This is a new 10zig thin client computer with eComStation 2.2 installed and configured. Sound, USB and wired network work. The display hardware is supported by Panorama graphics. Lots of useful OS/2 software is installed.
The Suntan Special Advantage
Fubopeep comes with Suntan Special. I use Suntan Special to install the software on all Blonde Guy computers. Suntan Special software can be used to install all updates to the system and its applications and to install additional applications. When newer versions of software are released, Suntan Special can keep your Blonde Guy computer up to date.
Capabilities
The USB 2.0 ports support keyboards, mice, scanners, thumb drives, cameras, MP3 players, external hard drives, floppies and CD Writers.
The display hardware provides fast graphics on the eComStation platform. The graphics driver is Panorama that works at least up to the 1920 x 1200 resolution of my monitor.
Connectors for sound and USB are provided on both the front and the rear of the computer for convenience.
Defects
There are two USB 3.0 ports on the rear that are not supported under eComStation. The four USB 2.0 ports function normally.
The recovery DVD is text mode only. WPS is not available, but LVM and the rest of the scripts work.
Although the chip is dual core, eCS works only with one CPU.
the Install Printer and Manage Printer programs are in the Dutch language instead of English.
Not Included
None of the following items are included: monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, ethernet cable, printer cable, USB cable.
Software
- Blonde Guy computers run the eComStation 2.2 beta 2 release. The license will be for eCS 2.1 with Software Subscription for six months. If eCS 2.2 is released within six months of purchase, it is recommended to upgrade the computers to the GA release.
- Suntan Special is included with each computer. All applications that are pre-installed by Blonde Guy can be kept up to date using Suntan Special.
- The OpenOffice.org office suite is installed. OpenOffice has good compatibility with Microsoft Office documents.
- The ePDF software has been installed to allow the creation of PDF output from any OS/2 application. Speaking of PDF, Acrobat Reader 5, Lucide, GSView and GhostScript are installed.
- A USB DVD-Writer (not included) may be attached, and RSJ CD-Writer can be used to write CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM media. The RSJ license may be purchased through Blonde Guy.
- Computer maintenance programs include eCS-MT, Suntan Special, a trial version of DFSee, Sysbench to measure the speed of the computer, SmartMon to asses hard drive condition, PCI to scan the system hardware and SystemInfo to view the entire computer configuration.
- The Embellish graphics editor and a demo of the PMView graphics viewer are installed.
- The FAT32 file system is installed.
- Firefox, and Seamonkey web browsers and Blue Griffon, a powerful web page editor, is installed. Each browser has the Flash plugin configured. The Qupzilla web browser, based on Qt and the Apple Web Kit is also installed.
- Thunderbird, PMMail and Polarbar Mailer are installed to provide a choice of e-mail client program.
- Java 1.1, Java 1.4.2 and Java 6.00 are all installed to give a choice of Java platform. The Java 1.4.2 plugin is used in an older browser installed for that purpose. Suntan Special allows you to change the java support in that browser.
- VLC media player is installed to play back most video file types and commercial DVDs.
- PM123 and Z! music players are provided to support music needs. The CD Player is correctly configured to play music CDs. Generic MP3 players that connect via USB are supported.
- Mr. Message is provided to allow participation with AOL Messenger users.
- Night Vision provides a view of the night time sky and any location and time.
- Software developers will appreciate SmartCVS and SmartSVN, which allow browsing of open source project source code at Netlabs and SourceForge. The Visual SlickEdit and med programmer's editors are provided. The gcc compiler, perl, WDSibyl and the OS/2 toolkit are installed.
- Cameraderie and Fotoget provide support for digital cameras.
- I use rsync, which is a mirroring program, to keep several copies of my data drive. The rsync program copies only files that have changed, added or removed when it updates a copy of the data drive.
Graphics by Colorful Language
Copyright 2014 by Blonde Guy