OS/2 Community Tries Bounty System 293
Grayskull writes "The OS/2 and eComStation community are trying to get open source software ported to that platform by opening bounties and allowing people to chip in with prize money. Currently the most important open bounties are Java 6 port, Icon routines in OS/2, VirtualBox port, Extend multimedia and OpenWengo ports."
Qutecom instead of Openwengo (Score:4, Informative)
Openwengo is dead, it's now called Qutecom [qutecom.org]. Also I'm wondering whether Ekiga is not much mature, especially now version 3.00 is around the corner.
Re:Open source the OS (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What! (Score:5, Informative)
There are several embedded systems till using OS/2. One of the biggest is ATM machines, new ones too.
My bank just installed a load of brand new machines, all running OS/2.
These frivolous thoughts do not concern me (Score:0, Informative)
You all should know that this is totally irrelevant because I am GOD!
Re:Open source the OS (Score:5, Informative)
Odin [wikipedia.org] tries to, but the project's been moribund for about ten years.
Re:What does OS/2 offer today? (Score:5, Informative)
> Try this with Linux or Windows. Keep a link to a file on your desktop, now drop down to the command line and rename the original file. Used to break Linux, it might try to search now, Windows will try a search if it's similar. OS/2 has no such problem, the 2 are automagically linked.
Um, you can do that in Linux with a simple hard link instead of a symbolic link. You could do that in Unix with hard links before symbolic links were even invented and before there was such as thing as Linux, MacOS, OS/2, or MS-Windows.
Re:What does OS/2 offer today? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not the whole OS, but large subsystems can be (Score:3, Informative)
1) Open-source the code it owns
It already has. Large portions of it, in fact. Where do you think Linux implementation of JFS came from? It was in OS/2 before it was even in AIX or Linux. The SMP and some of the NUMA stuff it bought from Sequent I think was also in OS/2 at one point or another. That stuff is also open sourced and part of Linux.
So, yeah, large parts of OS/2 code are alive and well and already open sourced -- in Linux
Re:You should all be ashamed (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Or... (Score:1, Informative)
What, exactly, do you mean by that statement? Lack of OO in the design? It's yet to be proven that OO is the Great Salvation it was supposed to be. Diligent modular design and discipline still produces world-class reusable code. Sloppy OO techniques do not. As for OS/2, it was built from scratch, from the ground up, by Gordon Letwin and others at MS.
I own every version from 1.0 through W4, and I'm still convinced that OS/2 1.3 was the slickest, tightest, and most robust 16-bit multi-threaded OS ever created. IBM's contributions to 2.0 and onwards included the SOM toolkit, implementation of a solid set of networking tools and functions, and many other valuable enhancements. I won't mention "thunking", because I thought it was clumsy, but it did work.
I participated in IBM's OS/2 developer program to the point where they sent me PS/2 machines to use, and use them I did. It was a sad, sad day for me when IBM pulled the plug on OS/2 and decided to let it fade away.
If you want to know more about the underpinnings of OS/2 and what it takes to create something like this, pick up a used copy (I think it's long out of print now) of Gordon Letwin's book "Inside OS/2" (ISBN: 1556151179). I've seen copies going online for under $5.
Re:What does OS/2 offer today? (Score:2, Informative)
Is the OS/2 link a hard link?
No, it's not a file system object at all. The Workplace Shell keeps all "shadows" in its ini file. Shadows are visible to neither the command line nor non WPS-aware apps.
Since the WPS is almost always running, it's not an issue, but if you do what he says without the WPS running (e.g. you edit config.sys to force OS/2 to use CMD.EXE as the user environment), the shadow will not be updated. It will just show a broken link icon. While the WPS is running, it pays attention to what's happening in the command line, and will update shadows as necessary.
An interesting thing I found while tooling around with an OS/2 ini editor was that all files have a filename that users use, and then a hex string that the system uses, separate from the Extended Attributes. I suspect this is why you can relocate an installed program to another drive, and it will continue to work. The WPS simply points to the static hex value of each file, and the FS redirects to the filename.
Re:What does OS/2 offer today? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Open source the OS (Score:3, Informative)
As the sibling poster mentions there is Odin.
As for GCC, it was first ported to OS/2 in about 1990 along with the EMX libc. IBM paid for a fork of EMX (removed all GPL parts and replaced with BSD and LGPL) for Mozilla and that is what we now have. GCC is at version 3.3.5, KLIBC allows most programs to be built with little effort.
Unluckily our X server hasn't been updated since the X.org fork and now Firefox is rejecting some of our patches as they are workarounds for our old GCC.
Now the thing we most need os an updated GCC. Without an up to date browser OS/2 will finally die.
Re:Wtf (Score:3, Informative)
Virtual Box is actually the last OS/2 program that Innotek wrote, they just reversed the usual method and wrote a program to run OS/2 instead of a program that runs under OS/2.
Virtual Box runs on OS/2 but the QT interface is a bit flaky so have to use the SDL interface.
OS/2 was the only acceptable option (Score:5, Informative)
I'm just chiming from my observations but wasn't OS/2 great for digital phone systems in the 90s and early 2000s before Linux products took the crown? This is of course well before VOIP.
Of course. Heck, OS/2 is still in use in a lot of ATMs, voice mail systems, and so on today, although it's being phased out due to lack of support. But there are ATM's in my area that I know are running OS/2. Our Nortel Norstar voice mail unit at work runs OS/2. In the 1980s and 1990s, OS/2 was very commonly used when you wanted to embed a general-purpose computer system into an "appliance" scenario. That's because it was, to a large extent, the only acceptable option.
Consider, it's 1990, and you want to build some kind of computerized "appliance". Maybe it's a voice mail system, or a bank ATM, or an electronic message board, or whatever. You want to use a general-purpose computer, because that lowers costs and enables third-party "layered product" options. GP hardware is cheaper, software development on a GP platform is easier (since the test target can be the same as the development environment), and there's a bigger third-party community to tap.
So what are your choices? Linux doesn't exist yet. Commercial Unix platforms (SGI/Irix, SunOS, HP-UX, DEC/Ultrix, etc.) are very expensive. BSD is tied up in legal wranglings, and support for commodity micros (IBM-PC, Mac) is limited at the time. DOS barely provides disk services and is useless for everything else, so you'd practically have to write your own OS. MS Windows runs on top of DOS and is basically just a GUI -- inappropriate for most embedded applications -- and has stability issues. Win NT doesn't exist yet. Xenix is a joke. SCO Unix is painfully clunky and hideously expensive.
And then there is OS/2. It's a preemptive multitasking, protected memory OS. It runs on IBM-PC-compatible computers, the platform with the biggest market presence and the most third-party support -- and also the cheapest hardware. It's from IBM, the single biggest name in computing. IBM and Microsoft both say it's the wave of the future. It's relatively inexpensive when purchased in bulk. Seems like a no brainer, right?
Obviously, looking back with 20/20 hindsight today, OS/2 seems like a strange choice, but at the time, it made perfect sense.
Re:Team OS/2! (Score:2, Informative)
The biggest problem was the Win/OS2 holodeck that allowed vendors to say they supported OS/2 without having to write a native port. Using Wine as a substitute for native ports (as others here have suggested) would continue that same flawed strategy that only works if there is already a large portfolio of native software.
Considering that wine is not an emulator, I wonder about that statement.
Microsoft programs are not the most efficient and so it seems possible that programs written for windows could run more efficiently in future versions of wine compared to future versions of windows, as wine reaches critical mass.
Plus wine benefits from all the optimizations constantly done to Linux internals, whereas look at how games run slower in the newer Vista than XP.
Re:Not the whole OS, but large subsystems can be (Score:3, Informative)
Just a couple of things dude,
- JFS was in AIX way before it was in OS/2.
- The NUMA stuff from sequent never had anything to do with OS/2, they ran their own unix OS.
I liked OS/2 back in the day. However you must realize that there are NO 'large parts' of OS/2 that have been open sourced.
Re:They should port the OS/2 API to Linux (Score:1, Informative)
Wow, as someone around from that era, I can tell you OS/2 was around LONG before WFW3.11 and I'm pretty sure predating even the concept of NT too.
Re:Not the whole OS, but large subsystems can be (Score:2, Informative)
The eComStation owners don't own the source code; they just license the binaries from IBM for resale. If they had access to the source code, then they would be upgrading and maintaining it.
Re:Not the whole OS, but large subsystems can be (Score:2, Informative)
Well, the information on wikipedia is subject to the competence of the provider. IBM has absolutely nothing to do with the development of eComStation. The only participation IBM has is in providing bug fixes based on the level of support contract that Serenity has for OS/2.
eComStation isn't an operating system; it is a distribution of OS/2, like Redhat, Ubuntu, or Debian for Linux. The OS/2 kernel, PM shell, and many other parts are still closed source belonging to IBM, and as far as I've heard, IBM doesn't want to make the source available even under a development contract, where Serenity could create a branch of (for example) the kernel.