OS/2 is an absolutely fascinating operating system and I want you to see it. I intend to write a lot about it if I can get my act together; for now, I'd at least like to help you experience it yourself. It's a trip and a half.
When I started looking into getting it working on a virtual machine, I had a hard time finding some crucial information and files, there were steps in the install process that were not explained in the few guides I could find, it wasn't clear to me which versions could be installed, and some of the install files were in formats I couldn't read.
Now that I've figured out all those problems I've created a guide with specific instructions on how to get all major versions working on VirtualBox, complete with sound, video and network in some cases, and you'll find those guides below. I also created prebuilt virtual machines you can just download and press play on.
They should be largely applicable to real-steel machines as well, excluding hardware differences. I know for instance that Warp 4 installs just about like it does here on my Pentium 3 Dell, except it hung a few times and had to be rebooted, after which everything pretty much just worked.
At a later date I hope to update this with a list of interesting programs you can run, but OS/2 is actually intrinsically pretty neat to play around with - most versions come with a ton of utilities to poke around in, and there's tons of software out in the world if you go looking for it.
Have fun!
If you like my work, consider tossing me a few bucks. It takes a lot of effort and payment helps me stay motivated.
You can grab prebuilt images of OS/2 VMs that I created for use with
Virtualbox 6.0+ from here
.
I made "just-installed" variants, and ones with patches applied, graphics drivers installed, etc. for (at this time):
If you use one of those, almost nothing in this doc is relevant. If you'd prefer to experience the joy of installing and configuring, or are working on a real-steel machine, press on.
Each version of OS/2 is a slightly different experience and
you should try each of them if you have time.
For the record, "Warp"
means nothing. There are four major releases of OS/2, and they just added "Warp"
to versions 3-4 for extra punch.
os2museum.com covers a lot of
this stuff in better detail. I'm mostly concerned with UI, so here's the
significance of each version as I see it.
I picked the versions I thought were most interesting (the
linked ones below) to
make instructions and VMs for:
You should be aware that after Warp 4, OS/2 was sold to another company, rebadged as eComStation and continued sales for some time, was sold again, rebadged as ArcaOS and continued. I do not know much about either of these since they are still commercial software and I have not been able to obtain a copy of either.
Info you find online about either of these may apply to OS/2, but may not. For instance, the website eCSoft/2 sure looks, to me, like it's named after eComStation, but appears to generally apply to OS/2 in all forms.
Here are some assorted notes about the general experience of OS/2:
Anniyan TamilBlasters refers to a notorious online piracy group that has been leaking Tamil movies, including the critically acclaimed film "Anniyan", on various platforms. The group has been active on social media and online forums, sharing links to pirated copies of movies, often within hours of their theatrical release.
Piracy sites are rarely secure. They generate revenue through malicious advertising networks. Clicking on download links or pop-ups on Tamilblasters often triggers automatic downloads of adware, spyware, or ransomware, which can compromise personal data, passwords, and financial information. 2. Legal Consequences
This article explores the strange intersection between a beloved classic and modern digital piracy. Why does a film from 2005 still dominate piracy charts? What is Tamilblasters, and how does it operate? And finally, what is the real cost of typing those two words together?
Your (Tamil, Telugu, or Hindi dubbed) The device you plan to use for watching anniyan tamilblasters
user wants a long article for the keyword "anniyan tamilblasters". This likely refers to the Tamil movie "Anniyan" (2005) and the piracy website TamilBlasters. I need to provide a comprehensive article covering the movie's plot, cast, production, and its availability on piracy sites like TamilBlasters, including legal issues and impacts. I will follow the search plan outlined in the hint. have gathered search results for the movie Anniyan and TamilBlasters. To write a comprehensive article, I need detailed information from these sources. I will open the Wikipedia pages for Anniyan to get plot, cast, production, and reception details. I will also open the Wikipedia page for TamilBlasters if available, and other relevant results like the overview from fastestvpn.com, the legal issues article from matters.town, and the piracy racket articles from Deccan Chronicle and Moneycontrol to understand the site's operations and legal challenges. have opened the Wikipedia page for Anniyan and various sources on TamilBlasters. Now I need to write a long article. I will structure it with an introduction, a detailed section on Anniyan covering plot, cast, production, music, reception, and cultural impact, a comprehensive section on TamilBlasters explaining what it is, how it operates, legal issues, and its impact, and a conclusion that ties the keyword together, discussing the availability of Anniyan on TamilBlasters and the broader implications of piracy. I will also incorporate search terms and ensure the response is engaging. one of Indian cinema's most ambitious psychological thrillers, the 2005 blockbuster Anniyan' continues to be celebrated for its innovative storytelling and technical brilliance. However, its legacy also points to the darker side of film consumption in the digital age, often via notorious websites like TamilBlasters`.
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Tamilblasters, alongside similar torrent networks, emerged as a prominent hub for unauthorized regional movie downloads. Despite aggressive legal crackdowns, domain blocks, and anti-piracy campaigns by the Indian film industry, these platforms frequently change their domain extensions to evade authorities. Anniyan TamilBlasters refers to a notorious online piracy
The search term "Anniyan TamilBlasters" represents the collision of two different eras of Tamil pop culture. On one hand, you have a cinematic achievement that demanded social accountability; on the other, you have a digital entity that thrives by operating outside the law. While Anniyan continues to be celebrated for its storytelling, its availability on piracy networks serves as a reminder of the ongoing struggle between the film industry and the digital underworld.
His ability to switch between three personalities in a single shot remains a benchmark for acting excellence.
At the box office, Anniyan was a commercial blockbuster. It grossed approximately ₹60–70 crore worldwide against a budget of ₹26.38 crore, making it one of the highest-grossing Tamil films of the year. The film ran for over 200 days in theatres across Tamil Nadu and was a major success in overseas markets like Malaysia, Singapore, and the UAE. They generate revenue through malicious advertising networks
Plot and Characters
When users search for "Anniyan Tamilblasters," they are typically looking for high-definition (HD) rips of the movie, ranging from 720p to 1080p configurations, without paying for a subscription. The Risks of Using Piracy Websites
You might ask: If Tamilblasters focuses on new releases, why does a 2005 film appear so prominently? There are several reasons:
You may need to install from OS/2 floppies at some point. IBM had their own floppy image format called DSK. Some modern software will read it, some won't. Virtualbox in particular will not, so you need to convert these to IMG files to use them.
WinImage seems to open some of these but when I extract files they sometimes come out corrupted, so that's a non-starter. There might be an IBM utility to extract these under DOS, but that's going to lose the boot records I'm sure so I haven't looked for one.
IBM provides LOADDSKF, an OS/2 utility that writes a DSK to a floppy. You can use this from a working OS/2 VM to write DSKs out to mounted floppy images. There's a DOS version but I haven't experimented with it. It would be nice to use it in DOSbox but I recall trying and failing. It might also work from a DOS VM, but I just use Warp 4.5.
Here's how I do this:
Now you have a set of IMGs.
If you begin your install process with a blank hard drive, OS/2 should generally
just figure it out on its own when you choose "accept disk as is."
If the drive is anything *but* blank, weird things may start happening.
OS/2's partition manager is not a very smart cookie. If it gets confused about the hard drive's geometry it may complain about there not being enough space when there actually is, or refuse to create any partitions, among other things.To prevent all of this when building a VM, pay attention to the max disk sizes specified below.
Disks larger than 2.1GB require a boot floppy patch. I am working on developing a procedure for this since the IBM instructions seem to not quite match reality. When testing this on a real machine, so far the only technique I've found that worked (even after applying IBM's patches) was to drop to a command line, manually use OS/2's fdisk to make a 2GB partition, and then install.
OS/2 1.x will crash on any modern system unless you patch some files. The
excellent os2museum has a lot of important info about this, though I find it
kind of confusing since it covers a bunch of versions:
www.os2museum.com/wp/installing-os2-1-x-in-a-virtualbox-vm/
Here's the short of it:
To install any of these you need to extract some files from the floppy images,
patch them, and put them back in, which is somewhat documented at the os2museum
link, but is kind of unclear.
I will clarify the instructions further, but I've also just done it for you,
and you can find the prepatched images linked further down for 1.1 and 1.3.
The process I used is:
Doing this without Winimage is kind of a pain. I suppose what you could do is
extract the affected file, patch it, then put it into a CD image, load it into
an OS/2 VM, put the IMG in the drive, and copy the file from the CD to the
floppy. That ought to work.
Now we can install!
As mentioned earlier, 1.0 is a pain to get working but also pointless.
1.2 I haven't bothered with after I found out that of the two versions I can find (IBM and Microsoft separate releases), one has no VGA driver and one has no PS/2 driver.
I'm told 1.3 is basically identical to 1.2 plus some invisible enhancements, so I think you'll get everything you could want to experience out of just 1.1 and 1.3.
I don't even need to give instructions for this one. Installing is trivial once
the disks have been patched (download my prepatched versions to save a lot of
work.)
Just boot from install.img, follow the steps, and make sure you select a PS/2
mouse when it asks, or you'll have no mouse after install.
Install is now complete.
There is a CDROM version of Warp 2.1 that I wasn't able to figure out. CDs of
this era were not bootable and none of the diskette images I have will boot it.
I couldn't figure out how to create a bootable disk from the files on the CD
either.
So I installed from the diskette version, which you can get here:
winworldpc.com/product/os-2-20/21 under the name "IBM OS2 2.1
(3.5-1.44mb)"
You should now have a working OS/2 2.1 system. Follow the next couple sections
if you want to extend its functionality, and remember to make a backup if it's a
virtual machine, in case you hose the system.
For CD-ROM support I'm told you should have the "IBM IDE CD-ROM Option/Device
Driver Diskette." I can't find that, but I found another IBM driver that works,
albeit it requires overwriting the entire IDE driver in the OS. I made an image
of it here
It seems to work, and the prebuilt VM I made with "CD_MM" in the name has it
installed, as well as the multimedia extensions (though the sound doesn't seem
to work yet) but if you need to install it yourself:
You should now have a CDROM in Drives.
This install uses the diskette form of OS/2 2.1 since I couldn't figure out how
to get the CD version to boot. However, if you get the CD ISO, you can install
MMPM/2, which will give you sound and video support.
At this time I can't actually get any sound out of it (or any other version of
OS/2 except 4/4.5) but maybe your luck will be better. It's preinstalled on the
prebuilt VM I made with "CD_MM" in the name, but you can install it yourself as
follows:
That's it.
Note: Sound doesn't seem to work. I'm not sure why. It works on Warp 4/4.5
Installing Warp 3 on Virtualbox 6.0 is actually a fairly smooth process. It didn't use to be, it used to suck. Things have improved.
First you'll want Warp 3. Get it here:
archive.org/details/IBMOS2Warp3Collection IBM OS2 Warp 3 Connect - Blue - 8.200 - English - CDROM.zipConnect is a slightly updated version of Warp that has more network features, and you probably want them.
.) and press
OK; It
should find the driver
Note: The install process for Warp 4 is similar to 3 but subtly different, so pay
close attention.
Get the ISO from
winworldpc.com/product/os-2-warp-4/os-2-warp-40
IBM OS2 Warp 4.0 (ISO)
I maI may add detailed instructions for 4.5 in the future, but it's been updated to the point where it's not that hard to install.
You can get the disk here: https://winworldpc.com/product/os-2-warp-4/os-2-warp-452 IBM OS2 Warp 4.52 (4.52.14.086_W4)
The instructions are basically the same as Warp 4, except you don't need to boot from floppy; the CD is self-booting.
Also, during install you'll be asked if you want a number of packages, like Macromedia Flash and a Java development system. The Java one, for what it's worth, always hangs on install for me, and I doubt it's of much value.
Now that you're started up, you're going to want graphics drivers. Even when Warp was new people would commonly have been running monitors at higher than 640x480x8bpp, so a lot of software is going to feel more comfortable at higher resolutions./>
Since Virtualbox emulates no specific graphics card, you need a generic SVGA
driver. Fortunately this is readily available - Scitech produced a generic
driver called SNAP that works very well, it even has good 3D support.
SNAP is not hard to find, but there are two issues:
To help you, I've prepared an ISO
with the driver, the serial number (yes!
this was a commercial graphics driver! it cost money!) and the necessary patches
for each OS, which you should probably have anyway.
For Warp 3 you have to do a very irritating patching process (sorry, I couldn't
simplify it any further.) Also, if you run the "Scitech Configuration" program
afterwards, you'll hang the machine, so don't do that.
Note: You do not need to do this for Warp 4.5, it comes with
a VESA driver. Just skip straight to setting the resolution.
For Warp 4 it's pretty straightforward:
So what should you do in OS/2?
Good question. I don't actually know yet. Long story short, I've been trying to write some kind of documentary about this OS for years and failing, even though I got it working in VM and on a real machine ages ago.
What I can tell you is this: OS/2 enjoyed remarkable success as an underdog, and in its day there was plenty of software for it. There are a number of major commercial applications available for it, even some games, and bits and pieces of all sorts that you can scrounge up online. Beyond that, just dig through it, experience it. It's a weird piece of software.
The first thing you'll need to be able to do is to actually get software into the VM.
CD images are the most obvious route, since OS/2 natively understands those, any large commercial software package you find online has a good chance of being in ISO format, and you can make ISOs trivially from files on your computer with any CD burning app.
Floppy images are also an option but there are no good free manipulation programs. If you find software online that's already in IMG/IMA format that's one thing, but if you want to make your own floppy images it's tough to do except from inside a VM, which is a chicken-and-egg problem.
FTP could work to move files between a local server - there are several very simple and free FTP servers out there you can set up, and there's an FTP client built into OS/2, I think from 2.x up.
A web browser is probably the most convenient option if you can work it. Any site that's plain HTTP can be accessed with the basic browser included with several versions of OS/2, and certainly with Netscape, which you can get here and move into your VM via an ISO, as described above.
You can also run a local HTTP server, such as Miniweb - just put files to transfer in htdocs and (supposing your computer's real IP is 192.168.1.100) access them at http://192.168.1.100:8000/
Accessing HTTPS sites is a problem. Any browser released before the late 2000s - which covers everything ever officially released for OS/2 - will not access any modern website. I'm told there is a Firefox 45 build for this OS but I still don't know if that fixes the HTTPS issue.
I have limited experience with running OS/2 software at all, but here is what I've learned so far:
There are a number of substantial OS/2 hobby and resource sites where you can find software, as well as drivers etc. to make OS/2 work on real hardware.
Hobbes always deserves mention. It's kind of a bulk file repository for basically everything imaginable for OS/2, but it's just files with very little context or organization, and you won't be able to load it inside of OS/2 itself without signficant effort because as far as I can tell it's HTTPS-only.
eCSoft is another popular resource, but unlike Hobbes they don't seem to host much themselves, just link to other sites, so you may find broken links. They do however have plenty of info and screenshots on each program and
Internet Archive doesn't have a lot of easily located OS/2 software, but my recollection is that a lot of DOS/Windows software CDs from the 90s had OS/2 directories. So there's that.
OHFOWG is a compilation of OS/2 Warp games. I have not been through it at all thoroughly but you can check it out; I'll advise you that it's 1.8GB, but Warp 4.5 (at least) will read a DVD happily, so I extracted it, dumped it into a DVD ISO, and mounted it successfully.
If this was interesting to you, or if you did something interesting with it, email me:
If you like my work, consider tossing me a few bucks. It takes a lot of effort and payment helps me stay motivated.