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Messages - Doug Bissett

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1561
It's fun to talk with knowledgeable people such as yourself, Doug. Do you see eComStation working up to 64bit in the next 2 - 4 years? Or maybe even sooner? Also, don't worry, it's not all for naught telling me all of this stuff. I'm installing Virtualbox right now and going to try out OS/2 that way. I'm a PC Guru, and it would be shameful for someone to ask me "Hey, have you used OS/2?" and I would have to say No. Yes, I'm a technophile. lol

Some would argue with you about the "knowledgeable" part.

No, I don't see OS/2 (eCS) going to 64 bit, unless somebody can build a 64 bit kernel with the capabilities of the OS/2 kernel. Nothing is quite like it, so it is not as easy as taking a Linux kernel, and fitting the rest of OS/2 to it. In fact it may come to that someday, when other options run out. Whether it can be made to work, or not, will depend on a lot of things. The biggest obstacle will be finding competent programmers to attempt to do the job. Apparently, a few have tried, but it seems that they gave up (or they have hidden their work).

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But I thought eComStation was the rebirth of OS/2? Doesn't that mean they have the source code? How are they supporting newer hardware if that isn't the case? That's a tad confusing. So you're basically telling me when we start doing 128bit computing and only have backwards compatibility for 64bit, no 32 bit software will work? I thought eCS already made it translate 32bit to 16bit(kernel) stuff?

No, eComStation is not the "rebirth", it is more like the "extension" of OS/2. Some would say "life support". No they do NOT have the source code, except for a few drivers, and a couple of other things. They do have the source code for a lot of the newer stuff, that has been added since IBM abandoned it (which isn't entirely correct either, IBM still owns OS/2, and Mensys does pay royalties to use OS/2). In fact, there was a rumor going around, that IBM has managed to lose the source code, but I doubt if that is actually true. They have neither confirmed, or denied, that rumor. 128 bit processors are currently an unknown entity. When they start to show up, decisions will need to be made, but I suspect that 32 bit capable processors will be around for a while. I don't know the details of converting stuff from 32 bit to 16 bit. I think most of that is in the device driver interface. Support for newer hardware mostly involves device drivers. ACPI support was, apparently, developed with the help of Intel. The biggest thing that keeps it going, however, is that there are a number of very knowledgeable programmers (I won't attempt to name them, because I will miss some of them), who do wonderful work, with very little to work with, and Mensys tries to keep it all together, with a "shoestring" budget, and a lot of diplomacy. After they pay for staff (two of them, I think), royalties, some important development projects, and expenses, there wouldn't be much left.

Give eComStation a try (older versions of OS/2 can be made to work in VBox, but you need to know a lot about it to get it to work properly). You may learn to love it, or, you may hate it. There is rarely a middle ground.

1562
Hey Doug, thanks for that addition. Wouldn't you say that no-viruses is because it's such a foreign OS? Not language wise, but in terms of use? It's very sparingly used by anyone, and the market share is so low that no one writes viruses for it? Same goes for linux and Mac OS? Mac OS and iOS is becoming used more, but not at the extent Windows is, to my knowledge. When you said "If you wanna play games use Windows, if you want to do work use eComStation", I was heavily reminded of the Mac VS PC commercials. Any OS can be used for gaming, provided someone writes software for it, or so I thought? The OS isn't the limitation, it's the developers for the system that create limitations, correct? If someone made a Win32 directx library that ran virtually or parallel in OS/2, couldn't it play games too? Also, if eComStation or OS/2 has support for GCC, couldn't it also install linux software(games), with some sort of driver manipulation for OpenGL?

Lack of viruses is partly because OS/2 (eCS) is not used by a lot of people, and that is mostly because it is not pre-loaded on computers. Hackers usually just play around with what they have, and don't buy other things. Companies (which are, apparently, the main driver behind keeping eCS alive) don't tend to write viruses. So yes, it is partly lack of availability. However, it also takes more programming knowledge to be able to work a virus into something running on OS/2. Anybody with that kind of knowledge will be working as a software developer, not playing around as a hacker.

True, eCS can be used for games, IF somebody would write them, or port them, along with a LOT of supporting software (much of which is copyright by Microsoft). There are, in fact, a few very good games, but nothing that interests "kids".  OpenGL exists, and there was a project, discussed here some time ago, to update that stuff, but it has been "dead" for a while now.  The biggest problem that OS/2 (eCS) has right now, is that there are not enough programmers willing to work on it, and paying them is more or less out of the question, in most cases. The second biggest problem is that the source is not available, for most of it. Those who do know something about it, are very busy just trying to keep eCS working on new hardware. No time for anything more.

GCC is available, and it is used by a lot of ported software. It is also used for some of the very few original programs, but it seems that most programmers find it much easier to port a program, than to write a new one. That isn't all bad, because we actually end up with lots of useful programs that were developed for other platforms (mostly Linux). The biggest "problem" there, seems to be converting the required libraries to be able to compile, and run, those programs. Just because a program uses GCC in Linux, doesn't  mean it will just run in OS/2 (eCS).

OS/2 (eCS) can run VirtualBox (although the current port is now ancient), so a user can run windows in that, to play games, or do other things that can't be done in OS/2 (eCS), Of course, there is the performance hit from running in a virtual machine.

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Based on what I can see of the OS/2 UI they were ahead in the times of Windows 98se,

Yes it was. Windows NT was based on OS/2. 95, 98 and ME were still DOS programs. Microsoft never really got NT to work, until they got to WinXP. Still OS/2 (eCS) will run circles around the 32 bit windows versions, simply because it has a lot less junk running in the background (including antivirus programs). Microsoft also stripped out a lot of the security stuff that OS/2 has, in a feeble attempt to speed up windows. Going to 64 bit software has finally accomplished the speedup, but they never put any of the security stuff back in (I suspect that they just never understood it, and didn't believe that it was necessary anyway). OS/2 (eCS) is still well ahead of windows, in some ways, but the gap is closing, simply because eCS is having a tough time trying to keep up to the new tricks that are being introduced by hardware manufacturers, and most of that seems to be coming from Microsoft. Linux is having an easier time keeping up, because they have a LOT more programers working on it. MAC, of course, has more control over the hardware, and they have lots of paid programers, so they can also keep up.

I can see the end of OS/2 (eCS), one of these days, simply because it is being overwhelmed by new stuff, and understaffed in the programmer area to keep up. However, it still runs well in the latest VirtualBox implementation for windows, and (I assume) in Linux and Macs. It will also continue to run in older hardware (which is generally available on the used market, at a big discount). It is just another case of a technically superior product being abandoned by it's creator, in favor of making a few extra bucks (IBM is probably the biggest beneficiary from windows viruses because their consulting arm gets to fix a lot of the damage that is done).

1563
One of the main reasons why I like, and use, eComStation, is that there are zero viruses that affect it. Other advantages are that I don't need to update all of my programs, just because there is a new version of eCS., and it will do most of the useful things that can be done in other operating systems. I realize that if you want to make a living at servicing, and supporting, operating systems, those are distinct disadvantages.

It is true that eCS is not as flashy as some other operating systems, but as they say "if you can't make it work, make it look good". Unfortunately, the "make it look good" crowd also wants to complicate life by changing a lot of the rules, for no good reason. That makes it difficult for those who use a rock solid OS to keep changing what needs to be changed because somebody else decided to do something in a different way. Even to find out what has changed, is difficult. Then, it takes a lot of work to make changes to the OS, to accommodate what somebody else decided was a good idea. The source for most of OS/2 is not available, but OS/2 will still run circles around windows on the same hardware. For instance, I still have, and use, an old IBM ThinkPad A22e, with 256 meg of memory (max). It will run eCS 2.1 pretty well, until I have to use a bloated program like Firefox, with complicated web pages. Then, it runs into trouble because the machine doesn't have enough memory, and it ends up swapping constantly. If that thing could handle a gig of memory, eCS would do fine. It has Win98 on it, and it would probably run Win2K okay, but I don't think it would work very well with WinXP, even if it did have a gig of memory.

The way that I prefer to think of it, is "If you want to play games, get windows. If you want to get some work done,  get eComStation."

1564
Hardware / Re: Lenovo ThinkCentre
« on: March 10, 2013, 05:57:34 pm »
Found a model with Intel 82579, but it's not listed as supported by Multimac.

My guess would be that that is just another variant of the same thing. You would need to get the PCI information (something like [8086:1502]) to be sure. According to the web page at: http://pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PC/8086 the 82579LM is an [8086:1502], which is listed as supported. Unfortunately, the only way to know, for sure, is to try it yourself. The good part is, that Intel seems to be pretty consistent about building hardware, so there is a good chance that it will work with Multimac.

1565
Hardware / Re: Lenovo ThinkCentre
« on: March 05, 2013, 06:02:16 pm »
Most new Lenovo ThinkCentre pc's available locally come with Intel DH graphics 2500 and Realtek RTL8111E.
Does anyone have experience with these?

My Lenovo ThinkPad L530 has a RTL8168evl/8111evl NIC (same as what you quote, I think. Windows says  Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller). It has some problems. Multimac, and GENMAC, will not run it successfully. It does work with the older RTGNDA driver, but not perfectly. In fact, it even has a problem in windows, if I try to transfer large amounts of data (40 GB or more) through it (the indication is that it overheats, and starts to cause errors). The good news is that the problem with Multimac is under investigation. Whether that means it will get fixed is another question.

I don't know about that specific video chipset, but Panorama seems to handle Intel video very well. The L530 has an Intel HD 4000 chipset, and Panorama 1.04 is great. The only "problem" is that Doodle's Screen Saver can't turn the screen off, which is probably a combination of ACPI, DSS, and Panorama, all missing some code to do it. On a desktop, you can use the switch to turn the screen off. Can't do that on a laptop, but DSS will go to screen saver mode.

HTH...

1566
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.

1567
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.

1568
Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Re: Odin
« on: February 22, 2013, 04:46:54 pm »
Great to see the new Java up and running.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to install the Odin 0.8.9 (neither the odininst.exe and the wpi link to Hobbes work).  If someone could fix the wpi link, I would be most grateful.

Eirik

What seems to be the problem with the WPI install? I have had no problem with that, on more than one system (and, IMO it is just as "official" as the ZIP distribution, since it contains the same stuff, packaged for user convenience).

1569
Applications / Re: Whatever happened to...
« on: February 22, 2013, 05:35:54 am »
Hi Doug

OO3 does not work with IFE260 at all here - never gets onscreen. Checking the readme.1st file I found this:-

- Innotek Font Engine is required to run OpenOffice.org 3.2 for
  eComStation and OS/2. (Available by default in eComStation)
  You can download it from the following location:
  http://download.innotek.de/ft2lib/InnoTek_FT2LIB_240_Release1.exe


That seems to indicate OO3 is built to use IFE 2.40

As you say IFE2.60 is better but can cause more hangs/crashes in my experience - which may be different to yours.

I use iFE 2.40 and have added pmshell.exe to the Applications - as well as deleting all mention of Mozilla apps - and find that the Desktops on 3 systems here all look much better with regard to font display. The only real moan I have is that long folder/application names do not fit on the dropdown menus eg click eCS button (on eComCentre) and here "File and Print Client Resource Browser" has the 's' overwritten by the right arrow head and half the 'e' is missing - as is the final 'r'.

I have also added ar5os2.exe to the IFE 2.40 applications and use ar5os2.exe as the "windows runtime" for OO1.1.5 for Windows. Font display in both OO1.1.5 applications and Acrobat Reader V5.1 is much improved and so far - touch wood (touches head ;-)  - no hangs/crashes.

Using IFE 2.60 with the above applications my system did suffer the odd hang/crash from time to time. I guess that is because 2.60 is a beta version... Would have been nice if it had got past beta before development stopped  :-(

Regards

Pete

IFE 2.60beta seems to work fine with OO 3.2, but all I have done, so far, is open a file to see if it rendered properly. It did. I don't use it with anything else, and would actually like to remove it completely, but I do use OO 3.2, and it seems to need it. I would like to see OO abandon IFE (any version), and start to use the same font support that the Mozilla derivatives are using. At least the source is available, so problems should be fixable (I don't know if that would actually work either).

Anyway, I will see what happens with OO 3.2, for a while. I don't plan on using it with anything else, since it seems to be unnecessary (at least on my system).

1570
Applications / Re: Whatever happened to...
« on: February 21, 2013, 07:35:51 pm »

As regards font antialias: I suspect the Innotek Font Engine may have a use there. You would need to add Wordpro to the applications supported by the Font Engine in the Registry - see the Font Engine readme file for details.

I don't know about antialias, but some time ago, I tried to remove the Innotek Font Engine completely. Almost everything worked okay, except OpenOffice 3.2. Apparently, OO uses the code, and the Font Engine should NOT be enabled for OO (same as for the newer Mozilla derivatives). I have every application turned off, and would never dream of using it for anything, since it is so flaky, but it seems that it is necessary for some things to run. In fact, that reminds me that I did a new eCS 2.1 install, and forgot that the old 2.4 version of the font engine is still what eCS 2.1 installs. The 2.6 version always worked better for me, but i find that it makes so little difference, that it is just not worth enabling it for other things,

1571
General Discussion / Re: Hybrid "64-Bit" eComStation
« on: February 18, 2013, 07:20:11 pm »
Quote
a) Store swapper.dat

I haven't seen any indication that swapper.dat ever gets used, when I have 1.5 GB, or more, installed. It may be possible to get it to be used, but I don't think I have enough programs installed to be able to do that, unless I run more than one virtual machine.

In fact, I have been using RAMFS to create a memory drive for the %TEMP% stuff, when I have more than 2 GB installed. I think that 2 GB would be the minimum to be able to do that, but I have had no indication that it causes a problem.

It might take a bit of fancy programming, but I think that modifying RAMFS to use memory above the (normally) accessible area, might be possible, and it wouldn't involve playing with the kernel.

1572
Hardware / Re: New hardware that works with ECS2.X
« on: February 18, 2013, 07:00:07 pm »
Quote
rtgnda13.zip
Do a search on the internet before trying it. Years ago I installed my system with it and got sporadic traps. Took me months till I found out it was this driver. After that others told me this driver is known to sporadically trap systems. Maybe it was Eugene so probably there are some traces about ecomstation.ru...

It seems that I don't have much choice. Nothing else (both Multimac versions, Genmac with various win drivers) will do anything more than get the IP address from my router, then the system hangs shortly after trying to use the network. RTGNDA will transfer about 40 GB, before having a problem. The bad part about that is, that when it does have the problem, the NIC won't even work in windows, until I pull the plug for about 20 minutes (apparently, the NIC will stay powered until AC goes away). I suspect that it is overheating, but I can't prove that. Anyway, once I get my stuff transferred to the machine, I won't need such large data transfers. Hopefully, it can be fixed in Multimac, but I will need to report the problem (actually add to an existing problem report). FWIW, I found a Google hit that indicated that Suse Linux has (had?) the same problem as Multimac, but Ubuntu Linux does not.

1573
Hardware / Re: New hardware that works with ECS2.X
« on: February 17, 2013, 07:33:24 pm »
You can try rtgnda (rtgnda13.zip)... It may set zero mac to card, so need to uncomment [NETADDRESS] section in nif file and setup address manually... Another thing - it can`t be used as NETBEUI (pure netbios) server... NETBEUI client working fine... Up to 40 mb/s speed.... But it works not on all cards...

AHA! I knew about that one, but hadn't got around to finding it. I found some posts that said it was at HOBBES, but it isn't there. I got it at:

ftp://ddt.demos.su/pub/fileecho/GFD.SYS.NET/rtgnda13.zip

It needs the NETADDRESS thing, AND, it needs IRQ15OVR=YES when using ACPI.PSD with high IRQs.. It looks like I am in business.

Currently, I am doing a copy, using SAMBA, and it seems to be going as fast as any other link that I have. At least it isn't hanging the system.

THANKS!

1574
Hardware / Re: New hardware that works with ECS2.X
« on: February 16, 2013, 05:23:05 am »
Quote
Realtek gigabit cards work very reliable,

If that was only true.

I have an Asus M3A78-EM motherboard (a few years old now, but still not bad). It has a Realtek 8168 chip on it. It died (even in windows). I tried an Intel PCI-e card, but whatever killed the 8168 also killed the PCI-e slot. I then got a PCI card, with a realtek 8169 on it. That works pretty good, with the Multimac driver, but it is significantly slower than another system with an Intel NIC, and the Multimac driver. It is even slower than my old Asus A8N-SLI system, with the NVIDIA Multimac driver.

Now, I just got a new lenovo ThinkPad L530. It also has a realtek 8168 chip (there was no indication of what NIC it had in it, when I ordered it - I did make sure I got an Intel WiFi adapter, which I haven't had any luck with either). I tried the Multimac driver (8169). It works, for about 2 minutes, then it hangs the system. I also tried the older 8168 Multimac driver. That killed it instantly, and it wouldn't even work in windows, until the next morning (whew!). Of course, this one works perfectly in windows, so I tried GENMAC. So far, no joy.

1575
Setup & Installation / Re: eCS 2.2 YUM/RPM question
« on: February 01, 2013, 03:23:02 am »
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That reads like it is already implemented in the installer. Do you have access to the sources? Or are you even the developer responsible for the installer?

I have no idea what will be in the eCS installer. No, I don't have access to the sources, and I am not responsible for it.

I DO have RPM/YUM installed on a drive that is not the boot drive, as installed by the existing installer (with no magic), and I see no reason for that to change (but stranger things have happened).

At the moment, I do not have a second boot system on that machine, so I cannot comment on what will happen if I try to share the RPM/YUM installation between two boot systems.

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Doug, please do the things that you know to do. I would thank you if you turn your mind and let Alex and Joachim speak in that case. An option would be to use citations, marked as such.

I think you should actually READ what I post.

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