OS2 World Community Forum

OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical => Setup & Installation => Topic started by: Caluser2000 on May 25, 2018, 09:34:50 am

Title: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Caluser2000 on May 25, 2018, 09:34:50 am
I'm curious to know who still implements systems running OS/2 still to this day. Basicly I would like to get an idea how big the OS/2 user base is out there in the real world.

Older OSs are are a hobby of mine and a still have one system, a 486DX2/66 with 16megs of ram, running v3 Warp. It gets used from time to time for IRCing. I do have quite good collection of OS/2 versions from 1.3EE up to Warp 4 Advanced Server.

My prefered OS these days for day to day usage is Linux. It took a while but I am quite comfortable using it now. All of my hardware runs on it, including my wife wireless printer.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on May 25, 2018, 04:45:40 pm
I run my OS/2 consulting business on OS/2, eCS and ArcaOS. Of those, only ArcaOS is actively developed. eCS is still available. Illegal copies of IBM OS/2 are floating around the internet. Some legal copies of older versions of OS/2 are still available on eBay.

As long as there are personal computers, I expect to run OS/2. As the world transitions away from personal computers, so do I.

The size of the OS/2 user base is unknown and difficult to discover. Neither Arca Noae, nor XEU has publicly disclosed their sales numbers.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Martin Iturbide on May 25, 2018, 05:48:49 pm
Hi

At OS2World I have approx 480 users registered since 2012. Not all of them are active, and some little percentage should be some spam users.

I asked Lewis (from Arca Noae) on a public chat he made some time ago. He didn't talk about number but he said a little bit about the industries where ArcaOS has been sold.
Quote
[02:18:50] <martini> Q: Lewis I always wondered which are the most common (or top 10) commercial use of ArcaOS (and OS/2) on these days. Without naming any specific customer can you tell us what kind of software are corporate customers running ArcaOS (Banking, Retail, etc)  ?
[02:19:06] <LewisR> Excellent question.
[02:19:22] <LewisR> Insurance, manufacturing (robotics controls)...
[02:19:42] <LewisR> and some point of sale systems.
[02:20:09] <LewisR> By far, insurance and manufacturing have been the most active clients for us.
[02:20:30] <martini> Any chance to offer ArcaOS on ATMs ? Was there any request?
[02:21:21] <LewisR> In terms of what software they are using, even in insurance, they are running a customized application, and these systems are isolated and away from the internet. No recent request for ATMs, yet, though we do have a lead on some used ATM dealers.
[02:21:55] <martini> Thanks.

Now that ArcaOS is one year old it can be interesting to ask the market size to Lewis.

Regards
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Joop on May 25, 2018, 07:35:54 pm
I run eCS 1.2 as main system, can do things with this OS which are impossible on other OS systems. Running seamless OS/2, Win3.1, DOS. There are still very good DOS programs which do fly on today's systems. Need Win3.1 for some programs without any replacements.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Caluser2000 on May 26, 2018, 05:03:54 am
Thanks very much for your replies. It would make sense to not have legacy systems internet facing. I see eCS has a list of customers they've sold to.

Neil I've used your howto guides in the past. I still have the hdd out of my old OS/2 v4 box. The "Cloud" seems to be the big thing these days.

Martin good for you keeping the forums going.

Joop nice to see. I guess you can run OS/2 variants in a virtual machine if need be.

My wife has a Windows 10 laptop. I find the UI quite clumbersome in many regards. Much prefered the way XP worked over it.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Doug Bissett on May 26, 2018, 05:36:39 am
Quote
I see eCS has a list of customers they've sold to.

Only the ones who permitted it (probably less than 10 % of them).

Quote
The "Cloud" seems to be the big thing these days.

The "cloud" is quickly becoming a major problem. It makes it easy for those who run the servers to spy on what you are doing. If you think that Facebook is a problem, you aren't paying attention to the "cloud". Personally, I wouldn't put anything out there. You never know what will be done with it.

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My wife has a Windows 10 laptop. I find the UI quite clumbersome in many regards. Much prefered the way XP worked over it.

Look in ALL of the settings, and turn off anything that doesn't make sense (about 90% of it), and NEVER sign in to the windows servers (including the "cloud"). Win 10 will work much better (much better than winXP, today, which is pretty much obsolete).
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Caluser2000 on May 26, 2018, 06:12:41 am
I've already done some tweeking of Win 10 to help make things easier. I just hope a major update doesn't reverse those settings.

As with XP being obsolete, that doesn't bother me too much. Still have one P4 system with XP still on. Its useful for casual browsing. I do use Linux, Devuan Jessie(Debian kernal), on my daily driver though and its running on a Celeron 2.8GHz system. Putting old hardware to good use is a hobby of mine. It cost nothing to set up just a bit of time. Certainly easier than any Windows fresh install. The Devuan forum is very helpful.

As for the"cloud" I could'nt agree more. I don't use it for those very reasons you stated.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Dave Yeo on May 26, 2018, 07:19:57 am
The "cloud" is handy for stuff that you want to share anyways, such as GPL code.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Joop on May 26, 2018, 08:55:25 pm
Joop nice to see. I guess you can run OS/2 variants in a virtual machine if need be.
??? For what reason? I run eCS 1.2 Dutch, thats it. OS/2 is backwards compatible as long as its version is 2.11 (2.xx?) or higher. Some DOS programs wants the whole machine, I run those in DosBox. Windows 3.11 no problem as long as it is Windows 3.x ;-). Have several Java versions next to each other for testing purposes, it doesn't bite so to speak.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Caluser2000 on May 26, 2018, 09:46:39 pm
I have a number of older systems. A 386DX25 runs Dos/Win3.1 and a few 486s.

What are your OS/2 system specifications Joop? Any major issues setting it up at all?

Actually I'm curious as to what other members are running as well.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Caluser2000 on May 26, 2018, 10:04:15 pm
The "cloud" is handy for stuff that you want to share anyways, such as GPL code.
Thats a very good point. I wouln't trust any personal information there though.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Doug Bissett on May 26, 2018, 11:50:39 pm
Quote
I just hope a major update doesn't reverse those settings.

Best to go through them occasionally. Sometimes, they introduce new settings, that override old settings. Don't trust windows to respect your privacy.

Quote
Actually I'm curious as to what other members are running as well.

My oldest machine is an IBM ThinkPad A22e, maxed out at 256 meg of memory, and a 30 GB HDD. It still has Win98 on it, but I haven't even bothered to boot it for many years. ArcaOS 5.0.2 works well, as long as I don't try to run any memory hogs. They do work, but it takes about 40 minutes just to get to the default Firefox (38.8.0 I think) home page. The disk is, of course going at full speed, paging.

Next, I have an old P4, that I use as an ArcaOS 5.0.2 based NAS box. I added a SATA adapter, and a 2 GB HDD, and it just sits there, under the basement stairs, and runs.

Two Lenovo ThinkPads. T510 and L530, which work well with ArcaOS 5.0.2.

I have three Asus M3A78-EM machines. Two with tri core processors, and one with a quad core processor. One of the tri core machines is loaned to a friend who runs XP. My brother uses the other tri core (currently ArcaOS 5.0), and I use the quad core as a test machine.

My main machine is an Asus A88XM-A, with A6 processor. It has a lot more software on it, than the others, and it runs well with ArcaOS 5.0.2. The main problem is to manage how much lower shared memory gets used, but that is a problem with all versions of OS/2.

There are three others (two DELL, and one HP), that I use for testing. They all work, but there are problems (mostly because they are cheap junk).

My oldest machine is an original IBM PC (the one with 4 banks of 16 KB chips, for a total of 64 KB on the motherboard). It doesn't run anything but DOS.  :-*

I use a few JAVA programs (JFTP, SmartSVN, and GenealogyJ), which work okay, but they also use huge amounts of lower shared memory.

I also have VBox 5.0.6 installed, with XP as a guest. The one on my main machine has quit working. I am not sure if it is a VBox problem, an XP problem, or something else. So far, VBox 5.0.6, with XP guest, is working well on the T510 and the L530.

I will make one more comment here. I have various versions of windows on most of these machines (as well as in VBox in windows, with multiple guests). I find that I spend more time trying to keep up with windows updates, than i do with all of the OS/2 work that I do. In the last few months, I have had a couple of virtual machines go bad, and I just scrapped them, rather than try to fix them. It must be very lucrative to be a windows consultant.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Joop on May 27, 2018, 04:12:52 pm
What are your OS/2 system specifications Joop? Any major issues setting it up at all?
Main system is a P4, installation by hand, always mind over machine in such cases. I have 3 installations of eCS on the machine including DOS 7 or 8 (did not run it for some time) with Psion emulators using same disk space and data(!).
I do have a 386 with OS/2 latest Dutch for testing purpose if a OS program won't install on the eCs machine like Pen for OS/2. And I have a P1 with I believe Ecs 1.0 Dutch, my old main system.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Joop on May 27, 2018, 04:17:58 pm
The "cloud" is handy for stuff that you want to share anyways, such as GPL code.
As we can access the cloud with OS/2 you can use the cloud for transport of data to your own other systems if SD disk or USB key won't work due to size problems. Just zip the data with password and after successful transport you can delete the file. I use this way for transport of data between a Windows 10 machine with bitlocker and my eCS system. No way you can use SD disks on such systems as bitlocker is only for certain Windows machines with certain specifications. Again a stupid invention of Microsoft in order to get more market share.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Valery Sedletski on May 27, 2018, 08:26:07 pm
2Joop: SD or USB key won't work due to size problems? What do you mean? I didn't encountered such SD or USB disks. I have a 64 GB USB flash and 128 GB microSDXC flash, both working fine with fat32.ifs (either FAT32 or exFAT).
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Valery Sedletski on May 27, 2018, 08:46:46 pm
2Doug Bissett:

> I also have VBox 5.0.6 installed, with XP as a guest. The one on my main machine has quit working. I am not sure if it is a VBox problem, an XP problem, or something else. So far, VBox 5.0.6, with XP guest, is working well on the T510 and the L530.

Probably, the machine which has a non-working VBox installation, has wrong version of libraries, or thelibrares itself are broken/corrupted. You can try updating/reinstalling all the required libs (listed here: http://trac.netlabs.org/vbox/). Also note that some newer version of libcx causes VBox to crash, if you didn't specified LIBCX_HIGHMEM=2. So, you can try this value too.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Joop on May 27, 2018, 09:18:13 pm
2Joop: SD or USB key won't work due to size problems? What do you mean? I didn't encountered such SD or USB disks. I have a 64 GB USB flash and 128 GB microSDXC flash, both working fine with fat32.ifs (either FAT32 or exFAT).
I have four 8Gb sd's, two of them do fine, two of them are a mystery. Did format and lvm'ed with DFSee, had a lot of mail with Jan van Wijk. As far as I can see is that those two don't have all the bits and bytes on the right places. If its okay for my camera its not okay for OS/2 and if its okay for OS/2 its not okay for the camera. That kind of problems. Next that stupid bitlocker stuff. 
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Valery Sedletski on May 27, 2018, 09:41:10 pm
Bitlocker? What do you mean? File system encryption? Camera can be limited to size  of 2 GB (SD), or 32 GB (SDHC). 8 GB is seen equally well by OS/2 if it's seen by camera. Or, do you mean, file sizes on FAT32 are limited to 2 or 4 GB? BTW, newer versions of fat32.ifs support files up to 4 GB, if you specify "/largefiles" on the command line. Otherwise, it supports up to 2 GB (as any 16-bit file system). Don't know which bits or bytes could be missing. Do you mean, a file system structure, or a hardware peculiarity?
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Doug Bissett on May 28, 2018, 01:36:56 am
Quote
Probably, the machine which has a non-working VBox installation, has wrong version of libraries, or thelibrares itself are broken/corrupted. You can try updating/reinstalling all the required libs (listed here: http://trac.netlabs.org/vbox/). Also note that some newer version of libcx causes VBox to crash, if you didn't specified LIBCX_HIGHMEM=2. So, you can try this value too.

It was working fine, about a month ago. It quit after doing an ANPM (RPM/YUM) update. The same updates were done to all of my systems, and I do use LIBCX_HIGHMEM=2. I just haven't had the time to try to figure it out, yet. I think there was another LIBC* update, that I haven't tried yet.

The symptom is that WinXP starts up, runs for a few seconds to about a minute, then a red and black bar appears at the top of the window. Nothing happens for another few seconds, then windows crashes (BSOD), and windows reboots.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Caluser2000 on May 28, 2018, 01:55:12 am
Sounds like XP has been owned. Had that happen on real hardware once. That was one reason for my conversion to Linux.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Valery Sedletski on May 28, 2018, 03:06:40 am
2Doug Bissett: Looks like it's WinXP VM corruption, not of VBox itself. At least, winxp starts to load. Didn't understood about red and black bar, though.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Greg Pringle on May 28, 2018, 01:58:20 pm
Running OS/2 is only eCs and ArcaOS. In the box, 2.1, 3.0, Warp Connect, Warp 4, WSEB and maybe a few more. Up until a few fix packs of Warp Connect it was easy to take down an OS/2 machine from the internet by attacking the TCP/IP stack. As of Warp 4 those holes were closed. I have run internet servers with OS/2 and eCS on the internet without any firewalls without any successful attacks. I did have to disable the NetBEUI because it was crackable and I was being attacked. Since I don't actually need NetBEUI it did not matter. The currently running versions are both with and without firewalls.

As to the Cloud. It is cost effective for some servers if a company does not have access to local high speed internet. One problem is that many of the Cloud companies only do Windows or Linux. Also if you have more than a few servers the cost is prohibitive. The setup can be complicated it you are not running normal servers such as a web site. I have customers running at Amazon and have had to implement "double-reverse-relays" to other internet servers to allow connectivity.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Valery Sedletski on May 28, 2018, 05:01:06 pm
NetBEUI? It is not routable, so it cannot be seen from Internet. So, it is safe to use NetBEUI on a machine connected to Internets.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on May 29, 2018, 10:03:57 pm
Comment regarding the CLOUD aspects.

I use OS/2 (MSI 880G-E45 mb, AMD Phenom II X6 CPU) fulltime. My kids and the wife use Win 7 Pro boxes. We also have a ZyXel 325v2 NAS box. All machiens are inter-connected, although the OS/2 box is a client only.

OK, now to the cloud....aka NAS...these really have the vast majority of functionality needed today for you to safeguard your data and keep the access very restricted. Case in point, many implement VPN tunnels between your home NAS and whatever mobile device you are using to access it. Yes, you do want to make sure your router is up-to-speed on security setups, but that's easily configured.

I am in the process of deploying a 4TB NAS setup, all of the kids' media is going on it, I am actively moving them away from storing stuff locally on their laptops (well, with the requird explanation of course as to what is suitable to be moved out to the NAS vs stored locally).

Anyways, I am thinking the OS/2 platform I use today has another 2-3 yrs of life left in it. The next biggest challenge will be to upgrade the hardware to the newer Ryzen AMD platform...some posts have appeard in our forum regarding the experience people are having with these, so it looks like that is viable move.
Title: Re: What existing implimentations of OS/2 are there?
Post by: Joop on June 02, 2018, 07:47:34 pm
Bitlocker? What do you mean? File system encryption?
My office system works only with bitlocker due to the new European law effective from 25 may this year. So every external stick or sd card has to be encrypted. Next to that, every camera or garmin or so device is seen as a big drive and need therefore also be encrypted, only those devices can't work with bitlocker systems. I found a solution for my office system and the combination with my eCs system when it comes to exchange files between the two.
Camera can be limited to size  of 2 GB (SD), or 32 GB (SDHC). 8 GB is seen equally well by OS/2 if it's seen by camera. Or, do you mean, file sizes on FAT32 are limited to 2 or 4 GB? BTW, newer versions of fat32.ifs support files up to 4 GB, if you specify "/largefiles" on the command line. Otherwise, it supports up to 2 GB (as any 16-bit file system). Don't know which bits or bytes could be missing. Do you mean, a file system structure, or a hardware peculiarity?
I have four 8Gb sd cards. Two of them are successfully "restructured" with DFSee so that and eCS and the camera accepts them. The two other cards won't work, used same procedure as for the other two, but for some reason it will work in eCS and not in the camera or the other way around.  Its just for transport of pictures from around 10Mb each. I hope its clear now.