A 21st-Century Version Of OS/2 Warp May Be Released Soon (arcanoae.com) 232
dryriver writes: A company named Arca Noae is working on a new release of the X86 OS/2 operating system code named "Blue Lion" and likely called ArcaOS 5 in its final release. Blue Lion wants to be a modern 21st Century OS/2 Warp, with support for the latest hardware and networking standards, a modern accelerated graphics driver, support for new cryptographic security standards, full backward compatibility with legacy OS/2, DOS and Windows 3.1 applications, suitability for use in mission-critical applications, and also, it appears, the ability to run "ported Linux applications". Blue Lion, which appears to be in closed beta with March 31st 2017 cited as the target release date, will come with up to date Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client, Apache OpenOffice, other productivity tools, a new package manager, and software update and support subscription to ensure system stability. It is unclear from the information provided whether Blue Lion will be able to run modern Windows applications.
Team OS/2 Forever! (Score:2)
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Uh, why? (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been operating systems which have come and gone which have reasons to exist today, like BeOS. But OS/2 is not among them. Windows 3.1 support? That's not a relevant feature. Please tell me that their actual planned release date is April 1.
Re:Uh, why? (Score:4)
Windows 3.1 support? That's not a relevant feature.
Not for most circumstances, no. On the other hand, there may be old legacy systems that ran on Windows 3.1 that people will want to be able to run. I don't know what the current state of compatibility is for Windows 10, but having a modern/updated OS that can run Windows 3.1 apps may be useful to someone.
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Maybe if they bundled power supply capacitors in with the software.
But really? 3.1? Why not CP/M? At least it was command line.
PIP A: PUN: *.*
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You could run CPM/86 in an OS/2 VDM if you desired. I used to run Minix in a VDM.
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100% with dosbox. Dosbox runs windows 3.1, can do network encapsulation/passthrough, and runs on modern windows.
It is also FOSS, and if you absolutely need a way to keep that legacy shit running, you can adapt dosbox to suit your business use case. Considering the low system requirements, you can virtualize the shit out of it.
Re:Uh, why? (Score:4, Funny)
and runs on modern windows.
I don't think anyone would run something as sensitive as an ATM on Windows.
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It is FOSS, and has been ported to more architectures than you can shake a stick at, including many posix based systems.
If you have a popular platform, it likely runs there.
Re: Uh, why? (Score:2)
Yes, some ATMs do run Windows. A very bad example: Around 2005 I saw an ATM (Rabobank) with an error revealing that it ran Windows 98.
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Kind of makes you want to start burying your money in your back yard.
Re:Uh, why? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think anyone would run something as sensitive as an ATM on Windows.
They can, and do. In the past I've seen crashed ATMs running NT4, XP, XP Embedded, 2k and... OS/2.
Banks are a bit like the military when it comes to IT: they stick with what works long after others have replaced it with something new.
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of course they wouldn't... [google.ca]
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I don't think anyone would run something as sensitive as an ATM on Windows.
No true Scotsman would run Windows on an ATM!
(It's typically XP Embedded, BTW).
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and runs on modern windows.
I don't think anyone would run something as sensitive as an ATM on Windows.
Diebold do. Some Windows XP based ones are still in the wild. I'm seen the blue screens.
This is from 2014 but you can expect it to still apply in some places:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/w... [zdnet.com]
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I don't think anyone would run something as sensitive as an ATM on Windows.
You would be surprised. I saw a ATM at one of those home town ATM with the blue screen of death on it. Saw a gas pump a few weeks ago with one too.
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We love bashing Windows but banks LOVE that platform.
Windows NT has Digital VMS style security, advanced auditing, acl, advanced permissions, lock down support, and a rich win32 API that maybe cryptic but has rich functionality to customize the shit out of. Every c++ programmer knows it overseas where they can save money on development platforms.
These customized versions of XP go on lockdown as soon as you plug in a keyboard. They use x25 networking with remote shut off if they stop receiving tokens on the
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Dosbox is slow and doesn't allow access to hardware, good for games but not much else. DOS (and Winos2) on OS/2 runs in ring 2 and will allow most device drivers to run like on bare metal. You can also run each Win3.1 program in its own process, side by side on the desktop and communicate between them much like if they were running in the same process.
There are problems with some graphic cards on modern hardware as the video driver depends on the VESA bios, which seems to be going away.
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It is also slow, not very compatible, doesn't allow hardware access. That's assuming there have been no complete rewrite since I last looked at it (not likely). The development method seemed to be: try to run game, if it doesn't run at all - bad, if it does run but buggy - good enough unless a developer is interested in that specific game in which case some hacks are done.
There are better ways to run old software.
Soldier of Fortune, Baby! (Score:2)
None of the post Win95 versions ran the OG version worth a damn, and that was the single bloodiest video game in existence. :)
It ran fine under OS/2 V2.2; I have hope for this.
I still have a lot of code I wrote under those systems I'd like to run.
The early scene in the Expendables, where the bad guy gets blown off at the knees was a direct scene steal from this game...
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32-bit Win10 still allow NTVDM to be enabled, though you have to enable the "legacy console" to run DOS apps.
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Compared to the OS/2 VDM, NTVDM is pretty limited. No hardware access, I don't think you can even run any DOS besides the included DOS 5 whereas on OS/2 you can run most any DOS though there are limits like no long file name support due to the OS catching disk access and using the OS/2 disk system, which was the reason back in the day that DOS and Win3.1 was faster on OS/2 then native, better disk access including the file system, currently JFS.
Re:Uh, why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I repair ancient Mazak CNC controls and other industrial controls. All the software is DOS/Win3.1 era stuff. No one wants to bite the bullet for new CNC systems because they can't find the mechanical quality to compare at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, there's probably not a single piece of electronics for these systems left in the world that hasn't already been through one repair cycle. Most of the PCB's I see have been patched, doctored, and abused to near death, but they keep coming. Mazak has quit all support for these dinosaurs, but they're still sitting on most of the schematics, source code, etc.
My boss would love to see a modern OS with good support for his ancient software packages that all the original vendors have walked away from supporting, and won't release anything for others to work with.
If Trump wants to impress me, he'll get around to doing something to clean up the copyright/patent fiasco that is killing so many smaller players like us.
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Have you considered replacing the electronics with something that can run the open-source CNC SW found in the hobby market? You'd need bespoke motor driver HW/SW and custom sensors, but it might make future support easier.
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Yeah, I don't know anything about your particular situation, but it was the kind of thing I was thinking of when I wrote my post. People have a tendency to think, "Why would you bother to support old [DOS | Windows 3.1 | Windows 95 | whatever] apps? Nobody uses that anymore." And it's true that it's very rare to see a normal person still using Windows 3.1 as their desktop OS. However, there are still various systems that businesses have in place, that may have been build decades ago with an old OS, stil
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You won't find any Windows 10 compatability. OS/2 Warp was a 16-bit OS so won't even run Win32 applications from Windows 95.
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I don't remember if windows 3.1 apps are 8bit or 16 bit. I believe they are 16 bit, in that case I think the 32 bit version of windows 10 might be able to run them. I know the 64 bit versions of any windows won't run 16 bit anything.
That is what my heart tells me. My head says fat chance. Lets go with the latter.
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>I don't know what the current state of compatibility is for Windows 10
32 bit Windows 10 still runs Windows 3.1 programs. I'm not sure how good the compatibility is, but it works. 64 bit can't run them at all because VM86 mode isn't available from in 64 bit mode on the CPU.
Linux also runs Windows 3.1 programs pretty well, with Wine.
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Not entirely true. If you are running 64-bit Windows then they will not run at all (Since Vista Win16 has been dropped from 64-bit Windows).
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said the BeOS fanboi. OS/2 was a very stable and reliable operating system, hence it still gets updated to make it run on newer hardware.
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All the banks in Germany used OS/2 because it was so reliable. And it was rock-stable on my PC, both 3.0 and 4.0.
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Or were simply running it under different constraints than you were.
There is no version of OS/2 (except perhaps those which are too old) which should not run properly on a 486SLC2-66 with 8MB of RAM.
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Warp v4+ requires 16 MBs of ram and a 486DX with many current programs requiring an i686.
I ran Warp v3 on a 386 with 4MBs of ram that eventually became a 486slc with 8 MBs. It ran fine once you stripped it down (no WPS).
Today, there are memory problems. Run Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice and ram will get fragmented forcing a reboot every few days. Run older programs and lots of people report long up times.
49 days after OS/2 2.0 was released, the bug reports came flowing in, OS/2 couldn't handle the up
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Well, who was the BIOS manufacturer and is it a 486-66 that can be fitted nasally? Even the constraint 8MB 486-66 involves a wide variety of 3rd party elements in the hardware/software stack.
It was an IBM PS/Valuepoint. IBM doesn't get to deliver a PC that OS/2 won't run on while they are shipping OS/2.
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What was the software running on it? Or did it crash without any non-IBM supplied hardware or software?
I'm trying to think of any Windows software I actually bothered to run. It was on a Novell network, I was sitting at it. I was in IT and we didn't have any fruity groupware or anything (this was before that crap was popular) so I really just ran ordinary applications, and tried to stick with the utilities and accessories that came with the OS. We didn't have budget for a bunch of OS/2 apps, though.
Did Mossad break into your home and steal your shoes, as well?
No. They didn't even steal my Casio terrist watch.
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No, OS/2 had all kinds of warts. Strange issues with memory management, odd quirks that would cause the system to randomly reboot from a benign cause, horrible hardware support, you name it.
Now, something with better interoperability than WINE on linux (because it can use actual windows drivers), that has all the other benefits of linux (such as 0$ pricetag except for support agreements, stable and reliable kernel and memory management, proper security model, et al) that runs equally as well, or better tha
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I can't say I ever saw a random reboot during the years I ran OS/2. There were a few BSODs, but heck, those can still happen even now on Windows. Don't recall any memory issues either. The worst part was WPS lockups because it had a single message queue, and an errant application could bring it to a screaming halt. It didn't happen that often, but was the worst thing I experienced in OS/2
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Maybe hardware specific?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
On something current (apart from maybe a few ARM chips) memory management is trivial so those memory quirks may go away.
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Ahh, thanks for the fond memories. I also ran a DOS-based BBS under OS/2 while developing DOS-based games on the same machine. OS/2 was at the time the best platform for DOS program (it wasn't all apps back then) development since it didn't require a reboot whenever the program crashed.
Also - to make it more interesting - there were different versions of the Mach64 hardware. Some of it didn't work well will the drivers (DAMHIK).
Today I think OS/2 has played out its role with all the major OS:es being robust
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If you think Vista was bad you're not old enough to remember NT 4.0.
I remember the sound system crashing on my Vista laptop, sending a horrible, unstoppable screeching through the speakers. Basically it was an audio snow crash. Yet everything else worked normally; I was able to save my work and shut the system down. And I remember thinking, "that was horrible, but so much less horrible than it could have been."
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I retired the last NT4 thing in the place a year after Vista came out, and no, Vista was indeed a truly craptacular piece of shit compared with NT4. It got patched a lot so people forget how shitty Vista was when it first came out. You needed to run stuff from the command line just to get it onto an MS Windows network, plus there were many diver issues.
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rofl, even for simple home networking between 98 and XP I seemed to need the command line. Or at least I did before finding out that you can hit start / run.. and enter something like \\192.168.0.2\games. (not \\big-PC\games)
Four things were unavoidable : death, taxes, "Windows failed to browse the network" and "Windows Media Player failed to download the codec"
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The biggest issue was the WPS queue getting filled and the GUI locking up. Other processes happily chugged along, mind you. I ran a BBS under OS/2 and frequently played games.
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It is if you want to play Sid Meier's Civilization II
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Of course, the OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, but I know it is too late now.
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The problem with OS/2 wasn't technical. It was because the internal politics at IBM were so caustic that different departments had a vested interest in not letting other departments succeed, and OS/2 was seen as a threat (somehow) to the mainframe business.
OS/2 was a fantastic OS. It completely blew Windows away by pretty much every technical measure. But nobody cared cause it didn't get market share, and that was because people at IBM didn't *want* it to get marketshare.
But fast forward to today, and you
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It is a relevant feature, for some mission critical applications. Not for general desktop use, no. Widen the world view.
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The Undead. (03.01.99)
https://www.wired.com/1999/03/... [wired.com]
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There have been operating systems which have come and gone which have reasons to exist today, like BeOS. But OS/2 is not among them. Windows 3.1 support? That's not a relevant feature. Please tell me that their actual planned release date is April 1.
You mean just like "The Mainframe Is Doomed"? IBM keeps producing new upgrades of their zSeries HW and the different OSes that run on it, and as a funny aside, inside the big box that houses it, you'll find one or more laptops running OS/2. They may have given up on marketing it, but it is still very much alive, and there are still people who remember it fondly; I can understan why - I used to program for Presentation Manager, the graphics interface of OS/2. The experience of being forced back on Windows wa
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Well, they certainly do still make (and market!) zSeries machines, but the laptops running OS/2 were replaced by laptops running Linux in 2005. In recent generations it is now 1U servers running Linux.
Opening for OS/2 (Score:2)
Well, a couple of good reasons for OS/2 to exist, such as REXX and SOM. Not Windows 3.1 support.
One reason I can think of is for people who want out of Windows, particularly Windows 10, but can't afford a Mac, and find Linux too challenging. OS/2 Warp could be a good alternative. Remember, back in the day, when OS/2 was around, one of the major beefs against it was that it was rather power hungry: that when people were used to 4MB of RAM in their computers, and thought that 8MB was too rich. Today, as
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Let me put it this way: if I had to use systemd/Linux or OS/2, I'd choose OS/2. Being able to boot properly is an important trait for any OS. OS/2 has this ability. Systemd/Linux often does not.
As much as I hate systemd, it really has no place in this conversation. You can get Linux without systemd, so you're presenting a false dichotomy in any case.
I've also had OS/2 corrupt itself on an unclean shutdown and fail to boot. I haven't had this with Linux since the early days of xfs.
Workplace Shell & virtualisation engine (Score:2)
Re:Workplace Shell & virtualisation engine (Score:4, Interesting)
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ArcaOS 5 (Score:2)
For the retro-head for whom running Windows 95 just isn't retro enough.
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I was working on a embedded controller for solar light simulator which outputs a hell of a lot of light with plasma arc lamps 2 years ago. The control system was written in DOS. As in MS DOS. It was really nostalgic to remember all the keyboard shortcuts to boot into command.com to edit something.init to... you get the message
Problem is that DOS does not have a network stack and trumpet sockets do work, but can only hold one connection on a port. It can also not time out as dos does not have background task
Competition is good (Score:5, Interesting)
If it can compete against the steaming pile that is Windows 10 and the eye candy which is Macs, this is a good thing. Being able to buy a license for a machine and use it without being forced to "upgrade" or have updates automatically installed whether you want them or not would be a great leap forward.
Being able to run software which is a few years old but does what you want would also be a big plus.
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But will it run on my cell phone?
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The problem with recent Mac OS releases is their seemingly anti-user direction. Style - not over function, but - against function. Thinner fonts that look like crap on regular, non-HiDPI monitors? Check. Pale pastel colours? Check. Removing any hint about widgets outlines? Check. Hiding or even removing functions because most people don't use them, even if they were available before? Check.
Things started to fall apart when "Mr. Industrial Designer" became in charge of GUI design. Hint: industrial design doe
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Sounds like Apple is following in Microsoft's footsteps. With each iteration of Windows they have made it more difficult for users to easily find and make changes. Widgets are buried in multiple, cascading menus and even then what used to be done in one place might now be done somewhere else.
Remember how you used to be able to see everything that was installed on your system, including updates, in one place? Nope, not any more. Now you have to go to a second screen for that and even then it might not sho
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Thinner fonts that look like crap on regular, non-HiDPI monitors?
I know we're getting off topic here, but I absolutely hate how GUI/text rendering looks on MacOS on a non-high-DPI display these days. Its just all weird and fuzzy. (Of course the UI does look great on a high-DPI display, but most of the "big external monitors" I regularly use aren't high-DPI.) When faced with a "normal DPI" display, I greatly prefer the look of Windows or Linux (provided you know how to tweak font rendering).
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Their font rendering is also excellent on regular displays. The problem is they switched to a new extremel thin font in the latest versions of macOS and it's barely legible on regular displays.
Sorry, it's time has passed (Score:2)
At the time of OS/2, it really was the best operating system available for PCs. Well written, fast operation, superior UI and great security. I'm definitely biased because of the involvement I had in its design and early integration, but it was an excellent platform.
I just don't see how bringing it back now, after so many years of being ignored, it can be brought up to speed in terms of features and hardware advances. It's limited to 32bit processors and I don't see any mention of handling multiple cores
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Re:Sorry, it's time has passed (Score:5, Interesting)
OS/2 got interrupt handling exactly right. I could format a floppy, play Wolfenstein in a window, and have a mod tracker playing in the background on a 486/25. BeOS got close but was never quite as good.
My Linux machine today can't copy to a USB hard drive without making the rest of the system unusable.
It seems like Linux could still learn some tricks from these old OS's.
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Don't equate Dolphin/Nautilus issues with linux having problems. There are plenty of other file managers out there that do threading correctly.
The USB-related thing that bugs me most about linux is that you can't simultaneously open both cameras in a USB-based stereo camera device, which rules out doing anything useful with OpenCV on linux unless you fork out huge dollars for Firewire-based devices. This hap
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That's due to the bridge chips being a bottleneck and it impacts on everything - MS Windows, Solaris etc also act that way on the same hardware. It becomes painfully obvious on things like the Raspberry Pi (where a broadcom chip is the weakest link and used for usb, network, etc) but it applies elsewhere. That old system you describe was dealing with it in the cpu so it's much easier to divide up the load.
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And then there was the hype that MS Windows 95 would be better - it wasn't. Being a cheapskate that false promise drove me to linux instead of the OS/2 I wanted. I forget the price, but I think it was high enough that IBM priced themselves out of the market and people put up with MS Windows 95.
Hmmmmm.... (Score:2)
If this could run Win 7/8 apps, I'd be very, very interested.
I'm hoping they've not included a buttload of telemetry crap, but maybe that's too much to hope for.
Either way, another viable alternative to Windows would be a good thing for everyone (except Microsoft, but screw them).
I was at the dawn of OS/2... (Score:2, Interesting)
...in 1988, back while IBM and Microsoft thought they could work together. HA! I was a contractor and I made much money in my entire career working on the installation package with an in-house language that lack the ability for simple Boolean functions! That's right - no AND or OR or NOT! We beg to do it in C but were overruled. It was a such a stupid project. I learn that if stupidity is profitable, it will be repeated.
While Windows start-of-art was 3.11, OS/2 came out with Presentation Manager and true mu
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> with an in-house language that lack the ability for simple Boolean functions! That's right - no AND or OR or NOT!
While I agree that is completely bone-headed, technically, you don't need them as long as you have +,-,*,/ since they can be simulated.
I came across this interesting Boolean Floating Point Logic [shadertoy.com] shader that proves how it would be done.
This guy does:
Way to go Slashdot! :( (Score:2)
ArcaOS 5 was going to released March 31 but then you guys slammed the server which caused it to overload and in the highly realistic Hollywood fashion, it began smoking and sparking. This resulted in a fire which burned down the building which for obvious reasons was also Arca Noae HQ and stored all the computers containing all copies of ArcaOS 5.
Thanks again Slashdot for ruining EVERYTHING! >:(
Seems a bit pointless. (Score:5, Informative)
If you need your OS/2 apps badly, you can already freely download IBM OS2 Warp 4.0 [winworldpc.com] and run it in a VM or some old metal. As for DOS, FreeDOS reliably runs even on modern hardware though you can also use ReactOS which implements it faithfully. Finally, Win 3.x apps are old hat for WINE. You can SkiFree all day if you want! [archive.org] ;)
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Having used OS/2 through the 2.1 and 3.0 days (back before Windows had its act together), I remember being excited for the release of OS/2 4.0. Unfortunately, at the time, I didn't have a computer with good enough specs to actually run it. Once I finally did, its time had passed and it didn't seem to have a point anymore.
For me, OS/2 always felt like an alternative to DOS/Windows, but never an alternative to Linux. Once Windows became "good enough" and I started to also use Linux for other things, OS/2 jus
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The same here.
OS/2 was for sure technologically excellent. And the API was beautiful, given the time. But IBM kind of could not decide in which market to place it (Competition for the home PCs? Professional?).
Finally, i switched to unix/linux and that worked well for me.
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At the time, I also remember being somewhat irritated that, while IBM did pre-install it as a dual-boot option on many of their consumer PCs, they did not make it the default. As such, they missed a huge opportunity to simply expose people to OS/2.
Its important to never underestimate the power of being the default option. So many people will just use whatever you put in front of them, rarely exploring what other choices they have.
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Then emulate the X86 instructions. A modern PC should still be running faster than the original did.
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VMWare 5.x and 6.x does a pretty good job at it. The hardest part is getting the network card emulation to work correctly, but there are drivers out there that make it work.
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On Linux people should use QEmu, it's more accurate and completely free. :)
On Windows VMWare is probably a good option but that point, you've already chosen poorly.
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> OS/2 running in a virtualization system? Last I heard there wasn't any VM
> platform which supported it because of the extensive use of the X86 instruction set.
Wrong. It installs and runs just fine under QEMU on a linux host.
What's the point? (Score:2)
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I was just thinking about OS/2 Warp yesterday (Score:2)
web site slash dotted (Score:2)
in 3 2 opps! too late......
OS/2 is dead (Score:2)
I was an OS/2 evangelist and apologist, a major fan. I mourned for OS/2 during it's slow, agonizing death and was likely in a state of denial for a while after it did die. However, at this point, anyone who thinks that OS/2 is viable for anything is really just engaging in necrophilia.
There's an oldie but goodie (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
I still remember the TV ads (Score:2)
I feel nostalgic for the early 90's when I think of those ads
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Programmers love nothing more than reinventing the wheel, preferably in an entirely new language using bold new paradigms. Newer is better! The new language will be more efficient and bug -free, and all our code will achieve perfection once we rewrite it all again. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
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IIRC neither. Which would make it pretty useless.