My client who's running 10 OS/2 workstations needs Open Office so he can read and print certain Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets that come in as email attachments.

Shouldn't be a problem, right? Serenity Systems and InnoTek have developed a version pf Open Office that runs native on OS/2 and eComStation (Serenity's version of OS/2). You need to pay for a support contract for this version but the client doesn't have a problem with that.

Sorry: no go. When you buy it you find it only works with that 32-bit TCP/IP stack which cannot be obtained legally and is almost as impossible to obtain illegially. Support says thay can't provide it because it's not covered by their license with IBM, it's just part of eComStation.

But, support says, "It's not really a problem because you can still download the MPTN upgrade that installs the 32-bit stack from IBM".

Yup, you can, but if you install it without the unavailable applications routing doesn't work any more. You can access the default gateway and anything beyond, but nothing on your own network.

Support pointed me to sites where I could get information and a link to where I could download the upgrade but those sites are all extinct now (the download site I don't know for how long, the information site went out last week).

So, as long as I'd already spent days messing around I pulled out my old eComStation 1.00 CDs. They include the IBM "Convenience Pack" so have the stack and applications.

Well, the eComStation install worked just as well as I'd remembered - absolute disaster. So I installed from CDROM #2, the IBM install. That went just fine, no complaints - except that neither TCP/IP nor IBM Peer networking worked at all. Peer wouldn't even accept a login.

OK - another approach. A slightly modified Windows version is supposed to work fine running on InnoTek's runtime package for Adobe Reader 5.1 (which does work just fine).

Well, it's slow, but it runs, and loads Word and Excel documents, and modifies them and saves them (but the default file extension feature doesn't work).

It won't work with any formats other than Microsoft's including any Open Office, Star Office or ODF formats - trying to load or save any of those just blows it out of the water leaving the InnoTek runtime running and even PSPM2 can't kill the process.

Selecting Tools/Options blows it out of the water too - exactly the problem that caused us to abandon Star Office 5.1 years ago when we had to start using fixpacks beyond 5 and TCP/IP.

Well, maybe we can get along with a crippled Open Office for a little while, while we plan a migration to Linux desktop. Only problem is they're addicted to that wonderful little word processor ClearLook which only runs on OS/2. Otherwise no problem (so long as Linux still runs DOS applications well - I'll have to test that, it might be another nightmare).

I think restricting availability of the 32-bit TCP/IP stack was a deliberate move on IBM's part to kill OS/2, and I'll never forgive them for that, no matter how nice they are to Linux.

And why do developers (Open Office, MySQL and others) require OS/2 with an upgrade that can't be obtained? That's just plain stupid.

Problem is, IBM released the TCP/IP upgrade for distribution then immediately declared that was a mistake, withdrew it, demanded it not be distributed, put a price tag on it and sold it for awhile, then it became unavailable at any price.

. . since stacks higher than 5.12.2 (fixpack 15 level) are easily downloadable from IBM - they just won't work right without the rest of the upgrade.

The package "IBM TCP/IP for Warp" to go along with the stack so it works right has to be 4.1 or 4.3. Fixpack 15 leaves it at 4.0.

. . but it looks for it and refuses to start if it isn't there.

. . OS/2 is very good at running DOS programs. Each workstation has 3 to 6 DOS windows open at any one time, they are used intensively, and extremely fast network response is expected.

And those DOS applications aren't going away because the owners feel they are a very major reason they have been able to thrash the competition and become multi-millionaires. They can answer in seconds inquiries their much larger competitors take up to half an hour on.

And because I wrote those programs and don't care to rewrite them for some other OS.

. . with RAID1, and an identical backup server that updates by NFS every evening just before the backup tape is run, and then the backup zip drive is written (he doesn't like the idea of losing data or having a server down).

There is an X client for OS/2 but it looks pretty complicated to install.