I’ve had OS/2 running in a virtual machine for years; specifically, a Virtual PC one. But I’ve always known that OS/2 has idiosyncracies, such that it won’t run in VMWare (although it’s getting better in VirtualBox).

By change I stumbled on the excellent site OS/2 Museum. The whole site is fascinating, and if you’re interested in the history of OS/2, or Windows, for that matter, it is a great read.

However the post that caught my eye (obviously) was Installing OS/2 in a virtual machine, which finally explained why it’s such a pain to get OS/2 going in a virtualiser.

Still, nice work – makes me want to dig out the zip file I saved it in and relive Warp 3 again, just for a while…

I’ve reinstalled my PC. Down to four partitions – the Acer recovery partition (the BIOS insists on it, won’t boot otherwise), 32GB for / (ext4), 4GB of swap and the rest for /home. Yep, no Windows. Except I now have two Windows installs… (more…)

Those of you who’ve been reading here a while will know I used to be a huge fan of ClearType. Huge fan! I thought it made fonts really readable.

Then, about two years ago, I started to get headaches. Big, nasty headaches. So I tried fiddling with display options – upped the refresh rate (sort-of worked, for a while), changed the colour scheme… Eventually I found if I turned off ClearType, the headaches went away. Finally, I could get back to the day job.

And then I upgraded my works machine to Windows 7… (more…)

Bit of an oddity, this. I spotted on All About Microsoft (written by Mary Jo Foley, who’s been covering the company long enough to know more about them than most MS executives, I should imagine) that Exchange Server 2007 doesn’t work on Windows Server 2008 release 2. The question is: why doesn’t it? Not that they haven’t got form for this kind of nonsense, of course. (more…)

In 2007 I talked about 10 things I do and don’t like about Windows Vista. So here are 5 things Windows doesn’t have that it ought to blatantly copy for Windows 8… (more…)