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This Noob wants to know: Is eCS right for me (long-ish)?

Started by Grackle, 2009.07.24, 15:54:33

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ivan

Christian,
QuoteYou've got to be kidding. Those are serious selling points for eComStation. Mensys/SSI would be shooting themselves in the foot if they made those generally available.
You know that, I know that but I think they might have a greater revenue stream with them alone and just sell the OS as an addon to run them.  That way those that are running OS/2 can get the bells and whistles abd someone thats needs a new OS gets the OS and the bells and whistles.

Another question I have is, how are they getting round the open source license for Open Office and keeping it closed?
   

RobertM

The answer basically is it depends on your needs (if you hadn't already guessed from the responses below).   ;D




I have one XP station, and multiple OS/2 and eCS stations.

I use XP to test various websites under IE (and OS/2 and VPC to test under two other different versions of IE). I also use it for serious video editing.

I use Warp for most of my web surfing (unless I happen to already be on the XP machine doing other things).



I also use Warp for much of my transcoding. As "easy to use" as XP may be for the task (selecting menu options is much easier than command lining ffMPEG), XP is a *DOG* at doing transcodes.

Our XP system is a Dual Core 2GHz (actual clock speed) Opteron with 2GB of very fast RAM. My WSeB server is a Quad CPU Pentium III 550MHz with 4GB of PC133 RAM.

Using the same command-line options on ffMPEG, the ancient WSEB machine can transcode 4 videos (simultaneously) in the same time or less than the XP based dual Opteron does 2 videos simultaneously.

Yes, that is not a fair comparison, as XP is absolutely HORRENDOUS at doing two very CPU intensive things at once - even with two CPU cores. So WSeB has a MASSIVE advantage (XP takes *TWO to FOUR* times as long (each) to do 2 simultaneously than it does to do one - OS/2 on the other hand, does not bog down - even with the other two CPUs disabled and each (while being done simultaneously) gets completed in about 5-10% longer than one would individually; instead of XP's 2-4 times longer).

But the point is, for me, if I want to get my work done in the time frame I have (with the Star Trek Phase 2 stuff, we're often at the wire, on the release date, and I still have to do the final video transcodes of all 5 episode parts before end of day), the best solution for me is WSeB hands down - even with antiquated hardware doing the job.


Now, for some other stuff, XP is the solution I use... synchronizing my Palm, heavy video editing, web surfing to certain sites, needing hardware that is not OS/2 compatible, etc.




My hope is for one day a Firefox build based off the Linux code, as everything else Linux ported seems to outperform their comparable Windows codebase ports.


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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RobertM

Quote from: chennecke on 2009.07.29, 17:42:38
Quote from: ivan on 2009.07.29, 14:03:47
From reading this and other sites it appears that the underlying OS/2 is unchanged because the source code is unavailable.  The drawback of this is the fact the kernel does need improvement.

Well, the kernel in eCS actually has been changed. It's patched at run-time to enable operation on modern CPUs.

Quote from: ivan on 2009.07.29, 14:03:47
An update of the WfW input and output filters for Describe.

I don't know who owns the rights for those. If it's the Describe owner, forget it. From what I've read about its history, the owner will never ever open source it. Anyway, the source code for those is most probably long gone.

He can't. Read the stuff that comes with it... it is either located in the "Help" section, manual, or in the DLLs themselves - forget which. But virtually all the read/write filters were licensed from others.  :(


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Saijin_Naib

Rob, can you run a transcode benchmark again in ffmpeg with SSE and MMX off for both machines?

RobertM

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.07.30, 00:11:57
Rob, can you run a transcode benchmark again in ffmpeg with SSE and MMX off for both machines?

I can try. I've got some encoding work to do this weekend. The bigger issue for me though is not being able to use two CPUs properly - something many such CPU intensive programs seem to have under XP. The XP machine is considerably faster (completing a transcode) when just doing a single video at a time - though the WSeB machine still comes close to halfway because it can do 4 at a time and acts almost as if each is actually being done on separate single CPU systems.

I'd kinda presumed that the newer SSE instructions and such should perform at least as well as the ancient 9 year old MMX instructions on the PIII 550's... but it is a good point. Will check it out this weekend.



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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Saijin_Naib

I've noticed in some benchmarks that the AMD CPUs fall a little short when doing Multimedia work, especially stuff with SSE. It is one of the reasons I've never purchased an AMD machine for myself.

cyber

Hello,

You push this thread hard off topic !

But it can be relevant if any 'new Joe' interested in speed of operating system. ;)

To RoberM:
>My hope is for one day a Firefox build based off the Linux code, as everything else Linux ported seems to outperform their comparable Windows codebase ports.

OK Linux is much faster than Windows. But Linux is still way slower than OS/2 in many different task usage.

RobertM

Quote from: cyber on 2009.07.30, 10:02:03
Hello,

You push this thread hard off topic !

But it can be relevant if any 'new Joe' interested in speed of operating system. ;)

Well, not so much speed as how it applies to the tasks needed. For instance (and this assumes availability of all apps (or comparable ones) on Windows and OS/2), if one runs an app or two at a time, then whatever... (at least based off this particular criteria) it doesnt really matter whether the user pics Windows or eCS. If one runs a bunch of CPU intensive apps all at once, then OS/2 would be the better choice.

Quote from: cyber on 2009.07.30, 10:02:03
To RobertM:
>My hope is for one day a Firefox build based off the Linux code, as everything else Linux ported seems to outperform their comparable Windows codebase ports.

OK Linux is much faster than Windows. But Linux is still way slower than OS/2 in many different task usage.


True... but my premise was that a Linux port under OS/2 may be faster than a Windows port of the same program under OS/2. Like someone else mentioned, there seems to be a lot of added code in various Windows versions of things and some loss of speed in the translation - and while I dont know if that applies to Firefox, it seemed possible.


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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chennecke

Quote from: ivan on 2009.07.29, 19:59:58
Another question I have is, how are they getting round the open source license for Open Office and keeping it closed?

Pretty simple: They are not keeping it closed. The source code is available for OOo for OS/2 is available from the OOo repository. You can try compiling it yourself. The only portion that is closed is the add-on package for WPS integration.

oli

Quote from: RobertM on 2009.07.30, 10:20:59
True... but my premise was that a Linux port under OS/2 may be faster than a Windows port of the same program under OS/2. Like someone else mentioned, there seems to be a lot of added code in various Windows versions of things and some loss of speed in the translation - and while I dont know if that applies to Firefox, it seemed possible.

The only problem there is that the Windows versions of Firefox 3.12 and 3.51 are MUCH slower on Linux than on Windows Vista running on the same hardware, this is especially true if you keep lots of tabs open.

RobertM

Quote from: oli on 2009.07.30, 20:43:15
Quote from: RobertM on 2009.07.30, 10:20:59
True... but my premise was that a Linux port under OS/2 may be faster than a Windows port of the same program under OS/2. Like someone else mentioned, there seems to be a lot of added code in various Windows versions of things and some loss of speed in the translation - and while I dont know if that applies to Firefox, it seemed possible.

The only problem there is that the Windows versions of Firefox 3.12 and 3.51 are MUCH slower on Linux than on Windows Vista running on the same hardware, this is especially true if you keep lots of tabs open.

Hmmm... so the Linux port is based off the Windows code as well? I didnt know that. But yeah, that's basically the same problem I am complaining about under OS/2. FF on OS/2 is a dog in comparison to FF on Windows.

Some of that though, I still think has to do with how it renders HTML (there are a bunch of posts someplace in these forums by me and others regarding this... seems the high number of redrawing does not work well (at least in the method implemented) under OS/2). Cairo seems to have improved that a lot, but it is still far from fast. This is particularly cumbersome for me when it comes to a lot of apps that I write that have tabular data - using... tables (for what they are now claimed as intended for). Pre-specifying widths and heights helps, but also doesnt always work properly with "random" data being pulled from a big database where one may instead need the table to be able to "auto-adjust" a few columns based on their content.

Regardless, that would not solve the problems on other similar sites where I dont have access to the code.


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Saijin_Naib

#26
Ahem.

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/browser-benchmarks-2-even-wine-beats-linux-firefox

If you want to see a good example of PMSHELL re-draw rape under OS/2, load the "My Ebay" page. It takes sometimes in excess of 20s to render on OS/2 in Firefox.

3-5s in WinXP, 3-5s in XFCE Debian.

I was browsing the source comments and Trak for the OS/2 Firefox build and I believe the maintainer found the possible culprit code. I have to see if I can find the comment I'm thinking of..

RobertM

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.07.31, 00:27:20

I was browsing the source comments and Trak for the OS/2 Firefox build and I believe the maintainer found the possible culprit code. I have to see if I can find the comment I'm thinking of..

LoL... I've been following those threads since FF 2.0 till about 8 months ago (when I gave up on hoping for a fix) and they keep seeming to think they have found the culprit code (nothing against them, I can definitely understand how such a thing can be a daunting task). As a matter of fact, I was one of the people who traced it to the redraw requests and emailed the porters with the information that helped them down that path. Hopefully this time they are correct and figure out how to resolve it. Am very interested in the new thread you found.


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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RobertM

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.07.31, 00:27:20
Ahem.

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/browser-benchmarks-2-even-wine-beats-linux-firefox


Brings up an interesting question as to whether FF3 will run under Odin (especially with the updates to Odin for the Flash plugin that I hope we all see).


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Saijin_Naib

Oh, this was quite an old comment. I believe it was dated some time in 2007 or so. I really hope we see a release of the updated ODIN code and possibly a migration to meld with WINE or ReactOS.