Odin's first anniversary
Just about one year ago, the Odin project was born. The roots of Odin go back to Win32OS/2 which itself started in 1997 as a closed source effort and after some great initial progress (remember when Quake II was running on OS/2 for the first time?) disappeared.
 It was Adrian Gschwend from Netlabs who started an initiative in April 1999 to revive Win32OS/2 by seeking for a new development team. The former team members decided that they would donate their code to the Open Source community after some cleanup to remove copyrighted code. The response was overwhelming. Newsgroups have been created and within days, there have been almost 100 subscribers, about 20 of them volunteering for development work.
Then, in May 1999, the cleaned up source code has been released to the CVS (a very popular source code control system) server at Netlabs so that everyone could easily download the latest source tree. Unfortunately, most of the volunteers have never submitted anything to the project. Fortunately, the original initiator of Win32OS/2 and lead developer, Sander van Leeuwen, joined the new team and still is the lead developer and designer.
Technically, Win32OS/2 had moved itself into a dead end. Although it was getting better and better, it was stuck in many ways. It completely relied on the Open32 library which only IBM could fix or enhance and it still requires a lot of fixing and enhancements to be usable for what Win32OS/2 and now Odin are going for. Also, Win32OS/2 used the famous pe2lx tool to convert Windows executables and DLLs to the OS/2 format. This means you have to first convert every single file an application requires before starting it. Not a really convenient way and also a method with lots of technical limitations due to Windows and OS/2 differences.
So it was clear that the Odin members first had to rearchitect large pieces of Win32OS/2 before concentrating on new features and enhancements. It took about 5 months to actually see big improvements but then we had a totally new and chic ring 3 Windows loader (called pe.exe) without the requirement to convert anything and support for every aspect of Windows executables as well as a technology called page fault loading that makes loading Windows apps so much faster than OS/2 apps. On the other side, large parts of the USER32.DLL library, that is responsible for all the window management, have been rewritten without using Open32. At one point, all the applications running on Odin suddenly lost their OS/2 look and feel and started to look like Windows 98. We got lots of emails from embarrassed OS/2 users but we had to put all those concerns down as there were technical reasons for doing this (to summarize, many Windows apps just rely on their Windows look and feel and would not work or look odd with OS/2 style).
Starting with the new Open Source effort, we also teamed up with our sister project on Linux, WINE. They have been working on Windows support since 1993, starting with Windows 3.1. During the years, they have developed lots of code and parts of that has been very useful for us. So some of our modules started as direct ports from WINE. Speaking of lots of code, Odin has grown enormously. When it was first released to the public, the sources had about 5MB. As of today, all Odin sources have more than 37MB which is an incredible growth! And it is still getting more complete every day.
Not every OS/2 user wants to use CVS to download sources and setup a compiler to get new Odin builds so we decided to setup a build server in Oslo, Norway. If everything goes well (i.e. noone checks in broken code), you can find daily builds at ftp.os2.org/odin/daily. None of them are tested but usually they improve from day to day. A daily build comes in a release and debug version with the latter being designed for problem determination and development. The release builds typically is about 3MB so that is an almost complete Windows implementation is just 3MB!
The goal of the Odin project clearly is to achieve what IBM did with WinOS/2 - run virtually any Windows application on OS/2. We're still not there but we have solved all those fundamental show stoppers (these kind of things that all the technical people meant when saying "Wow, nice project but it will never really work because ..."). However, there is still a lot of work to do in order to complete all those thousands of Windows functions and fix the hundreds of bugs in our code. We are still a very small team (less than a dozen active developers). We need help. Now. Everyone can help with Odin and any company can. You corporate OS/2 users, haven't you always complained about IBM not supporting Win32? Don't you always say that Citrix is expensive and cumbersome? Now you have the chance to get your Windows 32bit applications working on OS/2 with no performance or functional impact by just relying on Odin! If you have applications you need to run, just show us the application and we will tell you how much work it will be. Then you can put your developers or ask us for help to get the application work and supported.
With Odin, OS/2 has the chance to remain the "integration platform" that IBM once proclaimed!
Odin homepage: http://www.netlabs.org/odin
Odin users newgroup: http://www.egroups.com/group/odinusers
Odin developers newsgroup: http://www.egroups.com/group/win32os2-wai
Project Management Contact: odin@netlabs.org
Achim Hasenmueller, 2000-06-04
Comments: 4
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