
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Andy Willis on March 08, 2013, 06:31:36 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 08, 2013, 06:38:43 pm
I also tried it on an Lenovo R500. Booted half way and then asked me to put in the CD again.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Andy Willis on March 08, 2013, 07:24:51 pm
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
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 08, 2013, 11:22:44 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Zigulec on March 09, 2013, 01:20:45 am
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 :(
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: guzzi on March 09, 2013, 02:33:57 am
You should get a download link immediately after registering. Perhaps it ended up in your spam box?
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Thomas M. on March 09, 2013, 09:03:23 am
Hello Stefan,

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

Thomas
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Grimus on March 09, 2013, 07:01:49 pm
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
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Roderick Klein on March 09, 2013, 11:38:55 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Alex Taylor on March 11, 2013, 04:26:05 am
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: wsgibson on March 13, 2013, 04:21:43 pm
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
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: ivan on March 13, 2013, 04:40:09 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: warp on March 13, 2013, 09:09:44 pm
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: guzzi on March 14, 2013, 12:05:28 am
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.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 14, 2013, 06:21:24 pm
My son kindly let me try the CD on his gaming computer, with an Intel Core i5 2500K and 3,3 GHz CPU, with 8 GB of RAM. Seemed to boot fine but unfortunately hanged on the screen where one shall confirm network cards. It didn't react on Enter. I tried with settings in the preboot menu where I disabled all network cards, but the result was the same. Maybe eCS lost contact with his USB keyboard in some way?
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Roderick Klein on March 15, 2013, 11:59:30 am
That issue is fixed with the upcoming beta CD of the demo CD.  We did some SMALL fixes. But needs some more work.

Now testing on the last or second last internal beta of eCS 2.2 before it goes public :-)

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 15, 2013, 12:32:17 pm
Great! Today?
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: melf on March 15, 2013, 10:45:28 pm
Trying to interpret the latest message on http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/eComStation/message/87934 it seems like the eCS 2.2 beta now is delayed to Monday...April 2012 was  the first plan , then November and  December and latest estimate was this very week........ Does the beta have to be perfect before a release??

I wouldn't be surprised if the GA release which is planned to the second week in April is delayed to Warpstock 2013 the 24 of May.

There is a lot of messages on different websites but never an official statement on ecomstation.com . I think this is crazy, and a waste of resources both with regard to Mensys themselves and with regard to the interest of their costumers.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Chenbiao on March 16, 2013, 09:55:21 am
I tested the demo cd with 3 computers:
1, notebook Dell Latitude E4300. Starting up was smooth and the Intel network card was recognized. Touchpad didn't work.
2, notebook Dell Latitude E6420. AHCI driver was loaded automatically and worked fine with the cdrom. Intel network card wasn't recognized. Desktop was started up successfully. Touchpad doesn't work.
3, desktop pc with AMD 790gx chipset and AM2+ cpu. Starting up was smooth and reltek 8169 network card was recognized.

Other problems:
1, has to use usb mouse with notebook. The wheel roller didn't work on every mouse.
2, firefox loaded the Chinese web pages too slow, at least couple of minutes. During the loading the page the cdrom was non-stop reading, looks like the font file was continuously being launched into the memory.
3, the desktop looks plain and can't attract new comers.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Martin Iturbide on March 16, 2013, 02:47:10 pm
3, the desktop looks plain and can't attract new comers.

I was told the same thing from someone that didn't use OS/2 and booted eCS CD for the first time. It is like the desktop looks like too old school. Since I'm used to it maybe I can not notice it, but I also think that a design update on the GUI is necessary. Plus  I always liked the idea of the "navigator (http://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Comments_and_Suggestions_about_eComStation_User_Experience#Recommendation_.233_.E2.80.93_GUI_.E2.80.93_The_Navigator.)" that the other OSes has.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Roderick Klein on May 18, 2013, 10:14:42 pm
A new demo CD has been uploaded last night that also has the latest Realtek 0.3.1. driver onboard
that should fix the problems with the Realtek driver.  As reported previous news postings most issue's with OS2AHCI, danis506.add and USB stack should be resolved now. But we would like to know if it now works for everybody that reported bugs.

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Doug Bissett on May 19, 2013, 03:34:09 am
A new demo CD has been uploaded last night that also has the latest Realtek 0.3.1. driver onboard
that should fix the problems with the Realtek driver.  As reported previous news postings most issue's with OS2AHCI, danis506.add and USB stack should be resolved now. But we would like to know if it now works for everybody that reported bugs.

I have tried this on 5 machines. The results are pretty good. It boots on every one, and it will connect to the internet on all of them (including 3 that had troubles with the older Realtek driver). The USB problems seem to be fixed, as are the Danis driver problems. I did not see a problem with OS2AHCI, but the new one didn't break it.

I think the demo needs more variety in the sample programs. Perhaps a JAVA photo editor of some sort, and a simple word processor like FocusWriter.

Quote
3, the desktop looks plain and can't attract new comers.

Anybody who really cares about how it looks, is going to be disappointed. EComStation will probably never look like windows, but it is also unlikely to ever be under attack by viruses. I guess it depends on what the potential user is really looking for.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Pete on May 19, 2013, 10:05:20 pm
Hi All

I'm not very impressed with the Demo CD myself.

When I boot from "Menu with own values" the system hangs on "Creating objects"

When I boot with the "Default values" my USB Trackball does not work - not sure about any other usb devices as I could not be bothered to try and keyboard my way around the Desktop testing things.

At least I now know there has been no improvement of USB mouse related drivers since the release of eCS2.2 Beta...

Ah, well. Guess we can look forward to the next Live CD and hope it is much improved.


Regards

Pete
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Roderick Klein on May 20, 2013, 12:31:58 am
Hi All

I'm not very impressed with the Demo CD myself.

When I boot from "Menu with own values" the system hangs on "Creating objects"

When I boot with the "Default values" my USB Trackball does not work - not sure about any other usb devices as I could not be bothered to try and keyboard my way around the Desktop testing things.

At least I now know there has been no improvement of USB mouse related drivers since the release of eCS2.2 Beta...

Ah, well. Guess we can look forward to the next Live CD and hope it is much improved.


Regards

Pete

You kind of send the same email to the supportteam address as requested. Thanks for that.
 I wrote this reply:

>
>Booting from \"Menu with own values\" results in system hang when \"Creating objects\"

Oke lets try and pin point the problem.  You made any changes in the
preboot menu ?

What happens if you disable ACPI ?  Did you have a ticket open on
svn.netlabs.org for ACPI and a Gateway system with ACPI or I'm mixing
you up with somebody else ?

>Booting with \"Default values\" results in USB Trackball not working when Desktop loaded.
>
>Overall, this needs a lot more work.

If you did not modify in the preboot menu (boot with own values) and
boot with default value's is the same (in effect). It could rather be
pointing at something else as in a random problem that is somehow
occurring.

What happens with the demo CD if you take out the USB mouse and reconnect it ?
It would help if you could open a ticket in the eComStation bugtracker so we can try and trace and solve this bug.
But having stuff discussed in forums and emails makes it hard to track for developers.

Regards,

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.





Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: Pete on May 20, 2013, 04:32:21 am
Hi Roderick


You kind of send the same email to the supportteam address as requested. Thanks for that.
 I wrote this reply:

>
>Booting from \"Menu with own values\" results in system hang when \"Creating objects\"

Oke lets try and pin point the problem.  You made any changes in the
preboot menu ?

What happens if you disable ACPI ?  Did you have a ticket open on
svn.netlabs.org for ACPI and a Gateway system with ACPI or I'm mixing
you up with somebody else ?

>Booting with \"Default values\" results in USB Trackball not working when Desktop loaded.
>
>Overall, this needs a lot more work.

If you did not modify in the preboot menu (boot with own values) and
boot with default value's is the same (in effect). It could rather be
pointing at something else as in a random problem that is somehow
occurring.

What happens with the demo CD if you take out the USB mouse and reconnect it ?
It would help if you could open a ticket in the eComStation bugtracker so we can try and trace and solve this bug.
But having stuff discussed in forums and emails makes it hard to track for developers.

Regards,

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.


I set the following in the preboot Menu:-
Language to en_UK
Keyboard to en_UK
Video to SNAP
Changed AHCI driver to Danis506
Removed USB Keyboard support
Set USB Floppy support to 0


ACPI should work... It is possible that I enabled multiple CPU support. I will have to retest with only 1 CPU active.

No, I don't have a Gateway system  :-)

I had problems with the USB drivers supplied with eCS 2.2 Beta that look very similar to the problem with the LiveCD - ie the USB Trackball does not work with the supplied USB drivers but does work with the IBM 10.162 drivers.

I thought I had opened a ticket about the USB problem on the eCS Bugtracker but cannot find it... I do know that at the time I installed eCS 2.2 Beta I was using a *wired* USB Trackball. I seem to recall having a bit of a problem with the eCS Bugtracker around that time so maybe I did not report the USB problems. They do get briefly discussed in the eComStation 2.2 Beta First Impressions thread - on Page 6.

I'll have to do a little more testing and then file Bug reports about the USB problems.


Regards

Pete
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: ivan on May 20, 2013, 07:57:58 pm
Hi Roderick,

Since you are reading this thread I will add a few comments regarding the live CD.  These are from people that I have shown it to.

First, general comments.
1) You need to know a lot about the physical computer to be able to fill in the information. [this was from several people when the default values didn't work - French keyboard, monitor resolution etc.]
2) Detection of network card very poor.  [it appears to find intel nics but that is about all - see 1, also it never found any wireless cards]
3) Does not pick up USB mouse or trackball.  [these were all working with the operating system on the various computers]

Next, specific shortcomings, not exactly complaints but things that people think they need.
1)  No File Explorer.  [this I overcame by having File Freedom on a USB stick]
2)  The open folders are 'clunky'.  [for some reason all the folders are set to 'multiple columns' and 'maintain sort order' even if there are only a few items in the folder - this creates a redundant scroll bar at the bottom of the open folder - it would be better if they were set to 'gridded' or 'as placed']   

When it works people are generally impressed - after finding the correct nic, setting folder defaults and providing a file explorer.

There is still a way to go but being a beta release I expect the final release will work with more systems on default settings.
Title: Re: eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions
Post by: warp on July 09, 2013, 10:04:24 am

I tried the May edition of 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
Integrated ACPI Support Driver for eComstation v 3.21.07
Copyright (c) 2005-2013 Mensys BV
WARNING: Some devices could not be assigned an interrupt
(out of range)

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