Pleasant Surprises for OS/2 Users

I decided to build a PC to run OS/2 Warp Server for e-Business. These are the things I found to be easier than I thought.

I chose ASUS-99 mainboard which included an onboard AGP graphics chip. There were OS/2 drivers on the CD that came with the mother board. OS/2 worked with the provided drivers, even at 1280 x 1024 x 24. The graphics performance is adequate, considering this a server. This mainboard, and the Intel Celeron 400 CPU are very low cost, $142.

I bought the Danpex 10/100 PCI ethernet card for $18, and OS/2 drivers were on the floppy disk that came with the card. I haven't tried more than one of these, but the documentation claims it will work. Once again, the cheapest available hardware has OS/2 support.

I bought a Yamaha 4416E IDE CD-RW for $199 and RSJ software for $178 digital delivery from Indelible Blue. I took the list of RSJ supported CD-RW drives to the store with me. There were a lot of CD-RW drives at Fry's that were supported. This time OS/2 cost is much higher, due to the cost of RSJ software. Still, RSJ allows the choice of some of the cheapest available hardware.

I bought a CyberPower Power99 battery backup for $70. I plugged the serial cable into the server, and the OS/2 software works -- shutting down the service, warning the workstations on the network and shutting down only after the battery has run down.

I bought a PCI sound card from Indelible Blue for $27, and it worked. The OS/2 drivers had to be downloaded, but the link to the drivers was right on the Indelible Blue web site.

IBM DevCon comes with OS/2 Warp Server for e-Business, OS/2 Warp 4, and a TCP/IP 4.2.1 upgrade for the client which includes nfs. I tried it using the WSeB for the server and my Warp 4 machine as the client, and it works pretty well.