On May 7, 10:34*am, jimduk...@email.com wrote:
Wow, I saw this post and I honestly thought Google Groups was broken
and was showing me posts from 2001 as new.

It's hard to even take this post seriously, but for the sake of
argument I'll entertain the idea of someone in 2008 preferring Windows
98 to XP.

First off, OS/2 V3 is not a good idea on any PC hardware made after
say.. 1997. Systems after that time tend to assume certain things
about the operating system that OS/2 V3 can't satisfy, ie. Plug &
Play, certain power management, RAM setup, hard drive types, etc. The
last IBM version of OS/2, V4.52, has a slightly better chance of
installing on hardware made before 2002 or so, but some of the drivers
are still going to be very confused, especially with bigger hard
drives. Also, don't assume you'll get any decent video support.
There are some generic catch-all video drivers but I'm not sure which
are free and what they really support and support well.

eComstation has been mentioned. It's basically OS/2 4.52 with a lot
of mods. The company behind it has been trying to shim in some more
crazy and modern stuff, like ACPI (that Windows and Linux have had for
years) and trying to get the drivers a bit more updated. The desktop
got a makeover, but it's more or less a fancy shell comprised of lots
of already available things (ie. xworkplace, multimedia classes).

I really don't know how any of this will run on modern hardware. I
know people talk about installing Warp on blade servers and whatever
other odd things, but I'm talking about the typical rig built from
parts on Newegg. Can *that* run OS/2, much less run it well? I
honestly don't know. Is it worth dedicating an entire PC to? Also, I
don't know.

In my case I wanted to play with OS/2 after a 10+ year hiatus, but
didn't want to dedicate an entire PC to it. I turned to
virtualization, specifically the excellent Virtualbox program
(www.virtualbox.org), which allows me to run OS/2 V4.52 in its own
virtual machine. The good thing here is despite my PC being very new
(laptop bought in Feb 2008), the virtual machine environment is
presented as legacy hardware that OS/2 has no problems with. OS/2
runs on my desktop, in a nice big window, but there's no hardware
investment.. OS/2 is just another application, sitting next to my web
browser, media player, whatever else. The irony is that the resources
I allocated to it (which are adjustable) are far more than any PC in
1997 had. 8)