Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2008 18:18:56 -0400 From: madodel Subject: [VOICENWS] SW: eComStation 2.0 RC5 available ++ From the VOICE OS/2-eCS News Service http://www.os2voice.org ++ From: Joachim Benjamins Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV are pleased to announce the immediate availability of eComStation 2.0 Release Candidate 5. This release is available to customers with an active Software Subscriptions Services subcription. It adds a few new features and contains a lot of updated drivers and fixes. More details can be found at http://www.ecomstation.com/subscription/ !!! WHEN TESTING BETA SOFTWARE, ALWAYS BE SURE TO HAVE A TRIED AND TESTED BACKUP OF YOUR SYSTEM !!! The most notable changes since RC4 are listed below. ** Preboot harddisk integrity check ** There are several situations which may cause installation problems with LVM in the install process. In this release, it is possible to disable the integrity check at page 2 (miscellaneous) of the eComStation installer preboot menu. The checks have been further enhanced and should detect more potential problems. ** Harddisk volume resizing ** This release candidate has a custom DFSee engine that enables reliable RESIZING of FAT32 and NTFS filesystems to allow shrinking an existing Windows installation to make room for eComStation on the same system. The DFSee engine included is at level 9.04. The GUI to control the resizing has been rewritten for improved performance and reliability. To invoke it, please select 'Paritition Resizing Tool' from the Installation Volume Manager which can be called during installation (choose 'New Volume' to start the Installation Volume Manager). ** Experimental HDA Audio support ** The support for for HDA audio on new mainboards is highly experimental and can be selected manually in the installer, but may cause your system to hang during boot. Before reporting a bug that your system hangs, please make certain that you do not have this UNIAUD build installed. ** Genmac 2.20a GA ** This package provides generic driver support for several network interface cards under OS/2 and eComStation. Moreover, Genmac is enabled to support WPA encryption with the Wireless LAN Monitor 3.x or better. Genmac and the Wireless LAN monitor will be installed when the appropriate hardware is detected by the installer. If it is not detected, you can manually select the driver in the network installation dialog. The XWLAN eCenter widget will be automatically added when eWPS is selected to be installed. It is now possible to select a GenMac driver regardless of the hardware being present in the system. ** ACPI 3.09 & APM 1.24 ** Support for ACPI is available in this release. The current version is 3.09. ACPI will be automatically enabled if appropriate hardware is detected. You can manually enable or disable ACPI support at page 4 (USB & ACPI) of the eComStation installer preboot menu. The ACPI configuration tool "ACPI Wizard" has been rewritten to behave more like a true wizard. It will not allow selection of options that seem not to be supported on your system. You can manually call the Wizard with many commandline parameters to configure the system to your wishes, please see FAQ.TXT for an explanation on the parameters. ** multicore CPU support ** This release supports the installation of eComStation on a MultiCore CPU computer. This includes Intel Core Duo , Core2 Duo and AMD 64 X2. To enable it, you can do so in the ACPI Wizard that is launched from the Post Installation tasks at the end of the installation. Alternatively you can start the ACPI Wizard at any time from the install/remove folder in the Local System folder on the desktop. ** Improved hardware support ** An effort was made to improve the amount of detected devices. This should mainly help for the detection of network cards. The number of supported and detected USB controllers has been increased from 4 to 8, enabling more systems to properly boot from the boot CD. This release includes a new version of the Dani IDE drivers, supporting many more SATA controllers and mixed controller environments. ** eComStation Virtual File System (Samba client support) ** Samba is a SMB/CIFS protocols file and print sharing server/client set originally made for UNIX world to cooperate with corresponding Windows and OS/2 servers or clients. eComStation has a native implementation of SMB/CIFS server/client set - IBM LAN Manager and IBM Peer. These products have not been recently updated and may have some compatibility issues with modern Windows SMB/CIFS implementations. ** EVFS GUI ** There now is a GUI that will make it easier to configure network access using the Samba protocol. There is one big limitation though, the tool cannot determine if a network connection was properly created - so it will not provide sensible feedback on that, instead it will always create a mountpoint which may be empty if the actual connection fails. The object for this tool is placed in the "Local Network" folder and is called "Virtual Filesystem for SMB" - the GUI has been updated quite heavily since eComStation 2.0 RC4, refer to 'WHATSNEW.TXT' for details. == REPORTING == eComStation 2.0 RC5 introduces the Feedback Wizard, which will run if you have activated ACPI support. Please use this a as a first method to provide feedback to the eComStation development team. We will use this info to quantify the successrate of ACPI support in eComStation. To tell us your findings, please create a report at: http://www.ecomstation.com/support/rc5report/ To report problems related to UniAud, please refer to http://svn.netlabs.org/uniaud When you create a new ticket, please do always attach logs. You can create all the logs we need, by downloading this package: ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/uniaud/UniInfo.zip Please attach the Uniinfo.zip it creates to your ticket. To report problems related to ACPI, please refer to http://svn.netlabs.org/acpi Before entering a ticket, please read http://ecomstation.ru/projects/acpitools/?action=logs Collect all the data that applies to your issue and include it with the ticket. You are also welcome to join the TestTeam if you want to discuss this beta and future developments. See http://ewiki.ecomstation.nl/TestTeam for more details. == SOFTWARE SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES == Please note that although some subscriptions have expired by now, you are not required to purchase a renewal to obtain the GA version of eComStation 2.0. If you want to try this RC5 release however, you are encouraged to renew your Software Subscription Services contract. More details can be found at http://www.ecomstation.com/subscription/ == ROADMAP == After this release candidate, one more test release is planned, called RC6, which will effectively be similar to the GA and should have removed all currently known remaining serious bugs. RC6 is currently scheduled for release at the end of August 2008. Shortly after RC6, the General Availability (GA) version should be released. We will make an effort to publish a more detailed roadmap so those interested can follow the progress. == ENJOY == We hope you will enjoy this new and improved version of eComStation 2.0 and ask you to provide feedback via the Feedback Wizard or the Bugtracking system. Best regards, Serenity Systems International -- For a choice in the future of personal computing, Join VOICE - http://www.os2voice.org [Moderator's note: All posts are sent without guarantee to the accuracy of the content. We try to verify details and URLs but this is an entirely volunteer run list, so 100% fact checking and the quality/useability of products announced here is impossible. If you respond to this post please remove the DESPAM from the poster's email addresses. 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