eComStation 2.2 Beta Demo CD English first impressions

[Martin Iturbide]

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.

[Martin Iturbide]

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.

[melf]

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.

[Martin Iturbide]

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

[Martin Iturbide]

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?

[melf]

I can try that in the weekend, but it should be automatic AFAIK. The DEll is newer, but no AHCI is installed there either.

[Alex Taylor]

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.

[melf]

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.

[ivan]

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.   

[Holger Schuett]

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.)

[Holger Schuett]

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

[djcaetano]

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).

[Doug Bissett]

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.

[melf]

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.

[Doug Bissett]

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.