|
 Originally Posted by eblade
I've always wanted to try OS/2 on modern hardware, but it seems like eCS is always waaaaaaaaaaay behind the curve in software support. Last time I looked at toying with OSes for fun and entertainment (yeah, i'm fkin weird like that), both Solaris and eCS did not support SATA and I had just upgraded to SATA drives. Oops  That's been a few years, though, perhaps I should give them a look again. It'd be nice if Serenity offered a nice VM image to run in an emulator, just to give it a spin... :-) I suspect, though, that at this point, I'd be really hard pressed to be able to really use OS/2 to any degree.. sigh.
I build modern systems running eCS. eCS has ACPI and AHCI support. SATA drives are legacy, now. We have support for SSDs which emulate "standard" architecture. Audio is handled mainly by UniAUD, which is based on ALSA. IBM developed a useful video driver architecture (GRADD) and we have SNAP and Panorama which utilize it to support modern video hardware and video modes (Panorama supports more widescreen modes than SNAP).
We have new NIC drivers available, too. In short, unless the hardware is exotic, it likely can run eCS on bare metal.
We will likely see USB 3 support in the near future. A little late, I grant you, but there are people actively working on this.
Installing eCS in a VM is also possible, and there is even a special installer mode for configuration inside a VirtualBox VM. I use OS/2 (eCS) every day - in my business. My web server, hosting over 40 virtual hosts, and my email server (CommuniGate Pro) runs eCS. People pay me to host on that box. Hard pressed to be able to really use OS/2? You have got to be kidding me...
We have OpenOffice for OS/2 (3.20 is GA; version 4 is in beta). We have OpenJDK 6 for OS/2 (not the latest OpenJDK, I grant you, but quite usable). We have Flash. We have ESR builds of Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey (again, not bleeding edge, like on the tier-1 platforms, but quite usable - I am posting this from SeaMonkey on my ThinkPad running eCS 2.1).
What webOS needs is something like that. IBM pulled out of active OS/2 support in 2006. Thousands of ATMs, ticket kiosks, and factory machines are still running on OS/2. So, does OS/2 need IBM to survive? Only for the purpose of licensing. In the case of webOS, HP sold the technology to LG, and was able to open source it (something which IBM could never do with OS/2, due to the rat's nest of licensing issues surrounding the code: Microsoft still owns considerable portions of it). I'd say that by comparison, webOS is doing quite well, and if eCS is any barometer, the weather for webOS looks pretty good.
Cheers!
|
|
|