EComStation 2.0 Silver Release

(Saturday, 29 August 2009 -- 0:30am)

Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV are pleased to announce the immediate availability of eComStation 2.0 Silver Release for download.

This product is available for download to all registered eComStation customers with active Software Subscription Services http://www.ecomstation.com/subscription
 * INTRODUCTION

This release of eComStation 2.0 has been under development for a long time. This shows in the amount of issues resolved and the amount of code committed.
 * What's new?

259 bugs were resolved, of which 174 'fixed', since the release of eCS 2.0 RC6a. Over 1450 CVS commits were made, since the release of eCS 2.0 RC6a.

The Pre-boot menu has been changed to accommodate an easier selection of the target hardware and preset some configuration options automatically. The following options are available:
 * Pre-boot menu changes
 * Legacy hardware
 * Modern hardware, safe mode
 * Modern hardware, ACPI
 * Virtual Machine

The support for HDA audio controllers on new motherboards is greatly improved since the previous release candidate of eComStation 2.0. It is now detected and installed on most supported systems.
 * HDA Audio support

This version of eComStation allows the installation of the Panorama VESA videodriver, to enable accelerated display on video chip-sets currently unsupported by Scitech SNAP.
 * Panorama VESA video driver installation

This version of eComStation allows the installation of the Netware client software and utilities straight from the regular installer. It is integrated in the network pages and makes it easier to setup eComStation as a workstation in a Netware environment.
 * Netware installation

This beta has a custom DFSee engine that enables reliable RESIZING of FAT32 and NTFS filesystems to allow shrinking an existing Windows installation to make room for eComStation on the same system.
 * Disk Resizer GUI

The GUI to this tool has been updated and is now using a graphical interface. To invoke it, please select 'Paritition Resizing Tool' from the Installation Volume Manager which can be called during installation.

This package provides generic driver support for several network interface cards under OS/2 and eComStation. Moreover, Genmac is enabled to support WPA encryption with the Wireless LAN Monitor 3.x or better. Genmac and the Wireless LAN monitor will be installed when the appropriate hardware is detected by the installer. If it is not detected, you can manually select the driver in the network installation dialog.
 * GenMac support

This release of eComStation contains the option to install the operating system on a JFS volume. The advantage of doing this is that the amount of disk cache is only limited by system memory (typically 10% of available memory is assigned) This increased cache size gives a huge gain in overall system performance. To install onto a Bootable JFS volume, you will have to select 'JFS' as filesystem type in the 'Format Volume' page of the installer.
 * Bootable JFS

ACPI support has been updated to the latest available version (3.17) which results in varying success rate. For example, AMD Opteron multicore CPU is now reported to be supported. Installation of ACPI has been improved by the use of the ACPI Wizard, which tries to determine system configuration and set parameters accordingly. You can manually change them of course. It will be run after regular installation has completed.
 * ACPI 3.17

This beta supports the installation of eComStation on a Multi-Core CPU computer. This includes Intel Core Duo, Core2 Duo and AMD 64 X2. To enable it, you can do so in the ACPI Wizard that is launched from the Post Installation tasks at the end of the installation. Alternatively you can start the ACPI Wizard at any time from the install/remove folder in the Local System folder on the desktop.

Samba is a SMB/CIFS protocols file and print sharing server/client set originally made for UNIX world to cooperate with corresponding Windows and OS/2 servers or clients. eComStation has a native implementation of SMB/CIFS server/client set - IBM LAN Manager and IBM Peer. These products have not been recently updated and may have some compatibility issues with modern Windows SMB/CIFS implementations. Serenity Systems International has reached an agreement with Blueprint Software Works for the inclusion of the 'eComStation Virtual File System' driver which provides support for Samba Client.
 * eComStation Virtual File System (Samba client support)

There now is a GUI that will make it easier to configure network access using the Samba protocol. There is one big limitation though, the tool cannot determine if a network connection was properly created - so it will not provide sensible feedback on that, instead it will always create a mount point which may be empty if the actual connection fails. The object for this tool is placed in the "Local Network" folder and is called "Virtual Filesystem for SMB".
 * EVFS GUI

eComStation 2.0 Silver Release includes the Feedback Wizard, which will start automatically after a successful installation of eComStation. Please use this a as a first method to provide feedback to the eComStation development team. We will use this info for example to quantify the success rate of ACPI support in eComStation.
 * REPORTING
 * General Feedback

To tell us your findings, please create a report at: http://www.ecomstation.com/support/rc7report/

To report problems related to UniAud, please refer to http://svn.netlabs.org/uniaud When you create a new ticket, please do always attach logs. You can create all the logs we need, by downloading this package: ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/uniaud/UniInfo.zip Please attach the Uniinfo.zip it creates to your ticket.
 * UniAud

To report problems related to ACPI, please refer to http://svn.netlabs.org/acpi Before entering a ticket, please read http://ecomstation.ru/projects/acpitools/?action=logs Collect all the data that applies to your issue and include it with the ticket.
 * ACPI

You are also welcome to join the TestTeam if you want to discuss this beta and future developments. See http://ewiki.ecomstation.nl/TestTeam for more details.
 * TestTeam