Posted by Martin Iturbide - Thursday, 30 December 2010
!!! Happy New Year and Peace to every eComStation and OS/2 user on Earth !!!
I had written an article about the past 2010 and eCS-OS2.
Please read the complete article here.
This
article is about the OS/2 and eComStation community on 2010 and I will try to
resume the high points of the past year. Of course that this is my point of
view and I'm listing the projects that I liked more. If you have something you
think I'm missing go ahead and reply on the forum.
Software Releases and Updates.
We had seen
several software new releases and updates this last 2010. Here I list some of
them:
Firefox and Thunderbird
are versions are up to date. It is incredible to see that we have the last
version of Firefox ported to OS2-eCS and even have the beta of Firefox 4
ported. The Firefox eCS-OS2 developer community makes a great work keeping the
browser updated.
Lucide turned open Source on April of 2010. I
have always liked Lucide and I loved to see it open source and available for the
whole community for download. Before Lucide we used to have Acrobat Reader 5
(Odinized version) to read PDF. Since Lucide is open source now it will be
easier to extend the functionality of it.
GCC, PHP, Samba, eCUPS also gets regular updates and are
very important projects at the moment. Paul Smedley have done a hell of a job
to keep all his eCS-OS2 projects updated.
VLC (Media Player) and Arora (Web browser) showed up to be well received surprises this
year. VLC is a project I'm following with interest, since it is a very important
media player in the open source world. Arora came to me as surprise since I
didn't know about that project at all. Since Arora uses a Webkit based engine
I was very interested to test it out.
eComStation 2.0 was released on May of the past 2010, after I
don't know how many years. I recall that eCS 2.0 beta program started on 2005.
So this was big news for eComStation and the community. This release was made
possible by Mensys. The ACPI driver was the crown of the jewel of this eComStation
release. Thanks to this driver it was possible to run eComStation on modern
hardware.
OpenOffice.org 3.2 was also released on 2010 by Mensys. OpenOffice.org
has become almost a standard on every non-Windows operating system and we cannot
be left behind without a good and modern office suite running under this
platform. After the release of eComStation 2.0 I consider it the best software release from Mensys on 2010.
Another
important thing accomplished of the 2010 inside the eCS-OS2 community was the
release of QT4 port . The version 4.5.1 was released on early 2010,
it has been keept up to date and now it is on version 4.6.3. This port was
lead by Silvan Scherre and developed by Dmitry A. Kumino. This port was very
important as the QT library allows several QT based software to
be ported also.
After the
QT4 port I started to see a flood (positive flood) of QT4
based software ported to eCS-OS2. There was an excellent job from Elbert Pol porting small but useful
pieces of software based on QT4.
As part of
the OSFree project I found the
release of FreeLDR very interesting, allowing OS/2 to be booted from a CD and
USB drive in a very flexible mode. It
was not big news on 2010 but I think it was a very important milestone for the
OSFree project.
Drivers Releases
Uniaud was also updated this year and it keeps working
well enough for me. I'm my case I have an Intel mainboard with an i5 processor
running eCS 2.0. Even that Uniaud got criticized from time to time I found the efforts to keep it current very worthy.
The Mensys
open source Intel network drivers
were a positive news that allow all that have (including me) a newer Intel
mainboard to connect to the wired network. This released was also a very important for
the Intel mainboard I'm using and I guess several people inside of the ecs-os2 community found it very useful too.
xAta: It surprised me to see that netlabs.org hosted
this project which is the evolution of Danis506, this driver allow us to
access modern hard drives. There has
been some updates to Danis506 this year, but I really hope this project can
keep evolving on 2011.
As a
surprise on December I saw the release of the USB driver from Lars Erdmann. I read on that chat that there was some
work going on with the USB driver and it was good to see a release out there.
I haven't tested it yet but I'm putting my hopes on this project.
Developers and Open Source
Taking with
someone at the community I hear a phrase like "Don't expect too much from open
source pizza box developers, they cannot deliver important projects". Even ought
his words were well explained from his point of view, this 2010 showed me that
he was not completely right.
In this
year I have seen many developers delivered good, open source and important
tools to the community as a hobby. Sure
it will be desirable that developers get money even for their free time
development, but currently it is not happening because of the size of the
community and the operating system relevance on the market.
Sorry if I cannot
list all the community of developers on this article but I would like to say to all
of them that they have overpassed all the expectations on this 2010 and I congratulate
all of them. As the
OS2World.com NewsMaster I have seen new software updates almost on bi-daily
bases uploaded to hobbes or as reported news.
What to expect on 2011?
We never
know what can happen on 2011 on this community. We don't have big corporation
betting on eCS-OS2 , but I want to list what's seems to be more probable. Even
that for the moment some are just speculation.
I think OpenJDK port (Java 6)
is the most
important promise for 2011. They gave us a good surprise on the release
of the first beta on 2010 (30th december). When the GA released gets
available it will allow several Java
applications to run under OS2-eCS again. This is a necessary port
because the
last java port we have is version 1.5 and it getting very old. Plus
OpenJDK is
open source and can be further improved by community efforts.
I hope to
see on 2011 Mensys release of the stable Flash
10 plugin wrapper for eCS-OS2 (even that some people say
the word "stable"
and "flash" do not belong together on a same sentence ;) ). I personally
don't think of it
as a vital thing, but it is a plus to be able to see Flash content on
the web. But many other disagreed with me on this subject since they
think for web surfing flash is a must.
The USB driver will mature ( I hope so) to replace completely the IBM one. Hopefully this driver will be the
access door to have an USB 3.0 driver for eCS-OS2 one day.
GL/2: As an OS/2 gamer (and owner of OS2World.com
Gaming Site ) I will like to see how this project evolves on 2011, and see if
some GL games get ported to eCS-OS2 like QuakeGL.
More QT4 applications ported and hopefully more Java applications will be reported to be running on eCS-OS2.
What I
wish for 2011
I always
wish peace to all eComStation and OS/2 users on earth. But what I wish for
OS/2-eCS platform on this 2011 is keep adding and
porting more open source
replacement for closed IBM components.
Maybe one
day the platform can be complete open source to be independent from any kind of
vendor.
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