Saturday, August 31, 2013
The Complete Guide to Imperfect Homemaking: {OrganizedHome} Day 7: DIY pocket Organizer
The Complete Guide to Imperfect Homemaking: {OrganizedHome} Day 7: DIY pocket Organizer: [This is day 7 in a 31 day series called 31 days to an Organized Home. Enjoy!] Originally this wasn't supposed to be a blog post all ...
Thursday, July 5, 2007
My Current eComstation hardware
Just for reference unless I specify otherwise, this is the system which I use for OS/2. It is fully supported by the most recent released of eComstation:
Motherboard: Asus K8V-X SE
Processor: AMD Athlon64 2800+
Memory: 2 GB DDR400 (2x1024)
Video: ATI Radeon 9250 (using SNAP)
Audio: SB Audigy 2 (Onboard supported but has some glitches with uniaud)
Lan: Onboard (VIA Rhine III)
HardDrive: Hitachi Deskstar 160GB
Optical Drive: Plextor 712A DVD-RW
USB Devices: Dazzle Compact Flash Card Reader, USB Floppy Drive (generic no-name)
Motherboard: Asus K8V-X SE
Processor: AMD Athlon64 2800+
Memory: 2 GB DDR400 (2x1024)
Video: ATI Radeon 9250 (using SNAP)
Audio: SB Audigy 2 (Onboard supported but has some glitches with uniaud)
Lan: Onboard (VIA Rhine III)
HardDrive: Hitachi Deskstar 160GB
Optical Drive: Plextor 712A DVD-RW
USB Devices: Dazzle Compact Flash Card Reader, USB Floppy Drive (generic no-name)
eComstation 2.0 RC1
Truth to be told, I am not even running RC1 yet, in fact I am still using Beta 3.. It is working and I tend to leave well enough alone. This is also the primary reason why I am still running OS/2 in the first place. However, it is noteworthy that even though it is almost a year late the first release candidate has found it's way to the light of day. True, the whole eComstation 2.0 thing seems rather wrong to me. I remember the days where a full revision change meant that the entire underlying software has been changed, which of course at this point in time would be impossible since the core of ecomstation (OS/2) is more or less frozen in time, circa 1996. I've done the math and eComstation 2.0 should really be eComstation 1.4.5 or so =). But I digress.
This isn't a bad thing however, because for software of 1996 it was really well designed. IBM realized they were on the losing side of the battle and decided to embrace open standards. Notice, I didn't say "Fully embrace" They only were interested in open standards as far as they thought they could make a Hail Mary for their software division. In fact the failure of OS/2. which has been pointed out many times, is not in the software itself, it is not in it's lack of hardware support, or it's difficult installation but it was in IBM. A company which never truly got behind the Personal Computer (despite the fact they are credited with creating it). The problem is that these endorsements of open standards haven't progressed much beyond what was around in 1996. Outdated Java (which at that point was fairly useless and therefor IBM thought they could include it with little fear for their server division). Even our most recent release (1.4.5) is quite long in the tooth today. However, Serenity should be commended that they finally have released a non-beta OpenOffice 2.x release.
eComstation (Serenity Systems) works to fix as much of that as is possible. There are many new drivers and despite the fact that a major blow was dealt when SciTechSoftware jumped ship on SNAP (a video driver base which supported many different video chipsets). They still moved forward. There is ACPI support now, Wireless Lan drivers, a comprehensive support base for sound cards, and upgraded USB drivers since the OS/2 Warp 4 days. Using Innotek Font Engine there are anti-aliased fonts for mozilla applications, and if you are daring enough you can extend that to most applications which make use of truetype fonts. I have done this in the past, however I turned it off when after about a week of uptime I would lose all anti-aliased fonts across all applications.. however, my windows machines rarely make a week of uptime without being rebooted for one reason or another (the most common one recently has been automatic updates which requite a reboot).
Speaking of updates, though it is no longer a primary focus of the eComstation product line the eComstation Maintenance tool continues to improve. I still feel there is a long way for this product to go but it is great that it is out there. (more detail on this later)
I was hoping when 2.0 came around for some new stuff though, as much as I fear change, I also always enjoy something new to play with. I actually only have one wish for eComstation 2.0:
Remove IBM LS. It is almost the last of the Microsoft code in OS/2, and truth to be told not that Microsoft cannot program but their best efforts defiantly did not make it into the OS/2
Well, right now I am in the middle of a move, in fact I close on my house in a little over 3 hours. I am going to install RC1 and write up a review afterwards.
This isn't a bad thing however, because for software of 1996 it was really well designed. IBM realized they were on the losing side of the battle and decided to embrace open standards. Notice, I didn't say "Fully embrace" They only were interested in open standards as far as they thought they could make a Hail Mary for their software division. In fact the failure of OS/2. which has been pointed out many times, is not in the software itself, it is not in it's lack of hardware support, or it's difficult installation but it was in IBM. A company which never truly got behind the Personal Computer (despite the fact they are credited with creating it). The problem is that these endorsements of open standards haven't progressed much beyond what was around in 1996. Outdated Java (which at that point was fairly useless and therefor IBM thought they could include it with little fear for their server division). Even our most recent release (1.4.5) is quite long in the tooth today. However, Serenity should be commended that they finally have released a non-beta OpenOffice 2.x release.
eComstation (Serenity Systems) works to fix as much of that as is possible. There are many new drivers and despite the fact that a major blow was dealt when SciTechSoftware jumped ship on SNAP (a video driver base which supported many different video chipsets). They still moved forward. There is ACPI support now, Wireless Lan drivers, a comprehensive support base for sound cards, and upgraded USB drivers since the OS/2 Warp 4 days. Using Innotek Font Engine there are anti-aliased fonts for mozilla applications, and if you are daring enough you can extend that to most applications which make use of truetype fonts. I have done this in the past, however I turned it off when after about a week of uptime I would lose all anti-aliased fonts across all applications.. however, my windows machines rarely make a week of uptime without being rebooted for one reason or another (the most common one recently has been automatic updates which requite a reboot).
Speaking of updates, though it is no longer a primary focus of the eComstation product line the eComstation Maintenance tool continues to improve. I still feel there is a long way for this product to go but it is great that it is out there. (more detail on this later)
I was hoping when 2.0 came around for some new stuff though, as much as I fear change, I also always enjoy something new to play with. I actually only have one wish for eComstation 2.0:
Remove IBM LS. It is almost the last of the Microsoft code in OS/2, and truth to be told not that Microsoft cannot program but their best efforts defiantly did not make it into the OS/2
Well, right now I am in the middle of a move, in fact I close on my house in a little over 3 hours. I am going to install RC1 and write up a review afterwards.
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