ArcaOS (OS/2 Warp OEM) 5.1.1 Has Been Released (arcanoae.com) 49
"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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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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Mid 80's, most people seemed to have a printer, usually a dot matrix.
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.
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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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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'
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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)
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?
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.
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)
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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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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.
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)