Well something interesting and slightly different popped up, it’;s OS/2 2.00.. but in a different box, packaged for the UK market.
You have to hand it to IBM for making something amazing for 1992 so.. Bland and Generic. You really have to think there was some truth to that deal with Commodore licensing their bland grey style from the Amiga DOS 2.0 betas in exchange for a REXX.
One thing I did like about this package is the included quick reference card. I don’t recall this in the US version.
Sorry I don’t have access to a scanner here, so this is about all I can do.
Installing this was a bit of a bear, as the only thing I could boot this up in was VMware.
From a glance it pretty much looks the same as the US release, as an end user the only thing I saw different was that during the install it defaults to a UK keyboard, and Locale.
I guess that is to be expected? The xr06100 fixpack installed without any fighting, so that was nice.
Sadly no stickers in the box, so it’s very underwhelming in that regard.
Ill have to look into the bootloops and crashes under qemu/bochs later. I had planned on installing it on an old machine I literally pulled out of the garbage, but it doesn’t emulate a PS/2 mouse with USB, so I have kind of put that on hold.
Anyone interested can find it here.
In Australia, it included a VHS tape introducing you to the mouse and Workplace Shell from a presenter with a solidly English accent. I assumed the UK would get it too; it’s a shame you didn’t get to see that.
there was enough room in the box. Although I don’t have a VCR. I guess it’ll give me enough reason to try again later if I see one under £20. I’ve seen the hour long inside sales training video, and that was painful enough!
Im still not sure why it’s so difficult to run in emulation..
I tried to run OS/2 on VMWare back in the day, it failed.
Back then it was because OS/2 is basically unique in that it uses the x86 Ring-2 almost supervisor mode. Perhaps this is being revisited.
I might suggest that you try turning off KVM with qemu. I’m assuming that the software emulation is better than the multi-ring support in the kernel; IMO quite possible since KVM is designed for Linux on Linux and Window on Linux.
The option is “-no-kvm” when running on Intel (default if running on ARM etc)