Monthly Archives: February 2022

ArcaOS Desktop updated to 1.0.15

Dynamic Icons

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of ArcaOS Desktop (ANXWP) 1.0.15 in English, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Russian. This is a maintenance release containing bug-fixes and updates that have accumulated since the last release. The primary improvements include:

Desktop Properties notebooks

  • XFolder: Prevent doubled entries in the Background page’s File dropdown.
  • WPPgm/WPPgmFile: Prevent <Esc> from dismissing the Language tab dialog.

XCenter Widgets

  • Pulse: Fix spurious 100% CPU usage after a WPS restart.
  • Window List: Refactor/simplify button positioning and drawing.

Menus

  • Trash Can: Ensure the Open As default is correct.
  • XView: Display correct whitespace menus for root folders.

Startup and Shutdown

  • XStartup: Restart automatically after fixing the order of class-replacements.
  • XShutdown: Added an optional “XWP_ACPIDELAY=xxx” environment variable to change the default shutdown delay of 250ms.

Localization

Add translated strings in Font Folder and in a folder’s Details dialog.

See the Version Information topic of the ArcaOS Desktop Users Guide and Reference located in the Help Center for more details about this release.

Arca Noae would like to thank Rich Walsh for his work on maintaining and improving XWorkplace and ArcaOS Desktop.

If you have ArcaOS, this software is available for download from the Arca Noae website as part of the Support & Maintenance subscription for your ArcaOS product. Please log into your account and see your ArcaOS order details page to access your software.

If you are still running OS/2 and/or eComStation this is a great reason to consider moving up to ArcaOS. This update includes reserved features licensed for use exclusively with ArcaOS.

 

UEFI support in ArcaOS 5.1 – update for February, 2022

Development and testing of Arca Noae’s support for UEFI continues. Here’s a brief recap of how this will work in ArcaOS 5.1:

When the installation media boots, if the system is determined to be in “UEFI mode” as opposed to “Legacy mode” (“Legacy” here refers to the configuration which presents a traditional PC BIOS), ArcaOS will begin the preboot process using its compatibility system. Essentially, this is a 64-bit environment which will provide a rather complete BIOS emulation for the ArcaOS kernel, including VGA services for video display.

If the user selects to use his own settings for installation (the preboot menu), the screens will look and act just like a traditional installer boot, but will, in fact, be provided by this new compatibility system.

Once control is handed off to the ArcaOS kernel, the OS itself is exactly the same as a traditional ArcaOS boot. That is to say, the kernel is identical. The goal of the Arca Noae Compatibility System (ANCS) is to provide a standard environment for ArcaOS, without the need to actually maintain different versions of ArcaOS files for each environment. Another benefit of ANCS is that because the video BIOS emulation is generally more complete than that provided by the CSM in many systems built in the past decade, DOS and Win-OS/2 sessions tend to run much better.

ArcaOS 5.1 should support booting in UEFI mode on a range of systems which provide a recent UEFI implementation, from either GPT or MBR partitioned disks. In the next post in this series, we’ll discuss GPT and MBR and how the boot process differs between the two partition layouts.