Autor: Sebastian Trojanowski (Sebastian_Trojanowski_at_net-technology.com.pl)
Data: Mon 17 Apr 2000 - 10:14:02 MET DST
Co to oznacza ? Czyzby powrot OS/2. Czy ktos moglby to przetlumaczyc bo
ja zrozumialem tylko ze IBM bedzie z powrotem wspieral OS/2.
Pierwszy link na ktory sie natknolem to: www.pc.com.pl
Orginalny link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/000414-000003.html
Sebastian
OS/2 lives! IBM turns life support back on
OS/2 lives - albeit somewhat belatedly. After years of neglect and
silence IBM has promised annual refreshes of client and server versions,
and consolidations of fix packs on CD. It's not exactly what you'd call
a huge vote of confidence, but it's quite a jump for a company that for
years has given every impression of wanting to turn of the life support.
The fix packs will remain free, but they will also be offered with other
goodies on CDROM, in consolidations that IBM is calling Convenience
Packages. There will be no charge to customers who have support under
the Passport Advantage or Software Choice programmes. The first
Convenience Package is scheduled for 30 November in at least 15
languages. Apart from offering more device drivers and a developer kit
with Java Technology Edition 1.1.8, there will be significant video
enhancements, DVD/UVD, Geyserville power management and USB support.
IBM's announcement is not the long-awaited new version, but it is of
considerable comfort to OS/2 developers. During the Microsoft trial we
saw how IBM had effectively left OS/2 for dead. Well, it turns out that
the corpse was not quite dead after all, and is being kept alive because
of some big-spending IBM enterprise customers who have found that OS/2
applications just continued working, and wanted more of the same,
together with some SOHO users and small developers. Despite IBM's
callous neglect of an operating system used affectionately by quite a
few oldies, the corpse has started twitching and could be about to stage
some form of recovery. There appears to be some signs of OS/2
reinvigoration, but as to whether this will lead to a renaissance, it is
too early to judge.
Project Odin
OS/2 would surely be in a sunset condition for most people if Project
Odin - previously called the Win32-OS/2 Project - had not set out to
make it possible to run Win32 applications in OS/2 natively, without
needing either Windows or Win-OS/2. When IBM effectively threw in the
sponge, it cited the difficulty of making Windows applications work with
OS/2 as a reason for getting ready to lay out the body.
Netlabs is tackling the problem through binary compatibility, by
converting Windows EXE and DLL files to the OS/2 LX (linear executable)
format, and reassembling them in memory, as OS/2 requires. Although
permanent conversion is possible, dynamic on-the-fly conversion is also
allowed, so that Win32 programs could run under other operating systems
as well, from the same code. There's still some way to go with this
free, open source project, but the results so far look promising. Some
Windows applications may run faster under OS/2, but most are likely to
run 10 to 15 per cent slower because it is not possible to use the full
functionality of OS/2 after the conversion.
Another development track is the Everblue Project, which is porting xlib
to OS/2 (xlib is the Unix equivalent of the OS/2 Presentation Manager).
The hope and expectation is that it will be possible to port nearly
every UNIX application to OS/2. So far, there is emx for porting non-GUI
applications, with xlib intended to take care of the GUI.
When this is done, Netlabs plans to port Wine (a Win32 implementation
for UNIX/X11) to OS/2. So far as a finishing date is concerned, Netlabs
says "never", because the Win32 API is a moving target.
Neglectful
After the bruising negotiations between IBM and Microsoft over Windows
OEM prices that were revealed during the trial, IBM did almost nothing
to market OS/2, and tried to become chums with Microsoft. IBM's current
announcement is one of the most deeply hidden and un-trumpeted press
releases we have ever encountered. There was certainly a missed
opportunity to do some resurrection work during the continued absence of
Windows 2000 and as the tide began to turn against Microsoft, but IBM
was utterly silent.
Analyst Dan Kusnetzky of IDC sagely notes on MSNBC that OS/2 is "an
example of how an excellent operating system that's been marketed in a
mediocre way can be beaten by a mediocre system that's marketed in an
excellent way".
There are many serious OS/2 supporters with helpful web sites that keep
the faith. Tom Nadeau, who operates the www.os2hq.com web site, writes
passionately and persuasively about the merits of OS/2.
John Urbaniak, president of Aviar, develops OS/2-based software for
plant engineers and maintenance managers. He speaks of hard times, but
says he has found "more current interest in the last few weeks than in
the last year". Urbaniak believes this may result from Judge Jackson's
activities. He also identifies one of the biggest problems being IBM's
own apparent indifference to OS/2. The current announcement is widely
welcomed for its demonstration that there's life in the old girl yet.
OS/2 capabilities and future
OS/2 has always been good at doing several jobs at the same time, such
as formatting a floppy, searching a large file, downloading another
file, or running several DOS sessions at once.
Simplistically, Linux could be viewed as an OS/2 competitor. While Linux
enthusiasts are rediscovering the joys of Unix derivatives and the open
source development model, OS/2 stalwarts are using the object-oriented
model to drag and drop data from a data file to an application icon.
OS/2 has an object-aware language called Rexx which allows desktop
objects to be used in sophisticated interactions without programming,
because of the System Object Model (SOM) - a kissing cousin of CORBA.
The TCP/IP implementation is also much praised. Users who have tried
both OS/2 and Linux tend to suggest that Workplace Shell is superior to
anything currently existing for Linux [or it used to be, before IBM
started breaking it - Ed].
Apart from the merry band of OS/2 bug fixers and support staff, IBM has
undertaken no serious marketing for OS/2 and largely shuns it
internally: the speech group stopped supporting OS/2, Lotus scorned it,
and it's a very rare IBM PC that has OS/2 preloaded. Much of IBM is
having a love affair with Windows, or at least is hoping that it could
make loads of money by fixing Windows, but at its root, IBM is in the
business of making money by keeping enterprises happy. Putting aside the
enthusiasm and the cheerleading, IBM is at heart operating-system
agnostic.
Of course there are deficiencies for OS/2 users - there's a need for
some better native development tools, for example. There has been
increasing pressure on IBM to make OS/2 open source, and perhaps to give
some serious backing to Project Odin. Stranger things have happened, but
because of the amount of Microsoft code in OS/2, this route would need a
generous judge.
To archiwum zostało wygenerowane przez hypermail 2.1.7 : Tue 18 May 2004 - 15:26:57 MET DST