ArcaOS (OS/2 Warp OEM) 5.1.1 Has Been Released (arcanoae.com) 77
"IBM stopped supporting OS/2 at the end of 2006," write the makers of ArcaOS, an OEM distribution of OS/2's discontinued Warp operating system.
And now long-time Slashdot reader martiniturbide tells us that ArcaOS 5.1.1 has been released, and that many of it's components have been updated too. From this week's announcement: ArcaOS 5.1.1 continues to support installation on the latest generation of UEFI-based systems, as well as the ability to install to GPT-based disk layouts. This enables ArcaOS 5.1.1 to install on a wide array of modern hardware. Of course, ArcaOS 5.1.1 is just as much at home on traditional BIOS-based systems, offering enhanced stability and performance across both environments....
Need more convincing? How about a commercial operating system which doesn't spy on you, does not report your online activity to anyone, and gives you complete freedom to choose the applications you want to use, however you want to use them? How about an operating system which isn't tied to any specific hardware manufacturer, allowing you to choose the platform which is right for you, and fits perfectly well in systems with less than 4GB of memory or even virtual machines?
And now long-time Slashdot reader martiniturbide tells us that ArcaOS 5.1.1 has been released, and that many of it's components have been updated too. From this week's announcement: ArcaOS 5.1.1 continues to support installation on the latest generation of UEFI-based systems, as well as the ability to install to GPT-based disk layouts. This enables ArcaOS 5.1.1 to install on a wide array of modern hardware. Of course, ArcaOS 5.1.1 is just as much at home on traditional BIOS-based systems, offering enhanced stability and performance across both environments....
Need more convincing? How about a commercial operating system which doesn't spy on you, does not report your online activity to anyone, and gives you complete freedom to choose the applications you want to use, however you want to use them? How about an operating system which isn't tied to any specific hardware manufacturer, allowing you to choose the platform which is right for you, and fits perfectly well in systems with less than 4GB of memory or even virtual machines?
What? (Score:3)
Re: What? (Score:2)
They seem to focus on supporting as much modern hardware as they can, so no. Until Amiga starts using less ancient CPUs.
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It doesn't even support older X86 hardware. All the old drivers have been ripped out. The sweet spot is a few years old hardware. Newest often just doesn't have enough address space available below 4GB's.
How is the legal (Score:2)
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Yes, they can sell licenses, patch the binaries including the kernel and such. Unluckily no source.
Ah the PS/2...sniffle...gulp... (Score:2)
Back in 1993, my dads workplace gave him a PS/2 with OS/2 on it so he could remote in with a blazing fast 14.4 kbps modem when it was his turn to babysit the payroll processing jobs at God-knows-when AM.
I learned to type on the glorious Model M keyboard that came with the system, on Word Perfect 5.1.
I think I even turned in some schoolwork typed up on that system. We didn't have a printer (why would anyone need one in their home?) so I put it on a floppy and had Dad print it at work for me.
Ah, glory days...
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They had the payroll system accessible by modem? It probably used a simple password that could be brute forced, and forget about encryption most people didnt even know what that was. 1993 you could get away with stuff like that.
Re: Ah the PS/2...sniffle...gulp... (Score:1)
You know...most payroll systems are "accessible by modem" if the modem gets you to the internet so you can remote in to your systems.
But back in '93 ... it probably did go over the phone line in the clear.
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The difference is most such systems today require you to be on the VPN and have MFA. Back then, a random person could probably dial in to the system and if they could guess the password (which was likely the company name or a dictionary word) they’d be in.
Re: Ah the PS/2...sniffle...gulp... (Score:1)
And yet data breaches, wire fraud, and identity theft were small potatoes in the early 90s. Didn't really pick up steam until mass penentration of the internet both domestically and abroad.
Security by obscurity works. It's just a lot harder to achieve obscurity than it might appear at first glance.
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I don't think I EVER used a dictionary word for a password, even for my own systems. OTOH, I did write it down on in a notebook, and hide it.
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You know...most payroll systems are "accessible by modem" if the modem gets you to the internet so you can remote in to your systems.
But back in '93 ... it probably did go over the phone line in the clear.
Back in the 90's up until the mid-2010's, I dealt with a certain brand of medical office electronic records (ie electronic medical records or EMR) that ran on AIX that was very popular then. The support came with a USRobitics modem that sat on top of the server system to allow the support desk of that EMR company to call into the server for administration. The dial-in user had full admin rights, as it was simply the "root" user. Yea, that root, ya know, "root". And I'll let you guess the password, it only h
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When I was at IBM I had an IBM RT PC with a ROMP processor on my desk running AIX connected to a Token-Ring network.
Since I was a lowly contractor, it was reassigned to an IBMer and I was given a Tektronix X-Terminal, also using Token-Ring, connected to a big server also running AIX.
IBM was in a weird state in the early 1990s. I enjoyed it a lot.
We programmed in Ada and the SQL-ish IBM DB2.
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I worked for Tivoli in the late 1990s and inherited about eight of those RT PCs (all model 135s even!) I let them go to someone with more stability, though. I only wish I had kept just one board... since the model 135s were passive backplane, I could have done.
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They were *solid* performers. I miss my RT PC and working for IBM.
Alas, that division of IBM was sold off to Loral and eventually became part of Lockheed Martin Systems Integration. SO stupid of IBM to sell off IBM Federal Systems Group in the 1990s.
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Mid 80's, most people seemed to have a printer, usually a dot matrix.
Re: Ah the PS/2...sniffle...gulp... (Score:1)
No...most computer geeks. Mid 80s, most *people* did not have a computer in the home at all, let alone a printer for it.
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For people who did have a computer, it was fairly common to also get a printer.
It's pretty interesting going back and looking at what the prices were like. The printers for the Atari XL cost more than the machine when they were introduced, despite being hilariously low-fi. You could get a cheaper Epson that would work, though.
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I would never have called my parents computer geeks, though perhaps my Dad might have been if born 50 years later. My Mom, a receptionist liked using Wordstar and then Appleworks instead of a typewriter.
2006? (Score:2)
I had no idea OS/2 was supported until 2006. That's crazy, because OS/2 was confirmed dead .. like bona fide room temperature dead .. by the mid 90s when OS/2 Warp bombed. I had no idea they had it hooked up to ventilators and tubes until 2006. (It was a great OS btw, but M$FT was better at marketing and lawyering third parties to stay away from OS/2 ..ironically something IBM was famous for doing up to the 70s)
ATM (Score:2)
OS/2 was one of the main operating systems for ATMs well into the 2000s. In text-mode, it was rock stable, and so weird hacks were rare. IBM also used it as the service processor for their mainframes until they replaced it with Linux.
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They stopped marketing it in the mid-1990s after Microsoft withheld Windows 95 from IBM for adapting to IBM's PCs to punish IBM for competing against them.
That doesn't mean it wasn't available or supported. A company as big as IBM doesn't generally just stop supporting a product because it doesn't market it any more.
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GUI versions, on the other hand... If anything the joint project fell apart because later on IBM kept asking for Windows API changes and core features, like Fonts, to be disabled or removed because IBM's programmers weren't up to snuff and couldn't make that stuff work properly in OS/2.
My understanding is that MS kept insisting on doing stupid stuff like moving the graphic drivers into kernel space for speed. IBM's programmers were obviously up to snuff as they developed the Work Place Shell to replace the Win3.x desktop look.
Re: 2006? (Score:2)
Wut? Microsoft wanted to have nothing to do with OS/2 from 1991 onwards (although they continued to sell it as legacy Lan Manager for some time), the same year PowerPC appeared on the market.
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A company as big as IBM doesn't generally just stop supporting a product because it doesn't market it any more.
You need to get as big as alphabet for that type of behavior.
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It was dead with respect to sales, but not dead with respect to people using it for mission critical applications. OS/2 was in every conceivable way a more advanced and capable operating system than Windows. It had superior networking, memory management and file systems. At a time when Windows applications were using ISAM file libraries and storing data in DBF files, you could run a full-blown relational database with transaction isolation on your OS/2 box.
The problem is these capabilities required RAM a
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But knowing how these things go, there's no doubt still really important apps out there that run on OS/2 and have never been ported. Those are the people this company are really targeting, not casual users. Really I think it would make more sense to run these legacy apps in VM or compatibility layer where the older operating system could be isolated rather than running the OS in a modern threat environment. Even if the company has made some attempts to make the OS more secure, there's only so much one small company can do.
It's really hard to say what proportion that they are targeting are industrial users vs casual users. Lewis talks like the casual users are pretty important and I have more access then most and it seems to be true.
Not many virtual machines can run OS/2 and even less actually support it, basically VirtualBox is it when it comes to support, which makes sense as VirtualBox was created to virtualize OS/2, as OS/2 uses more of the x86 capabilities then any other OS. With 5.1.1, if you do install it in VirtualBox
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OS/2 was in every conceivable way a more advanced and capable operating system than Windows.
Than Windows 3.1 or 9x, yes. But OS/2 didn't have multiuser security, which was a major important feature that NT did have. Citrix had a multiuser OS/2 but they let it die early in favor of Windows NT.
if you're an application developer, what platform are you going to target? Microsoft was smart about this and moved heaven and earth to cut memory use, often resulting in horrific stability problems (NT 4
NT4 was unstable in the way NT 3.51 wasn't because they merged the memory space inhabited by the graphics driver with that of the kernel to improve multimedia performance. It wasn't because it didn't use a lot of RAM. NT4 was unreliable even if you had loads of it.
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Warp was solid and good.
The "suicide" was the Windows 16-bit (not Windows NT) compatibility layer. They should have left it out. It never worked properly and IBM drained their resources trying to support it.
And, also, so much of the kernel was written in assembly language for the x86 architecture, so cross-compatibility was not even an afterthought with OS/2 which is a shame.
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WinOS2 support is pretty good, at least until VxD's (is that the correct term for a Win 3.1 device driver?) became involved. You are right about IBM draining resources trying to rewrite the 32 bit VxD's to run on OS/2 and eventually MS hard coded some DLLs above 1GB where OS/2 at the time could not access them. Still, today, what other system runs 3.1 binaries on new native hardware? NT can't do it very well. DosBoxX can do a fairly good job until you need to actually access the raw hardware. You still can'
Re: 2006? (Score:2)
I used the Win16 layer of OS/2 back then and it never failed me. It worked better than Windows NT's NTVDM (which was good too, save for a few glitches).
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I had OS/2 reboot on me a couple of times while using the Windows 3.1 environment on a PS/Valuepoint which was fine with DOS, Windows 3.1, or even Chicago Beta (every piece of hardware in the system worked fine including sound.) I was testing it as an intern at the County of Santa Cruz. I brought in the Chicago floppies and installed it on the same machine of my own accord, but after OS/2 with Windows blew up and the not-yet-released Windows 95 didn't, it was clear that there was no point dicking around wit
Re: 2006? (Score:2)
Nope, technically Warp 3.0 and 4.x were quite good. There was a hog of an operating system, but it wasvcalled Windows NT 3.1, and to a lesser extent, Windows NT 3.5 .
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Nothing is dead until Netcraft confirms it.
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It was only a couple of years ago that the NYC subway moved away from OS/2. Various railways in Europe too. Banks and such. The suspicion is that today Arca Noae has a lot of industry partners they support. That old Pentium machine finally dies, replace it with something modern running ArcaOS, which at heart is OS/2.
There was also rumours that some of the biggest IBM customers got the source along with their licenses.
Also Parallels and then VirtualBox were both developed to run OS/2 as there was a demand. V
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Plenty of ATMs ran on OS/2 (and I would not wonder if some still do)
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At one point, after the rise of consumer-oriented versions of NT (notably, WinXP), I'd heard that a lot of ATMs still ran on OS/2, but I never confirmed the details. I probably heard that on slashdot, come to think. Or possibly on usenet.
How about no? (Score:2)
How about a commercial operating system
How about no thanks? Why would I want that? Commercial software is one thing, commercial OS underneath it? No thanks.
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Nothing else on that list that linux doesn't give you for free and if you want commercial support you can pay for a commercial distro. Solaris brought some interesting things to the table, even if linux pretty much has them now.
I was never an OS/2 guy; is there something nobody is mentioning that OS/2 does better?
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I was never an OS/2 guy; is there something nobody is mentioning that OS/2 does better?
Well, in '92 when OS/2 2.x was first released (OS/2 1.x was 16 bit, ran on the 286, OS/2 3 NT evolved into Win 11) there was a few things it did better then any consumer OS. Multi-tasking with memory protection. At the time it was much more stable then anything else the average user would ever encounter and could do things like play a video while formatting a couple of floppies with the user barely noticing the system was busy. By default it gave the foreground process both a CPU priority and an IO priority
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Ok, so extracting it out:
- "By default it gave the foreground process both a CPU priority and an IO priority boost resulting in a very smooth user experience. Even today I find it a better experience then Linux in that way."
- There could be something worthwhile in how it handled multi-threading.
- "The Work Place Shell, which was the graphical shell. Fully object orientated, could do things that no one else can yet. Needs to be a separate discussion."
That doesn't sound like enough to make running it worthwhi
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At this point, it really isn't worthwhile for most to run it, especially how different it is out of the box though it is customizable in most ways if you know how. EG, don't like using mouse button 2 for dragging, change it in the mouse object. Don't like the colours, open the colour palette and drag a better colour to your folder, program etc, need to know that you have to hold down the alt key to change the foreground colour. Other things like changing the window widgets need 3rd party utilities.
The work place shell sounds interesting and I'd bet that once the functionality is seen it could be incorporated into something new [at least in spirit] and brought to Linux.
Yes, that
Nice to see ongoing projects like this... however (Score:3)
Linux says "hi".
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The bigger issue is it's $139 so it's never going to be a majority OS as ether you go free with Linux or just buy Win11 Pro for the same price.
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Exactly, the only thing on that list that Linux isn't out of the box is 'commercial software' and that sounds like a bug not a feature. If I want support I can buy that in linuxland as well.
The important question... (Score:1)
What specifically makes paying for this OS wise? (Score:2)
What are compelling use cases not addressed by other options?
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There's one, you have some software you need to run that only runs on OS/2. I don't know who that applies to, maybe there's someone.
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And I bet it runs in a railroad, bank, government, or some industrial system.
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Typical IBM (Score:3)
I used to work in IBM Hursley around the time OS/2 Warp came out and I got the sense they didn't have a clue about how to deliver a desktop operating system to the end user. Everything was just a little off kilter - crashes, instability, complex workplace shell, corrective service diskettes, high system requirements, "common user access", inscrutable rules that didn't work in reality. It's like they wanted to deliver something but didn't know how and failed when they tried. And of course Microsoft did their anticompetitive BS on top. The net result was that OS/2 died. A bit more spit and polish and it might have taken off.
Re: Typical IBM (Score:1)
Re: Typical IBM (Score:2)
VM? What do you mean by that?
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IBM killed it when they announced Windows 3.1 would be the last version of Windows supported for compatibility with OS/2. This announcement was made when 32-bit Windows NT was out, and talk existed an awesome new version of 32-bit Windows. The chronology was this:
1993: 32-bit Windows NT 3.1 launched
1994: Warp launched
1995: 32-bit Windows 95 launched
1996: Windows 4.0 launched
It was obvious at the Windows 95 launch that 16-bit Windows development was dead and the future was 32-bit. Windows 95 was going
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They also didn't seem too keen on supporting OS/2 on non Micro Channel Architecture machines. Which of course meant almost entirely over priced IBM machines.
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OS/2 worked "fine" (as well as it ever worked, which was frankly not that well) on ISA bus machines. IBM was selling PS/Valuepoint 486 systems with ISA bus when OS/2 2.1 came out, to try to defeat the clone market. 100% of the hardware in these machines was supported by OS/2, you did not need a single additional driver. Where I worked we had a bunch of PS/2s (A lot of model 30 286s) but were planning to upgrade machines to 486. We tried out OS/2 and it turned out to be crashy when running Windows apps, so t
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I beg your pardon, I don't see how the GPL should be obnoxious to the spread of an operative system. All Android phones shipes with a GPL-v2 kernel.
I have been using a "fucking GPL" desktop OS since 1998 and I am quite happy with it.
Re: I wish (Score:2)
Linux doesn't seem to have any problems with a GPL ecosystem. Why should an OS have problems with it?
Windows 95, NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 had very decent GUIs, and they're 90s GUIs.
SteveB and the OS/2 "bad app" (Score:2)
Steve Ba
uh... (Score:2)
Need more convincing? How about a commercial operating system which ...
How about the one thing that 99% of customers care about: Can it run all the applications that people need?
That's really all that matters. To every non-nerd, the OS is just part of the system and they don't particularly care about it.
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IBM and MS sales reps did a product shootout (Score:3)
commercial OS which doesn't spy on you (Score:1)
Which apps are available? (Score:2)
So why are user applications not mentioned anywhere in TFA nor in this discussion?
More: I went via the Wiki to the Store, where there are only three "Office & Productivity" apps, none of which anyone has ever heard of before.
And you want me to pay for this?
Re: Which apps are available? (Score:1)
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I don't want to run OS/2 just for fun (shudder, I remember what it was like trying to use it). So why are user applications not mentioned anywhere in TFA nor in this discussion? More: I went via the Wiki to the Store, where there are only three "Office & Productivity" apps, none of which anyone has ever heard of before. And you want me to pay for this?
I'm sure there's some turbo-nerd somewhere that can get all snobbery about the fact they *CAN'T* run any of the software everyone else uses.
32 bit OS in 2025? What a joke. (Score:1)