Submitted by “This article is about the OS/2 and eComStation community on 2010 and I will try to resume the high points of the past year. Of course that this is my point of view and I’m listing the projects that I liked more.”
“This article is about the OS/2 and eComStation community on 2010 and I will try to resume the high points of the past year. Of course that this is my point of view and I’m listing the projects that I liked more.”
Just I wish that they (serenity systems) should be more … professionals.
I applied to join the official group (at yahoo) (I am an OS2/4.5 user and looking a good reason to upgrade to eCS) and they refused..I assume they support ONLY customers (that means NON existent pre-sales support)
I’m the moderator for the group so this falls on me. When we receive a request to join the group,
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ecomstation/
I send an email to the requester asking for info about their objectives for joining. I do this to avoid spammers, since they don’t respond to emails.
If you didn’t get approved, it would be because you did not respond to that email. Sorry. If you care, request again and put this info in the comment field of the request so I’ll recognize the situation.
There are also forums and newsgroups on http://www.ecomstation.com
Thanks.
Bob St. John
Edited 2011-01-04 15:54 UTC
More minds about the 3-rd (future) generation of eComStation: http://en.ecomstation.ru/showarticle.php?id=235
In today’s world full of great OS / working environment (call it whatever you want), why OS2?
I’ve been a very early adopter (and supporter) of OS/2. Since the very first awesome OS/2 (3.0), I tried (sometimes very hard) to work with it. As a professional programmer I have also at certain point developed several applications for OS/2.
After several years I still read about OS/2. eComStation is its successor: but I was very surprised to see they charge $150 for a copy. Not even Windows cost that much (that, by the way, I believe is way too much for what it offer compared to the competitions).
An OS os no different than any other product: the final price should not be defined by the real cost of the product, instead, it should be set by the various and complex market rules.
I understand eComStation is just a way to continue to support the thousands of installations of custom applications, but wouldn’t be better to eventually open source OS/2 (eComStation) and simply maintain the existing installations as a per-basis consulting contracts ?
Think of that in the same terms as openSolaris (pre-Oracle)…
In my VM repository I have Linux, OpenSolaris, and various experimental OSs, but unfortunately I cannot have eComStation… I’m sorry, but I will never shell $150 just for trying it…
Less than $150 for Windows? Lucky bastard. In Denmark the price of Windows 7 (and Vista) are around $150 and upwards. Or put differently; identical to eCS.
I still remember the joy of using OS/2 2.x back in my youth. It was a fantastic experience compared with Windows 3.x (incl. WfW). I was one of the really disappointed ones when Windows 9x took over. None of the fancy drag’n’drop worked anymore and the extended file attributes were no more. Those alone are almost enough to justify the price of $150…
They could sell it (home edition) for -say- $50 as a limited time offer….
I really don’t understand how anybody at Serenity can look with a strait face at OS/2’s interface. How hard can it be to change some default icons, make a nice wallpaper and change the look of the widgets? Oh and BTW … $150 is ridiculous.
Edit: I’ve been looking at some screenshots and there is no antialias whatsoever and the Configuration icons are 16 colors … Argh! Are these guys serious?
Edited 2011-01-04 09:00 UTC
The widgets and wallpaper are already different form OS/2. Alternative icon sets are in fact available, possibly even on the installation DVD, although as I don’t have 2.0 I can’t say whether they come with the package or not.
From what I understand, it is not possible to improve the icons much since the graphics system has not been updated in years, other than to support higher resolutions. I could be wrong.
$150 is very steep, I agree. However, OS enthusiasts are not the target audience. eCS owes its existence mostly due to the fact that many large corporations still rely on OS/2 and eCS offers them an up to date (sort of) version of this. Serenity also have to pay IBM pretty hefty royalties on all copies sold, which accounts for a lot of the cost.
I have 1.2 running under VMWare on OS X, but I rarely boot it up nowadays. None of my own clients use it now, but I keep it around in case I am contracted to one that does in the future.
Not at all. Have a look at my screenshot: http://rolofs.net/album/scr/ecs20-20110104d.png
What exactly do yo mean?
Maybe I’m immune against antialias topics, maybe I never used what you call “configuration icons” – but I don’t really understand the problem you have.
There is no GUI as configurable as the WPS.
Of course, not every eCS user is a professional graphics designer. Thus there sure are some ugly desktops in the eCS community. But although I do have a sense of aesthetics I wouldn’t judge an OS according to its aptness as home cinema replacement.
You don’t seem to know what antialiasing is? Understandable, since it doesn’t exist in your screenshot. If you’re instead saying you never understood why people care, well, that’s aesthetics.
Here’s a screenshot: http://www.ecomstation.com/gallery/gal/eComStation_2.0/ecs2_nl_desk…
Lots of those icons look 16 colors. Everything looks absolutely awful ( more screenshots here: http://www.ecomstation.com/gallery/index.php?g=eComStation_2.0&p=5&… )
I’m not arguing against the technical merits of eComStation or its UI because I haven’t used it, but a modern OS needs both functionality and at least decent looks. You can’t sell something like that unless all you want is to milk dry some 20 year old support contracts and kill the OS eventually.
These screenshots have been made before the release of eCS 2.0 GA in order to appease some very impatient users. We should understand where the beauty contests run and where not.
As you are not the first non-eCS user guessing that eCS uses only 4-bit pixels in its icons, I’ve put four screenshots online to indicate how you can create your own icons.
http://rolofs.net/album/scr/eCS20_icon-edit_1.png
shows the icon configuration page. You can either generate a new icon by drag & drop from anywhere, for instance from the directory shown in http://rolofs.net/album/scr/eCS20_icon-edit_3.png , or you can edit an existing icon. The icon editor page is shown in http://rolofs.net/album/scr/eCS20_icon-edit_2.png . Here you can define each pixel manually. As you’ll notice, the pixels are 8-bit.
The underlying image is shown in http://rolofs.net/album/scr/750px-Supermassiveblackhole_nasajpl.png .
The default system icons are indeed 4-bit pixeled as they have not been changed since around ’95. This certainly correlates with the fact that the typical eCS user is not driven by the newest trends in town but by factors like security, stability, and, yes, familiarity.
I agree that it should at least be configurable for decent looks. Personally I don’t care about the default settings as long as I can change them to my taste. And this is the case in eCS more than in any other OS I’ve been using.
In fact, it is the combination of versatility, stability,and functionality which yields the primary attractor for me.
Apple’s looks certainly are the first in beauty. But their machines are not versatile at all. I need machines where I can replace the components myself and not from one vendor only.
Windows is the contrary of versatility. It is built on the philosophy of breaking standards, of anti-interoperability and of damaging and destroying competitors. Thus it’s really an ethical question for me not to support those guys.
Linux is fine. I’ve been using distris from SuSE, Mandriva, and Redhat as long as OS/2 and eCS. Now I’ve settled with fedora. It will never be my primary system, however, as its interoperability by far doesn’t match that of eCS. Its relatively slow performance is of minor but not of zero importance for me.
Depends on your target group. OS/2 always had that connection to mainframes as both have the same producer, IBM. Although I can’t prove it, my impression is that among the home users of eCS and among the business customers of eCS the percentage of mainframe affiliates is the highest relative to other OS-s. This target group doesn’t care so much for sexy backgrounds and cool programming concepts.
Why people choose eComStation
http://ecomstation.tv/en/?action=why
+ screenshots in the gallery, clips in Clips (top menu)
All the guys complaining about the “steep price” of eCS forget to consider the total cost of ownership.
If you sum the expenses a typical eCS user had for his OS during the last 10 years and compare that to the expenses of the typical prevailing Windows user then you’ll get quite a different impression.
150 US$ within five years are peanuts for the membership in one of the most exclusive and most rewarding OS communities.
How much do you pay for your AV software? I don’t need to pay anything because my eCS (and OS/2) machines were and are 100% free of malware. Since 1992.