The osFree project has published its first screenshot. “osFree is an open source free (non-commercial) software development project. Goals of the projects are to replace all (or most) of OS/2’s subsystems with open-source analogues. The base compatibility system is OS/2 Warp 4 (Merlin), but that doesn’t mean we won’t be supporting features of newer versions of OS/2 like OS/2 WarpServer for e-business and eComStation by Serenity Systems.”
os/2 is a great os.
Good luck to them, i hope to see more.!!
I’m impressed! And when you’re done you can start rewriting Windows 3.11.
Why bother with Windows 3.11?
ReactOS is already working on writing a Windows NT clone.
“I’m impressed! And when you’re done you can start rewriting Windows 3.11.”
Don´t push to hard, start with ms-dos…
i think, they should first rewrite DOS 6.22. Oh wait, CP/M 3.0 is first on the list…
Why bother rewriting Win 3.11?
WINE is sufficiently mature to provde the Win16 APIs that OS/2 Warp 4 supports.
I love the UI! ^_^
Nah, j/k, I hope they have a lot of fun doing this project (as that would probably be the primary use for it).
– Simon
Why the sarcasm? This is OS News, right? You enjoy OS articles, and you presumably are interested in people actually cutting OS code? Maybe not.
OS/2 like DOS or CP/M? Is this a case of “I don’t use it so I’ll bash it”.
Try the eCS Live CD – if you cannot comprehend that OS/2 is a family of products that stretches back a couple of decades and is not at version 1.0 anymore then you probably don’t understand that Windows XP is not Windows 3.1, or that Linux 2.6.x is not something that some guys put together in a lab in the 1960’s… OS/2 has progressed. As has Windows, *nix, Mac, etc.
It’s getting really tiring having to counter trolls whenever a minority OS is mentioned. All it takes is a sniff of OS/2, AmigaOS, Haiku, RiscOS, SkyOS, etc, and the ignorant brigade come out from under their bridges.
By the way, osFree team: well done. Not everyone here is OS myopic.
What it really is, is a question of what real use all of that talent is going to be, when they’re putting their time into rewriting and upgrading obsolete systems that have fewer users each year.
Yes, I know that it must be fun for them. so as long as it’s a hobby, fine. But the significance of it all is minor, at best. A few thousand people will play with it for a while, and then go on to something else.
Some of these systems are truly dead. They serve no modern purpose. The commercial users have either gone, or are in the process of going, and will not stay or come back.
It’s not ignorance to make note of all of this, and question its usefulness. It IS ignorant to pretend that the people who question it are to ones who are trolls.
If you think that your viewpoint is valid, then so is ours.
I read so many posts where the person thinks that with just a bit more work, some hopelessly outclassed OS is going to make a comeback. It’s not. The vast amount of work required will never emerge because most programmers realize that there will be no market for their work, and so stay away.
This is the same problem Linux faces. There are too many distro’s that have 100 or even less people using, and swearing by them. If that effort went into a more mainstream product without all of the hysterics we’ve seen in the community overs the years, Linux might have a much bigger share now.
Yes, I know that it must be fun for them. so as long as it’s a hobby, fine. But the significance of it all is minor, at best. A few thousand people will play with it for a while, and then go on to something else.
The above is true of just about everything which is discussed on this web site, including variants of BSD, Solaris, and Linux.
Then again, this web site is for OS enthusiasts, and mainstream practicality is often not a stated goal at all. This is something commercially-oriented readers need to understand…
Whether or not the systems are dead are yet to be seen.
Du you consider newspapers dead because of radio?
Do you consider radio dead, because of TV?
Do you consider newspapers, radio and TV dead because of the Internet?
Good ol’ books, newspapers, radio and TV works fine with the Internet.
So no, they are not dead.
New technology does not mean that old technology is obsolete, nor dead. It just means that they will be used for other tasks.
And OS/2 for an instance is – from a technical point of view – still superior in many areas compared with Windows, Linux and even Mac OS X. OS/2 has also several drawbacks, but this is true for most OS’es (I yet have to find the perfect one).
@melgross
I was not questionning your right to challenge the uesfulness of any particular OS. However when people’s quotes degenerate into ridiculous comments such as why not us CP/M or DOS instead, then frankly it adds little or nothing to the discussion. This is an OS forum for OS enthusiasts. If somebody did come along and decide to do a free version of CP/M, then let them, say I.
My point was that simply because an OS is a minority OS and is not one that you (generally, not you specifically) use, does not mean that it has no value. And if people are willing to dedicate *their* spare time to making a free clone, good for them. I’m not convinced that they’ll succeed, but why lambast them for trying? Must everything free be *nix derived? Should Haiku be scrapped? No, of course not. In variety and diversity lies strength, and good ideas can drop out of the most unlikely places.
Incidentally, OS/2 is far from being obsolete. It’s got a few good years in it yet. If it were, Serenity Systems would have gone out of business a while back, and IBM would have stopped selling OS/2 support too.
If the inference was that I was tainting you with an accusation of ignorance, then I do apologise for that. I have no wish to cause offence to fellow readers of this forum. I hope that you in turn can see the other point of view.
Especially the ‘preferred kernel’ poll is telling
I thought that by ‘replacing subsystems’ they meant replacing modules, while keeping the majority of the proprietary system running untill everything can be replaced. Instead, they go from the grounds up. Possibly not the approach I prefer to see; too big projects with a small audience run aground like this.
Aros is on the pretty same situation I think
Most haven’t heard of the FreeDOS project, which actually has a fully functional DOS clone with user tools and everything.
hmm, i would love to create a dos like enviroment that can handle multitasking, unloading of TSR software (basicly drivers) and maybe virtual terminals…
oh wait, thats the linux kernel and a bash shell
btw, good luck to the people working on this remake. i never to so far as to test the original os/2, but ill try to test this ones it get fully implemented
Edited 2005-11-24 22:19
Did you try the eComstation live-cd?
nah, i realy dont have the bandwidth to download it in a reasonable timeframe…
Would Real32 over at Intelligent Micro Software (http://www.imsltd.com/) qualify?
maybe, but i would love for it to be free in both senses of the word
hard to tell just from a marketing website realy. to much hype…
why even bother? OS/2 was and is a shitty OS with no future what so ever..
Gimme Zeta or Haiku instead
You, sir, are a f–king moron.
OS/2 was a very good OS in its day and it still is a very nice OS. I hope this project meets its goals.
i second that my goog sir.
Because some people out there want to have an open-source alternative to an operating system that may never be open-sourced. OS/2 was technically superior to what Microsoft had at that time, and even possibly still is. The reason it failed was a combination of Microsoft dominance and IBM incompetence. Its future (at IBM) was cut short. But that is no reason to call it ‘shitty’. Your attack on the operating system has no basis whatsoever.
I say let them!
“why even bother?”
Who died and made you ruler of what people spend their time on?
Because they feel like it? It’s an interesting challenge? Who cares, it’s not for us to tell them what to do.
I heard the previously mentioned Ignorance Brigade is looking for volunteers, you might want to join.
http://wiki.fdos.org/Main/Todo_1_0
http://freedos.sourceforge.net/
Not really, they move pretty slowly over there.
What was OS/2 like? I always got the impression it was DOS with more advanced features like threads and protected memory and what not. But still single user, simple filesystem.
OS/2 is a advanced OS and even more so for its time.
OS/2 was a REALLY powerful os… Think a stable and fast windows(Presentation Manger) with no 640k barrier unlike win 3.11 and much faster and stable then win 95… The only flaw was os/2 couldn’t handle a reset button.. 😉 Seriously, you pressed the reset button on an os/2 box and be rest assured you have to run chkdsk! 😉 Imagine if BeOS had been released when win 3.11 was out.. That’s what OS/2 was like in terms of speed and stability..
It’s a protected mode OS/2 with multitasking and good support for threading. It also featured an impressive Amiga-like GUI. Think Win95 but stable and fast and with a better GUI/built in scripting(Rexx), proper CLI etc.
Some people (mostly people who never used it) seem to be under the misaprehension that OS/2 was a bland OS but it featured a lot of cutting edge tech well before other OSes implimented them (JAVA, TCP/IP dialer as standard, OpenDoc).
Yes, and do not forget the excellent drag and drop that the gui had.
OS/2 Warp 4 came out just before Windows 95, and I was amazed at the difference between both systems on the same machine. OS/2 was in a completely different league, and it never showed one sign of instability on my machine. Things were totally intuitive to do. Even if I had never done them before.
However…. I dumped it in favour of Windows 95.
At the time, I was one of those users who “THOUGHT” I had to use Windows because everyone else done so.
I was young and naive, do not hassle me out for it, I since know better.
The UI had queing issues, causing it to ‘hang’. Other than that, it wasn’t like DOS at all. It took years for Windows to reach a similar level, and even then the desktop under Windows isn’t nearly as nice.
Being an old OS/2 advocate, I’m in the ‘let it go away like the Amiga’ crowd. (Of course, there are plenty of current Amiga fans, so what do I know!)
Currently, everything seems to be either Unix, Unix-like, or repeating the lessons learned in Unix (that would be Windows). So, why not just use a *nix and be done with it?
OS/2 was a big clunky OS that reminded you that its owners liked to build operating systems for big old mainframes. It barely seemed to fit on a PC.
It was way ahead of its time and could be a pain in the kneck to install. I recall video drivers running at ring zero and crashing the whole OS.
Once you had it installed correctly it would run forever and was as solid as a rock.
There was very little software for OS/2 but it could run Windows programs.
OS/2 Warp 4 could be made to run on a 4MB machine (as you could completely drop the GUI and run it using a freeware third-party text shell), and its resource usage has always been significantly less than Windows NT and its descendants.
OS/2 Video drivers do not run at Ring 0 — you must be thinging of Windows NT 4?
OS/2 is lacking in certain types of software, but the fact that it runs DOS and Windows stuff makes up for some of that lack, putting it ahead of all but Windows and Linux in terms of available software. And maybe MacOSX, though it’s a specialized case.
OS/2 was and is an efficient OS with a minimal footprint on the system.
OS 3.X could easily run in 4 MB of RAM while NT required at least 16 and the same for Win95.
Software could be a bit problematic, but most major applications got ported to OS/2 one way or the other. And those who weren’t could still run due to the great support for DOS and Windows applications. Especially the DOS support was great. Much better than anything I’ve seen later, apart from DOSBox
Well, some of us simply don’t like the Unix approach (in terms of “feel”, not in terms of general approach) when compared to the OS/2 approach. 🙂
FWIW, most of the WPS hanging issues were dealt with when Warp 4 was released. I’ve not had such a hang in years.
Consider it an userfriendly highly efficient WinNT.
Even OS/2 2.x was in many ways superior to what Windows is today. It’s a professional OS, comparable to NT.
It’s not related to DOS no more than Linux is.
It’s not like Windows 9X/ME which are DOS versions with a Windows 4.x API on top of it.
I tried FreeDOS a few times in the past and could never make it install and boot correctly. The last time was probably about one year ago. Has it improved substantially since then? If so, I might try again.
FreeDOS was the first non-commercial OS I tried, back when I was in Year 12 at school. I was looking for an OS for my 486, so I type “Free Operating System” into my Web Browser. There were all of these references to something called “Linux.” I investigated it a little and heard it was a clone of Unix, which I had never used and I had read (in a school textbook) was extremely difficult to use and was only operated by engineers!
It was another two years before I decided to investigate that Linux thing again…
They decided to take Warp 3 or 4 or eCS and replace the bits one by one. There is no reason not to, because OS/2 Warp 3 was pretty common and the original media is dirt cheap to come by.
As it stands, it looks like they are working from the bootloader up so I would be surprised if they ever finish it.
I’ve never seen a better looking GNOME desktop! Goodbye Ubuntu!
dick !
I used Warp 3 for my primary OS for awhile. Bought a system preloaded with it from Indelible Blue. Good system, great operating system.
It had some great strengths and some weaknesses… I am glad someone is undertaking this project. It is good news.
Seems this project has a quite long road to ever be something.
“The next step (being in process) is switching to protected mode”
.. woohhooooo! 8|
I belived so mutch in this OS that i still have the _ORIGINAL_ OS/2 2.1 and i recently bought “OS/2 for Windows”.
I also started a petition (www.petitiononline/OS24FREE) to ask IBM to open source it, but there are mutch licensing problems… Anyway i hope to see osFree grow !
Marco Ravich
The one thing that stands out from this project is that instead of complaining about IBM not open sourcing OS/2, this group has made a huge effort in solving the problem. If only other groups that yearn for their favourite OS to be open sourced would take a page from this group’s book. Haiku is another great example of a group getting off their laurells and making a real contribution to the community.
Kudos to them.
I know that the reactos project intend to add other compatiblity layers other than just Win32, and I’m sure they’d welcome volunteers to work on an OS/2 subsystem. *perhaps* their efforts might be more worthwhile there?
Best Regards,
Toonie.
From memory, the NT4 OS/2 subsystem was:
a) text mode apps only
b) 16-bit only
So it’s use was rather limited.
Happy to be corrected if that’s not the case.
I don’t think the point is to copy the system that NT had, (although they will have to do that also), but to create complete OS/2 program compatability.
And, correct me if I’m wrong
Perhaps it could be done but for me, the brilliance of OS/2 was the OS and the GUI itself rather than any app in particular. It would be a LOT of effort required just get a couple of nice apps running.
wow, I suppose it took years to produce a screenshot like that…
Isn’t Freeloader the name of ReactOS bootloader? Did they just boot Freeloader and take a screenshot?
I believe ReactOS does use Freeloader, yes, however, to develop an OS compatability layer, this would be insignificant. You would be writing code which talks directly with the kernel and other OS subsystems I guess.
In any case, I am not critical of there efforts, as I have great admeration for people who can write an OS from scratch.
Regards,
Toonie.
> Isn’t Freeloader the name of ReactOS bootloader?
That is rigth.
> Did they just boot Freeloader and take a screenshot?
No.
Have a look at
http://www.osfree.org/index.php
There was a vote, which kernel would be used for OSFree as first starting point.
The most people voted for ReactOS.
The relationship between OSFree and ReactOS is like Haiku and NewOS.
OSFree used as a starting point at first the existing ReactOS kernel and modify it, so that it is compatible to OS/2. And that is then called OSFree.
How are they going to license their own stuff then? They have their own OSFree license (3 clause BSD like) ReactOS is GPL, then there are significant parts under a license called 4OS2, they want their stuff to be based on L4 (I assume Pistachio) so add 2 clause BSD license. Then there is REXXUTIL.DLL that they label as being MPL. Damn that’s a hodgepodge!
Remember when ReactOS wanted to be like nt4;
Remember when free dos wanted to be dos 6.22;
Where is freedos? 32bit multithreding now as a branch
ReactOS is working hard towards their goals..2k now i think
Legacy OS’s have their place and who knows you might want to show your grandkids what kind of os you were using when you were 15..
Still cant find that freedos article on embedding it in bios :S
Edited 2005-11-25 14:15
maybe some banks that get tired of windows will use osFree when they get to the level. As I understand it banks used to use alot of os/2.
So is the osFree team using FreeDOS for the dos compatability?
Glad to hear ReactOS is teaming with these folks
Hmmm haven’t visited the freeOS site in quite a while and actually I thing that Apple is on the right path using a freeBSD userland – a successor doesn’t need to run legacy applications native (Look at Vista that runs them in a VM).
I must say to the FreeOS crowd – BRAVO – WELL DONE – KEEP IT UP. You’ve made it to the first milestone, that has enabled you to show something to the masses.
I must say that I fell in love with the WPS/PMShell back in 1992 with OS/2 2.0 – It was chunky, lazy, not really 100% stable, massive, and partly 16-bit. With Enterprise, Merlin and Aurora the stability and ressource overhead has come under control – IMO the latest snapshot isn’t much more ressource demanding than the old 2.0. Actually this post is written using FF 1.5 B3 on an eComstation 1.2 (based on OS/2 4.52+) – I’ve got the applications I need to perform my tasks and am really looking forward to the arrival of OO.O 2.x in Q1 next year.