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Author Topic: Very Remedial OS/2 Question  (Read 2397 times)

LorKorub

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« on: 25 January 2003, 11:22 »
I have about 15 total minutes of experience time on OS/2, and I have to help out a friend this weekend.  He is running OS 9.4, I think, and with my remedial UNIX knowledge, I am going to help him get some configuration down.

My problem:

How do you get to a command line in OS/2?  

I tried looking around in it a few times, but out of every menu, I could never find it. If I can figure that out, I think I'll be ok.  It does use a lot of the same syntax as Linux, right?  Does it have the same utilities like find, grep, ls,  more, etc?
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Doogee

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #1 on: 25 January 2003, 11:49 »
errm wasnt OS/2 more windows based with dos and C:\ et c? or was that just the earlier versions?
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LorKorub

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #2 on: 25 January 2003, 14:12 »
I have no idea, dude...

He has OS 9.4, and I just need to get to a command line.
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Kintaro

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #3 on: 25 January 2003, 16:22 »
OS/2 and Windows NT Kernel and GUI Layers are very simlar. Microsoft and IBM both worked on OS/2 and Microsoft had "Microsoft OS/2" before then.
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voidmain

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #4 on: 25 January 2003, 17:09 »
Uh, I don't believe Microsoft ever had an OS/2 on their own. It was created jointly for IBM from the start and then M$ started crying and left them cold.  I believe you may be referring to the start of the NT kernel. I have quite a bit of OS/2 experience and I must say I'm not very fond of the experience.
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Kintaro

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #5 on: 25 January 2003, 17:20 »
Well from a document i read, it said Microsoft and IBM where both working on it, and Microsoft put there apple ripoff gui in it.

NT has some small OS/2 things in it. But NT was written by some developers hired by Microsoft, the same developers that did VMS.
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pkd_lives

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #6 on: 26 January 2003, 02:00 »
First off OS/2 had little in common with Linux. Are you sure this is the OS you need to work with. Which version are you using. I am guessing V3 or Warp 4 (or the latest which I have no idea about). If you have not got the command lines installed you will have to install them, this essentially means a reinstall of the software (OS/2 was a nightmare for config updates, even if you were happy editing config.sys)

Okay bear with me, it's been a long time. You get you command line from one of the top menus. I forget which one, but it will say a:>prompt or something similar. It's in the same menu from where you can select the Windows 3.1 bastard version of M$ Windows.

Basically there are two that exist. One is the dos command line, very simmilar to dos, and the other is the CPM command line, vey similar to CPM. The are differentiated by A:] and a:>.

I have never ever executed anything even remotely similar to Linux/Unix in OS/2, it may be possible, but if it is then it's news to me.

And in addition:

The OS/2 project was a collaboration, which M$ pulled out of. The design work on OS/2 which was COLLABORATIVE formed the basis for the work that became the NT kernel.
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Master of Reality

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #7 on: 26 January 2003, 02:42 »
...moving to other OSes
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mobrien_12

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #8 on: 28 January 2003, 11:59 »
Quote from: pkd_lives
Basically there are two that exist. One is the dos command line, very simmilar to dos, and the other is the CPM command line, vey similar to CPM. The are differentiated by A:] and a:>.

I have never ever executed anything even remotely similar to Linux/Unix in OS/2, it may be possible, but if it is then it's news to me.

Fascinating.  They called the A:] the OS/2 prompt.  and the A:> the DOS prompt.  I didn't know the OS/2 prompt was CP/M based.
 
The one similar thing between unix/linux and OS/2 was that OS/2 Warp 4 could run XFree86.  This let OS/2 run alot of Xwindows programs (properly recompiled, of course).
« Last Edit: 7 February 2008, 14:14 by Orethrius »
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pkd_lives

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #9 on: 28 January 2003, 18:55 »
Quote from: mobrien_12
The one similar thing between unix/linux and OS/2 was that OS/2 Warp 4 could run XFree86.  This let OS/2 run alot of Xwindows programs (properly recompiled, of course).

I never thought of that before. Of course it runs XF86, I just never put 2 and 2 together. That would be because I used it before Linux, and there was a break between times significant enough to allow me to forget everything about OS/2, which I used in user style and was never trained in.
« Last Edit: 7 February 2008, 14:15 by Orethrius »
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voidmain

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #10 on: 28 January 2003, 20:14 »
OS2 is *much* closer to DOS/Windows than it is to any form of UNIX. There is *no* resemblance to UNIX/Linux in OS/2. XFree was ported to OS/2 just like it has been ported to run on everything else (even Windows). IBM had nothing to do with porting XFree to OS/2. OS/2 sucks if you ask me. I worked *in-depth* with it for about 5 years running a critical distributed processing system of around 50 OS/2 Warp 3 (and Warp 4 towards the end) workstations. Even Windows is better than OS/2 at this point, however, back in the day OS/2 was better than any DOS/Windows that was available at the time.

[ January 28, 2003: Message edited by: void main ]
« Last Edit: 7 February 2008, 14:16 by Orethrius »
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pkd_lives

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #11 on: 28 January 2003, 21:15 »
I fully agree. There is nothing I can think of that makes OS/2 a better option than what is/was out there in the Unix field.

I remember the Y2K update, there were 30 floppy disks that had to be run in one after the other (this was the update for warp 4). The joke was it still failed Y2K, after everything changed the dates read wrong in the file manager on the files created after Y2K. Still hasn't been fixed as far as I know. God only knows what else was not fixed.

I mean I hated it but you (void main) sound really angry about it.
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voidmain

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #12 on: 28 January 2003, 21:41 »
Well I had to support it and write programs for it. The memory model is the most unstable and leak prone I have ever seen. And instead of blue screens you just get STOP E and STOP D errors. :)    Not very good when it's the most critical system a large and well known company uses for it's revenue system. :)   I actually converted the entire department from OS/2 and Netware to NT4, and ported all the processing scripts from REXX to Perl. That's how bad it was. I did upgrade the database server from an old Sun to a new fairly large Sun server though. I do have my limits.

[ January 28, 2003: Message edited by: void main ]
« Last Edit: 7 February 2008, 14:17 by Orethrius »
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LorKorub

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #13 on: 30 January 2003, 15:39 »
It is Mac OS 9.4.  I guess I was wrong in stating that Mac OS is OS/2.  I have no idea about operating systems that are not UNIX, and (sadly) $hitblows.  

If Mac OS is UNIX-derived (which a lot of people were tooting a horn about around here), I just need to know how to get to a command line.
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Calum

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Very Remedial OS/2 Question
« Reply #14 on: 30 January 2003, 15:43 »
MacOS versions *below* 10 (for instance your 9.x one falls into this category) are NOT based in any way on UNIX. sorry to disappoint.
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