Re: hodgepodge (ECS info)

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Morris Krok wrote:

>   Recently mention has been made of an operating system - Ecomstation. Is
> this available by downloading or does it come in a package.

Not by download. It is developed (up from the OS/2 Warp 4.5 codebase) and
released by Serenity Systems, whose website can be found at:

http://www.serenity-systems.com

although the actual ordering and fulfillment is handled by Prism Dataworks:

http://www.prismdataworks.com/

It comes on 2 or 3 CDs, with no printed manual, although there is a (separate)
manual available for free d/l online, as a .PDF file. I can supply that URL if
you'd like. That might give you some notion of what you'd be getting yourself
into.

There are more deluxe packages of ECS available, if one wants dual-processor
support, entitlement to later releases within a certain time frame, or
enrollment in a Tech. Support program.

I think the initial base price is somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple
hundred $, unless you are upgrading from a license for OS/2 Warp 4.0. However,
that could be an introductory price, which may already have ended. As has been
mentioned here before, this is not a very easy OS to just jump into cold, with
no background . . . though it is by most accounts substantially easier to learn
one's way around than is Linux. I would not recommend it to anyone who happens
to find W95/98 "difficult." It is much more technical than that, at least for
setup purposes, and the object-oriented GUI is different from the Windows world.

Additionally, I have no idea if NB-Win is numbered among the Win-32 app.s that
can be run via the add-on ODIN package. My guess is that almost no one has
requested support for it, so it can't have been much of a priority. Of course,
Xy4DOS would run exceptionally well, just as it does under earlier versions of
OS/2. XyWin (a 16-bit Win app.) probably runs much the way it does under W95/8.

Jordan