Date: Fri, 06 May 2011 22:56:44 +0200 From: VOICE News Service Subject: [VOICENWS] Event: Some highlights from Warpstock Europe Day 1 ++ From the VOICE OS/2-eCS News Service http://www.os2voice.org ++ From: madodelDESPAM at DESPAMptdprolog.net Just a short report from Haarlem in the Netherlands where Warpstock 2011 started today. A lot of folks I haven't seen in a long time as well as a few I have never met. The main news is that eComStation 2.1 will be released here on Saturday, with an ISO available for download shortly there after. This will be both an English and a German version. Dutch and Italian are still being translated. This release will have all the updates since 2.0, and specifically the following new features: Airboot to replace the IBM Boot Manager (though if BM is installed it can be used). This will save a primary partition. New Graphical disk checker for install. A brand new AHCI driver based on Daniella's driver. Firefox 4.0 will now be included. The new File Open Container will be available for install but not default. The new MultiMac network driver will be available for supported network devices. A new CPU throttling utility that I'm told will provide significantly better battery use times for laptops. ACPI will be at the 3.18 level. eComStation 3.0 was discussed. This will include an updated version of the Panorama video driver. an update to the USB stack, updated ACPI driver, the eCUPs printer driver, more new MultiMac network driver support (including Intel wireless chipsets), Flash 10 and Java plugins for Firefox (I also heard today that there is a fixed version of Odin32 being tested that stops the SMP system hangs). Compatibility with the newer EFI boot standard was discussed as well. IPv6 is being investigated, butit's felt that backward compatibility with IPv4 will remain widespread for some time to come. To me probably the biggest news was that Mensys has recently renewed their OEM contract with IBM through 2014 (this was the 3rd contract renewal), and they seemed reasonably assure that further renewals will continue. This is because 2010 saw a 3 fold over 2009 (which had been the best year for sales to date) increase of new eCS licenses being sold and this trend is continuing into 2011. More and more companies are coming to Mensys for eCS to run on replacement hardware for mission critical OS/2 installs. Several major companies were mentioned including the US Postal Service and Iridium Phone Communicatipons. There is also some new expanded commercial use which is also helping to fund new eComStation development projects. I think the entire event is much more upbeat this year then it has been in years. More news over the next 2 days. I am also looking forward to the next Warpstock event, this October in Raleigh/Durham North Carolina, in North America. Warpstock Europe: http://www.warpstock.eu Warpstock: http://www.warpstock.org Mark -- 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. Please do not send requests for information about a specific post to the moderator unless it is an update or I sent it. To submit news to this list please use the submission form at http://www.os2voice.org/SubmitNews.html or send an email to "submit at os2voice.org" To unsubscribe yourself from this list, send the following message to majormajor at os2voice.org unsubscribe news end ]