EComStation - Differences Between EComStation and OS/2

Differences Between EComStation and OS/2

Version 1 of eComStation, released in 2001, was based around the integrated OS/2 version 4.5 client Convenience Package for OS/2 Warp version 4, which was released by IBM in 2000. The latter had been made available only to holders of existing OS/2 support contracts; it included the following new features (among others) compared to the final retail version of OS/2 (1996's OS/2 Warp version 4):

• IBM-supplied updates of software and components that had shipped with the 1999 release of OS'2 Warp Server for e-business, but had not been made available to users of the client version. Key among these were the JFS file system and the Logical Volume Manager.
• Operating system features and enhancements that had been made available as updates but never offered as an install-time option. These included an updated kernel, a 32-bit TCP/IP stack and associated networking utilities, a firewall, updated drivers and other system components, newer versions of Java, SciTech SNAP Graphics video support, and more.
• IBM-supplied updates that had previously only been offered to customers with maintenance contracts, such as UDF support and a new USB stack.

eComStation provided a retail channel for end users to obtain these updates. In addition, from the beginning it bundled a number of additional features and enhancements, including (but not limited to):

• Value-added applications, including the Lotus Smartsuite office suite, IBM's Desktop On-call remote-control software, and more.
• Utilities and drivers licensed from third parties including scanner support and drivers for multiple serial cards, as well as enhanced storage drivers developed by Daniela Engert.
• A number of features from OS/2 Warp 4 which IBM had omitted from the Convenience Package release, such as voice navigation and dictation,
• System improvements developed by Serenity itself including a new installer, various user interface enhancements, system configuration changes, and a rapid deployment system based on Serenity Managed Client.
• Open source utilities from the Unix world.
• A number of small utilities and drivers developed by various third parties.

As IBM began to wind down OS/2 development, Serenity and its partners began to take up the slack (through a combination of in-house, contract, and community/open source development efforts) in terms of keeping the operating system usable on current hardware. The results of many of these efforts are included in version 2 of eComStation; among others:

• ACPI support.
• A new generic graphic card driver called Panorama.
• A bootable version of JFS.
• A 'universal' sound card driver based on ALSA.
• AHCI support (introduced in version 2.1).
• On-the-fly resizing of hard drive partitions.
• A new client to access CIFS/SMB (Windows-style) LAN resources (supporting both files and printers) based upon Samba.
• Ports of current Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird for browsing and email.
• A port of the OpenOffice.org office suite.