A major update to the eCS Maintenance Tool is contained in 1.10.5. In addition, the following packages are now available for download through www.ecomstation.com or by downloading eCS MT 1.10.5 and using its download capabilites.eCS Maintenance Tool 1.10.5
IBM Convenience Package FixPak 3 (English)
OS/2 kernel 14.093a_W4
OS/2 kernel 14.093a_SMP
TCP/IP 4.3x fixpack UN02206 (English)
MPTS LAPS 4.3x fixpack WR08706 (English)
TCP/IP 4.3x fixpack UNG2206 (Deutsch)
MPTS LAPS 4.3x fixpack WRG8706 (Deutsch)
IBM Single Mouse driver (10.73)
IBM IDE DASD drivers (10.85)
Daniela Engert’s IDE driver suite (1.5.2 & 0.3.12)
Some of the above packages require the latest level of eCS MT for installation support (for example, the install program shipped by IBM with the Single Mouse driver has never worked).
For more than a year eCS keeps promising this CD and the best they could come up with is a demo made for the German public (on the German edition of PC-Magazine).
What about the rest of us? What about a downloadable ISO? This will probably take another year or two, if ever…
As an ex-user and lover of OS/2 I was just wondering what the userbase of eCS has become? You don’t ever hear about it much, and it gets no press par say. And then there is OS/2 4.5 which IBM still “somewhat” supports.
Anybody have any idea on figures here?
I got a democd at Warpstock, its pretty impressive. They did not want to distribute until they judge it ready but the opportunity came up to distribute it with the German magazine. So they took it. They are still working on it, but it looks fully functional to me. There was only one machine I own it did not boot on and that was a machine with ide raid on.
Serenity does not want to push eCS yet because the 1.0 release was not really thought for the wider audience. You still have to know OS/2 quite good to install it without problems. eCS 1.1 has a much better install process and this takes more time than they thought first. But IMHO it’s better to do that clean now than to finish a release that still contains major bugs and problems.
The original version of the demoCD relies on the floppy emulation method OS/2 uses to boot from CD. Sadly, because this is not the method Microsoft uses, the hardware manufacturers are not testing it any more. As time goes along, the failure rate gets very high – some reported as high as over 50%. So, for us to release a demoCD base on that CD boot method would have been suicidal. So, in the last several months, we have completely rewritten the booting code and it’s now using the non-emulation method to boot from CD (same method used by Microsoft). As a result, we are seeing over 90% success rate now.
As to where we will be distributing the demoCD, our intention is to circulate up to half a million dmeoCDs by mid-year, and possibly up to 2 million demoCDs by the year ends – but we will be doing it in a focused manner. Just throwing a bunch of demoCDs in the cyber space isn’t meaningful to us. We circulated 75,000 demoCDs with the German PC Magazine because that’s a market that’s likely see some real sales. There is another one we are working on that should draw some 100,000 circulations, and there are others we are working on.
BTW, in relation to the thread about Athene, some people unfamiliar with eCS may not realise that eCS relies completely on SciTech SNAP Graphics technology for the display driver support. IBM licenses this technology from SciTech for OS/2, and eCS is based on a version of OS/2 that Serenity has licensed from IBM.
Just thought I would mention this 😉