On Fri, 11 May 2007, Richard Steiner wrote:
> Here in alt.msdos, Straydog <asd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> spake unto us, saying:
>
>> I spent considerable time with OS/2, both warp 3 and warp 4. Most of
>> the boxes I tried (about a dozen) would install Warp 3, but Warp 4
would
>> only install on one of the boxes.
>
> Interesting, since Warp 4 is two years newer and has a lot of drivers
> (especially video drivers) that Warp 3 does not.
The Warp 4 that I got (actually 3 different boxes sontaining software) had
a whole second CDROM disk with drivers. All useless if you can't get the
primary OS installed. And, all of the boxes I tried W4 on but would not
install, installed W3 without a problem except one with a very slow boot.
> Both will have issues with newer IDE drives (as both OSes predate large
> IDE disks), but Dani wrote a replacement driver many years ago which is
> free, easy to use, and completely solves the issue.
>
> Same with Windows' 0x0E and 0x0F partition types.
>
> The newer eComStations distribution solve most of these problems, of
> source, since it's a modified release of OS/2 Warp 4.52 and doesn't
> have the disadvantage of being over ten years old.
I'd like to know what fraction of people who bought ECS got it to work?
I strongly doubt, based on what I learned, that ECS is going to solve most
of those problems. And, ECS is not cheap.
>> I'll tell you some additional dirty little secrets about OS/2. They
>> have a ton of fixpacks. You need certain ones, not others, to get
>> Mozilla to run, if you can keep it from cra****ng,
>
> Mozilla variants (Firefox, Seamonkey) run just fine on Warp 4 with the
> application of a single base FixPak -- IBM public FixPak 15 for OS/2.
I spent a lot of time on W4. No more.
> That's what I'm using here. No network updates or other fixes are
> required at all.
Sorry, I've wasted enough time on OS/2 and why are you talking it up on a
DOS newsgroup? And, how many boxes have you installed your W4 on? If I
have to find a consultant (the OS2 newgroups were useless and I spent a
lot of time reading posts there, years ago, and asked for help)
>> plus fairly stiff hardware requirements (go ask on
netscape.mozilla.os2,
>> or whatever it it, for help).
>
> I use it quite happily on a PPro/200 with 64MB. This box has a bit
> more RAM (192MB), but it wasn't Mozilla that needed it.
Fine, you can be happy with your system. I had far far far less headaches
with Linux, which also installed on every box (dozens) I tried it on.
>> Another one: IBM released subversions of Warps all in the same boxes
>> so you couldn't tell which was later (maybe if you looked at file
dates).
>> I have three boxes of Warp 3, each box has its own OS plus
applications.
>
> There are *no* Warp 4 variations that were sold as packaged clients.
Don't evade the fact that Warp 3 had a lot. And, I would recommend anyone
to watch out for W4. Even on one box I got it to work on, it was buggy.
> Even the Upgrade version (sold in a different box) is the same as the
> full Warp 4 client. Same CD-ROM and part number. I have both.
> The only Warp 3 variations I'm aware of are the standard ones which
> were clearly labelled on the boxes. These are:
>
> * OS/2 Warp 3 (red-spined box) without WinOS2.
>
> * OS/2 Warp 3 (blue-spined box) with WinOS2 (also called "fullpack").
>
> * OS/2 Warp 3 Connect (blue-spined box) with WinOS2 and compete LAN
> sup****t (ethernet drivers, etc.).
I had one box (W3) that had one boot disk and one CDROM disk. That is all.
You used it to _make_ the dozens of install 3/5 floppies. The other W3
boxes had a pile of 3.5 disks and no CDROM disks.
> There was one upgrade slipstreamed in with the 1st Warp 3 variant --
> the initial release only sup****ted SLIP dial-up networking, but later
> Warp 3 red-spine boxes contained PPP dial-up as well.
And, that is buggy, too. Not all dialup networks will handshake with the
W3 ppp dialup. Maybe half will, the other half won't . I spent time with
this, too.
>> Guess what, applications from box 2 will NOT work with OS from box 1.
>> Only applications from box 1 will work with OS from box 1. Etc for
>> other permutations.
>
> There is no license enforcement or other technical reason why OS/2 apps
> from one Warp 3 package should not work on another.
Sorry, bub, I tried the TCP/IP stack from a differnt box. Installed fine,
did not work. I did this repeatedly on different boxes. So, there may be a
whole basket of hardware compatibility issues here, too.
>> I tried a few DOS programs in the DOS windows of OS2 and they were
>> crap. Particularly graphics. Want to do anything fancy? You might
>> need autoexec.bat and config.sys files with 200 lines of
configurations.
>
> The previous poster appears to be spreading serious misinformation.
>
> I've used a wide variety of DOS programs including a variety of major
> applications and games in OS/2 VDMs (mostly via vanilla VDMs using the
> default emulated DOS kernel, not using a VMB (Virtual Machine Boot))
> since 1992. I got into OS/2 specifically to run/juggle DOS software.
Fine, if you are happy with it. I read all of below and I can tell you
that it is the worst OS of all of them and not because I came in wanting
to find that. I've played a lot of DOS, Win3.1, Win9X, BSD, and a lot of
Linux and I really WANTED to find OS/2 as an alternative to Microsoft. I
only gave part of my list of bad experience and I was left very
unsatisfied and I don't know what you mean by "used here" below, but I did
not get very far into playing DOS aps in a OS2 full screen or window
before I found bugs, crashes, poor color problems (on all the versions and
on all of the boxes), and if it was a DOS ppp dialer or a Win3.1 dialer,
it would not connect with the modem.
Out of some 6-7 books on OS/2 I bought over the years, the one that clued
me in the most, believe it or not, was "OS2 for Dummies" where the authors
actually sound like they actually tried things and made notes of all the
things that didn't work and they figured out what had to be done. The
second most useful book is "Your OS/2 Warp Consultant" 2nd edition, by
Herb Tyson. All the rest I got just parroted each other and sounded like
the guys never really used the OS (this is a problem with most of the
Linux books, too).
You can say "pilot error" if you want when I re****t that the W3 TCP/IP
stack is not robust. But, I've used W3 a fair bit on ppp and it can
suddenly go dead and unhooking and re-dialing does not get me my ppp
connection back. Relaunching the dialer and re-dialing does not get it
either. Only a reboot does it. So, as far as I am concerned, I'm not going
to spend any more time with it. I've had much much better luck with ALL of
the other OSes, and on the exact same hardware!!! My advice: go DOS,
Win3.1, Linux, or even up to maybe Win98SE (I had lots of problems with 98
and 95). Save your old software. The newer stuff is bloated, full of
register-ware, limitations, and other trickery.
And, I recall that some of OS@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
was co-developed with Microsoft and from a
number of Wall Street Journal articles I read back in the '90s, IBM was
getting progressively unhappy with what MS was doing while IBM was paying
the nickle. Later, IBM sued MS and got a 700 mil settlement. Oh, yes, MS
had its own version of Win3.1 with OS/2 as an option, the reverse of the
OS/2 with 3.2, but I never saw it anywhere. But, there are books that talk
about how Bill Gates really was out to bulldozer IBM.
And, I am really very very sorry to have to say I wasted a lot of time and
once the writing was on the wall and MS got its monopoly established, it
was only a couple of years when everyone dumped OS2 and for all of the
time I spent looking at OS2 websites and seeing updates trailing off to
nothing in the late 1990s and I still had problems (and the OS2 newgroups
were useless to me [esp compared to the Linux newsgroups, and I read a
few Linux books, too, cover-to-cover]).
Fine with me if you are happy with your OS2. For me, it was the biggest
waste of my time and money.
===== no change to below, included for reference and context =====
> Examples of programs which I have used here under OS/2 include:
>
> Geoworks Ensemble, New Deal Office (all versions)
> Executor/DOS (all versions)
> SEA 3.0 Graphics Viewer, QuickView Pro graphics viewer, PictView
> Graphics Workshop, Improcess
> MPXPlay, DAMP
> NeoPaint (all versions), PC Paintbrush 5+
> Telemate, Qmodem, Telix, Terminate, {COMMO}
> SLMR, OLX
> MAME (various versions), Retrocade 1.0 and 1.1, Appler, DVE
> FTE Text editor, QEdit, TSE, TDE, Boxer
> MS Word 5.5, Wordperfect 5.0, 5.1, 6.0, 6.1, StarWriter 6
> FoxBase 3.0, Lotus Agenga, Information Palace, PC File 5 and 7,
> Norton Commander, PC Valet, FileJet, XTree Gold, Stereo Shell
> 4DOS (of course!)
> QuikMenu III, GAZE,
> Quicken (all versions through 8)
> MicroCAD, bCAD, Draft Choice, EasyCAD
> Quattro Pro, Lotus 123 3.x and 4.0, AsEasyAs (all versions)
> US Atlas 2 and 3, World Atlas, Skyglobe
> Compton's Contem****ary Encyclopedia (uses a nice DOS GUI)
> Games like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, Descent, etc.
>
> The only programs I've ever encountered over the past 15 years which do
> not work are the following:
>
> * Tools like Partition Magic and Ghost which explicitly detect any
> OS/2 or Windows environment and will not run.
>
> * The Fusion Mac emulator for DOS (it seems *really* picky).
>
> * The original Doom after beta 666 (broken sound code, fixed by the
> Doom Legacy folks in their advanced versions).
>
> * The GFVM filemanager. Not sure what its issue is.
>
> * Some very old programs which used VPCI memory management.
>
>> In the Windows 3.1 loaded OS/2 the file manager was buggy.
>
> IBM had the source for Windows 3.1, and they actually fixed a number of
> bugs in that platform (included a well-known calculator bug) before they
> included it in OS/2 Warp 2.1 as the WinOS2 subsystem.
>
>> The only thing that installed, ran, and uninstalled well was StarOffice
>> 5.1 for OS/2. Interestingly, StarOffice for Windows9X has good
webbrowser
>> capability. Sadly, the StarOffice for OS/2 is so buggy as a web browser
>> that it crashes (window closes) on 98% of the websites I tried it on.
>
> StarDivision actually created StarOffice on OS/2, and platforms like
> Windows and Linux were added later.
>
> I've been a paying customer of the StarOffice product since the OS/2
> version of StarOffice 3.0 was sold (I'm a registered user of 3.0, 4.0,
> and 5.0), and all versions up through 5.1a (the free version that was
> distributed just after the Sun buyout of StarDivision which included
> OS/2, Windows, Linux, and Solaris versions on the same disk) will work
> just fine under OS/2.
>
> The DOS versions of StarWriter also work under OS/2. I've not tried to
> run the Windows version.
>
> I used to use StarWriter 5.1a in web mode as a test browser for my web
> site (along with various other weird browsers including AOLPress 2.0,
> IBM's own Web Explorer, and Internet Adventurer), and I don't recall
> StarOffice's browsing function ever having stability issues.
>
>> Also, OS/2 is not crashproof. The only good thing about a crash is that
>> all you need to do is reboot.
>
> A lot depends on the nature of the crash and the specific software and
> settings being used. OS/2 Virtual DOS Machine does allow DOS programs
> more access (optionally, not by default) than Windows does, and that
> can result in a locked system, but that one of the risks you assume if
> you decide to bypass techical safeguards and give DOS programs direct
> nonvirtualized access to hardware.
>
> In general, OS/2 is fairly stable. My record up time here is over 100
> days, though I normally reboot periodically to make backups.
>
>> Other bad things: no defrag. checkdisk only from boot disks. And,
>> several more.
>
> Checkdisk can be run at boot time with the /F option if an issue
> occurs. Otherwise, it's not possible to run it with the /F option
> on the boot filesystem from the OS that booted from that filesystem.
>
> This is a safeguard.
>
> HPFS is somewhat fragmentation-resitant (not frag-proof) -- it's not
> based on FAT, and is far more similar to NTFS and ext2fs in that it
> doesn't need regular defragging in order to be efficient.
>
> There are numerous technical papers on the net about HPFS.
>
>> If you can't get the CDrom drivers to install warp 4, you can "make"
>> one hundred 3.5 floppy disks at XDF density, and then you have to swap
>> the floppy drive out of the "make" box and put it into the "install"
>> box so head alignment and spin speed is right.
>
> Warp 4 has sup****t for all standard IDE CD-ROM drives and most SCSI
> controllers. I don't know anyone who has had to install from floppy
> since the Warp 3 days, and even that was a rare occurrence.
>
> In addition, while the option to install from diskette is certainly
> there (and all of the diskette images can be found on the CD-ROM),
> you can make those diskettes from the same machine that you install
> on, and I've never heard of "head alignment" or "spin" issues outside
> of the standard concerns that apply to any 10-15 year old hardware.
>
>> Last big bad news. The TCP/IP stack is not robust (warp 3). hackers
>> can send a malformed packet and crash the stack. OS still runs fine,
>> but you can't redial in and set up ppp (not all Warp 3s have ppp,
>> some only slip).
>
> Interesting. I remember when Windows was vulnerable to the Ping of
> Death and other things which left OS/2's BSD-derived network stack
> largely unscathed.
>
>> You have to reboot the OS to redial in. I've had this happen lots of
>> times.
>
> Sounds like pilot error to me, frankly.
>
>> I've had plenty of experience with Linux, Red Hat, vers 4.2, 5.2,6.2,
>> 7.x, and the workstations (bad news if you don't have the right cdrom
>> drive).
>
> So have I. I started with SLS 0.99, then Morse's Slackware Pro 2.1,
> then Yggdrasil, Slackware 3.1, Red Hat 4.2 through 7, Mandrake 5
> through 9.x, and many other distros over the years.
>
> I use DSL, Puppy, Mandrake (not Mandriva), and Coyote still. It's a
> very nice OS. But it doesn't touch OS/2 as a DOS platform. :-)
>
> --
> -Rich Steiner >>>---> http://www.visi.com/~rsteiner
>>>---> Mableton, GA
USA
> Mainframe/Unix bit twiddler by day, OS/2+Linux+DOS hobbyist by night.
> WARNING: I've seen FIELDATA FORTRAN V and I know how to use it!
> The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
>
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