Re: We should [NOT] > move en masse to Nota Bene (sorry Anne!)

[Raphael rtennenbaum@xxxxxxxx]

> Can OS/2 (which I have never used, but which I understand is still
> running NYC's subway system and hasn't had to be rebooted in 15 years)
> be run on contemporary hardware as a virtual machine? For that matter
> I understand that, ethical and legal issues aside, it isn't hard to
> run OS X as a virtual machine.
Would OS/2 were running the subway system, I wouldn't have to wait
twenty minutes for a G train! Actually I am pretty sure it runs the
Metro Card vending machines -- for a long time it ran most ATMs, but
that may have changed. These days it's been more or less orphaned by
IBM, who seven or eight years ago told everyone they were pulling the
plug and we should all move to Linux. It's still available commercially
as eCS -- I used it for a while until its age started to tell -- eg, it
couldn't access partitions over I think 500GB.
That I don't think would present any problems with its use in a VM --
the issue might be how well it can access the latest versions of MS
filesystems, I remember waiting quite a while for FAT32 support. Though
it might be a viable alternative, and is simpler to use than Linux, I am
really not sure how much longer it can be relied upon, but JR can chime
in here.
The thing to do really would be to find a nice lightweight distro
(Lubuntu? Puppy? which is simplistic to the point of being idiotic imo)
and run that in a VM. A shame we haven't got the Xy source, we could
come up with our own distro, call it Xyubuntu (pronounced "zoo BOON too."