The OS/2 Thread - A better failure than failure

[Gargamel]

Never tried OS/2. I might try it now on 86BOX. I think someone must tell me how are drivers installed on that OS?

During the installation, there is a dialog box shown where you can pick your hardware. Best to set up your 86Box to something that is supported out of the box.

Don't forget to tell it about your IDE CD-ROM drive, that the installer doesn't know about despite running from a CD.

 

[i440BX]

During the installation, there is a dialog box shown where you can pick your hardware. Best to set up your 86Box to something that is supported out of the box.

Don't forget to tell it about your IDE CD-ROM drive, that the installer doesn't know about despite running from a CD.

What version you recommend? Warp 4 or Warp 3? If Warp 4, is it resource intensive, especially the last version released in 2004?

 

[Gargamel]

What version you recommend? Warp 4 or Warp 3? If Warp 4, is it resource intensive, especially the last version released in 2004?

I don't know how much bigger Warp 4 is over 3, but either one will run on a 486. Give it lots of memory.

Hobbes probably has drivers for whatever video card you want to use in your 86Box. I think there is also an OS/2 version of SciTech Display Doctor floating around somewhere. Warp 4 should have more built-in drivers than Warp 3.

I do not know how to install or remove drivers after the fact. It's pretty easy to break too. Very alien to anyone familiar with Windows.

I don't think there is much of a bloat difference between the inital release of 4 in 1996 and the versions that came after. I think they're mostly Fixpacks and some feature updates rolled into the install CD more than anything.

There's also eComStation and later ArcaOS, but those are probably too heavy for emulation.

 

[SilentDuck]

I don't know how much bigger Warp 4 is over 3, but either one will run on a 486. Give it lots of memory.

Hobbes probably has drivers for whatever video card you want to use in your 86Box. I think there is also an OS/2 version of SciTech Display Doctor floating around somewhere. Warp 4 should have more built-in drivers than Warp 3.

I do not know how to install or remove drivers after the fact. It's pretty easy to break too. Very alien to anyone familiar with Windows.

In IBM's references, technical manuals and "problem determination" schema there's an assumption that anyone trying to fix OS/2 is a fully trained IBM repair tech with a book full of full of recovery, boot and repair diskettes as well as original install media and an instant hotline to whoever made whatever hardware you are doing anything on. Could be an OS/2 machine, could be an AS/400, could be an S370. All the same shit to the reader in IBMs approach and mentality.

To it's credit I never had a single disaster that couldn't be fixed with a reboot on any version of OS/2 but RIP anyone who did. You were fucked.

 

[Gargamel]

I believe I did fuck up my install on the L40SX, and I definitely didn't have installation or recovery media.

But Windows 95 was only 13 disk images to download on AOL, so that won out.

 

[i440BX]

I believe I did fuck up my install on the L40SX, and I definitely didn't have installation or recovery media.

But Windows 95 was only 13 disk images to download on AOL, so that won out.

Holy shit. Did you install Windows 95 on floppies? I can't imagine how lite that version could be.

 

[Gargamel]

Holy shit. Did you install Windows 95 on floppies? I can't imagine how lite that version could be.

The original release of Windows 95, the one without USB support or the IE4-infused Explorer, was only 13 floppy disks. They used the DMF format to fit 1.68MB onto a 1.44MB disk.

The other two releases of Windows 95 had more disks, and Windows 98 was available as a 72 disk set.

 

[i440BX]

The original release of Windows 95, the one without USB support or the IE4-infused Explorer, was only 13 floppy disks. They used the DMF format to fit 1.68MB onto a 1.44MB disk.

The other two releases of Windows 95 had more disks, and Windows 98 was available as a 72 disk set.

Interesting. Didn't know there was DMF alternative to FAT from Floppies.

 

[i440BX]

The original release of Windows 95, the one without USB support or the IE4-infused Explorer, was only 13 floppy disks. They used the DMF format to fit 1.68MB onto a 1.44MB disk.

The other two releases of Windows 95 had more disks, and Windows 98 was available as a 72 disk set.

72 diskette set... Somebody should make BDSM with a geek that installs Windows 98 on floppies. Maybe they were less error prone then.

Edit: I cringe now at what I wrote.

 

[Mikoyan]

In IBM's references, technical manuals and "problem determination" schema there's an assumption that anyone trying to fix OS/2 is a fully trained IBM repair tech with a book full of full of recovery, boot and repair diskettes as well as original install media and an instant hotline to whoever made whatever hardware you are doing anything on. Could be an OS/2 machine, could be an AS/400, could be an S370. All the same shit to the reader in IBMs approach and mentality.

To it's credit I never had a single disaster that couldn't be fixed with a reboot on any version of OS/2 but RIP anyone who did. You were fucked.

I unfucked some fairly significant stuff in my day with it, even had an in depth talk with an HPFS expert on a FS corruption issue. Their support was actually really damn good if you could get a hold of it.

You are correct that significant issues got esoteric very quickly.

One thing about drivers was that some classes of driver still had config.sys entries. That actually made things a bit easier to unfuck, since you could sneak in on a boot disk and twiddle bad settings.

 

[SilentDuck]

I believe I did fuck up my install on the L40SX, and I definitely didn't have installation or recovery media.

But Windows 95 was only 13 disk images to download on AOL, so that won out.

Eventually everyone quit... ring the bell and 111-1111111. Even the Hobbes archive is going down this year and those big blue niggers might as well have been stone golems. It's fun to dig through the CDs and a reminder of what life was like before the internet had penetrated every normie's brain and distorted all of society and humanity.

I unfucked some fairly significant stuff in my day with it, even had an in depth talk with an HPFS expert on a FS corruption issue. Their support was actually really damn good if you could get a hold of it.

You are correct that significant issues got esoteric very quickly.

One thing about drivers was that some classes of driver still had config.sys entries. That actually made things a bit easier to unfuck, since you could sneak in on a boot disk and twiddle bad settings.

HPFS was way ahead of it's time and versions of FAT were like a joke by comparison. Looking back I think a lot of the perceived system stability came from using it and not having your disk get corrupted or needing defrag constantly with any hard power off. I don't remember ever running a defrag once... contiguous allocation too... although it wasn't bulletproof it was still light years ahead. IBM support and techs on the open market were billed out at around $400/hr at that time so... support was trained to that level back then there were no babbling Pajeets.

On the Warp server side there was HPFS and HPFS386 that actually ran in "ring fucking 0" to quote our Patron saint.

There was a lot of potential and superiority with OS/2 but IBM just generally ignored what consumers wanted and there was no way for them to keep up with the explosion of new computer users, consumer hardware not made by IBM, trends and what users wanted to be able to do with computers. Sly Billy Gates won that easily like most satanists he just gave people what they wanted.

 

[Fabio Socialist]

Dad and I weren't IBM or related to anyone there, but we had OS/2 2.x and 3 installs that worked pretty well. Would have been far better if we'd thrown more money at decent hardware; instead we were constantly resorting to ghetto measures like booting text-only (unfortunately not really practical) or editing CONFIG.SYS at a level of autism that made DOS seem like an Altair. Networking was easier and more reliable than in Windows, and the multitasking worked well enough for our limited needs, especially with DOS programs. We were honored to interact with IBM's tech support on a few occasions, which was a mixed bag - when it was helpful it was extremely helpful, but you could tell they were more accustomed to dealing with big corporate customers. One of the more interesting times we had was installing the unsupported HPFS386 on our non-server installs. But ultimately Linux was what came to dominate our offices and homes because it ran better on our limited hardware, it was improving at a far faster rate, and it was both more fun and more rewarding to delve deeply into.

We did pick up a copy of ArcaOS 5 when it came out, but admittedly a great deal of our motivation was pure nostalgia as we'd long since moved past any technical needs or specific software requirements. It definitely brought back a lot of those good fun feelings, and without the pain of lacking sufficient power to run it properly.

 

[Migraine Box]

I quite like piddling around with OS/2. Could never get the later GUI editions of 1.x to run on native PS/2 hardware (the original HDD in my 30/286 kicked the bucket so I was using an XT-IDE) and could only ever manage to get the Microsoft flavored distro to boot from floppies. Warp 3 is schizophrenic when it comes to IDE CD-ROM drives and I've unfortunately been through the full 30~odd floppy install process on more than one occasion. Definitely the most fun to mess around with imo as Win-OS/2 is so fucking jank. Some things work fine, some things crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Love the UI as well. It's a nice middle ground between early 95/Chicago builds and Warp 4.

 

[MMan]

Hello

ArcaOS or even eComStation runs fine with VirtualBox under modern hardware.

If you want to use OS/2 today, and you can not buy ArcaOS, I recommend using OS/2 Warp 4.52, which has the same technical level as ArcaOS 5. But ArcaOS has a lot of sofware preinstalled that may made your life easier.

You can get some OS/2 OVAs to run on VirtualBox from:
- https://archive.org/details/os2_ovas

Get Drivers from HobbesArchive (this is the new Hobbes that will replace the old Hobbes).
- http://hobbesarchive.com/?path=/pub/os2/system/drivers

If you want to run more modern software, like Qt5 libs, and Dooble browser, I recommend installing ANPM to get RPM/YUM and some libraries ported from the Linux world to OS/2.
- https://www.arcanoae.com/resources/downloadables/arca-noae-package-manager/

Remember that on OS/2, the config.sys is very, very important. Every driver that boots is there.

Good luck

Regards

 

[Mikoyan]

They've been fiddling with the MSOS/2 2.0 betas, which is interesting, err, historically. I'm not sure that 2.0 with the 1.3 PM would've been a real winner, but Windows 3.0 took off, so what do I know?

 

[Mutley]

OS2 Brings back some memories..I remember an IBM Rep enthusiastically demonstrating how good EDIT was as and how superior to EDLIN it was.

 

[ditto]

They also stole a bunch of VMS guys from Digital, who ended up writing substantial parts of NT.

Dave Cutler, the designer of NT was on a podcast recently talking about how Steve Ballmer recruited him and his team over breakfast at Denny's

I think OS/2 was just a rough starting point. The two systems (OS/2 2.0 and NT 3.1) as released are quite different.

OS/2 was only used to build and debug the very earliest builds of NT until it was mature enough to debug on it's own. There was zero actual OS/2 code in NT.

 

[ditto]

They've been fiddling with the MSOS/2 2.0 betas, which is interesting, err, historically. I'm not sure that 2.0 with the 1.3 PM would've been a real winner, but Windows 3.0 took off, so what do I know?

Keep in mind that version could've been released in 1990. A protected mode, preemptive operating system that would run comfortably on a 386. It wouldn't be until Windows XP in 2001 that most people got to experience that.