Author Archives: Lewis Rosenthal

Checked your disk lately?

Mysterious boot problems can be caused by a variety of things from failing hardware to software misconfiguration. Besides regular file backups, saving your disk partitioning can be a big help during recovery (or reconstruction onto a new drive). Fixing an odd problem, such as the once-in-a-lifetime file with an impossible character in the name which just won’t delete, is also possible with a good disk tool. Moving to a new disk to gain more space? You’ll need something to carve that room into something useful and transfer your data.

Luckily, we have just the thing: DFSee, the Swiss Army knife of disk utilities. DFSee runs on a variety of platforms, so if you need to boot from “something else” to fix your OS/2 system, you may. (Likewise, you may boot from OS/2 or eCS to fix your other OS.)

DFSee, now at version 13, now has full support for GPT partitioning schemes, compatible with current systems on the market today. It has an amazing array of features, including:

View, analyze, edit and fix partition tables
Support for GPT partitioning schemes (as mentioned above), including move, copy, and resize
Browse, analyze and fix various filesystems
Undelete files
Replacement for FDISK and LVM (Logical Volume Manager) tools
Clone, backup and restore partitions or filesystems
Split large images in smaller pieces suitable for burning to CD or DVD
Hex editor
Scriptable recovery

and, of course, that world-famous support from the developer, Jan van Wijk and Fsys Software.

DFSee is installable to a local partition or may be run from a bootable CD or USB stick, which makes it especially handy for real rescue operations.

If you’ve never licensed a copy of DFSee, now is the time to do so. If you have an older version (even a very old version), an upgrade is only a few clicks away, and if you have a license for version 12, we have an even better deal on an upgrade.

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Review the full feature list at DFSee.com, and stop into our store to license your copy today.

Still running mature software? Arca Noae can help

There was some news made recently when Orly Airport in Paris, France suffered some apparent downtime of its Windows 3.1-based DECOR system which provides Runway Visual Range (RVR) information to pilots. Tech news media was abuzz with ridicule for any enterprise still running what it termed as such “antiquated” systems (referring to both DECOR and Windows 3.1, and in several instances, referring to Windows XP and “UNIX” as similarly antiquated (see here, here, and here for examples).

Unfortunately, what many of these news outlets don’t understand is that after all of the years in service, it simply may not make economic sense to replace a working system simply because there’s a new OS or application version available (likely with new and unknown flaws and potential pitfalls). Perhaps a newer version of a critical application did away with what is to that customer a must-have feature, or perhaps the application has been orphaned altogether, and nothing else currently available seems to be able to do as efficient a job as what is already in place.

Arca Noae understands the value of these systems. OS/2 still provides “a better DOS than DOS and a better [16-bit] Windows than Windows” due to its preemptive multitasking capabilities and crash protection, so multiple Windows 3.1 and/or DOS sessions may be started and run independently of one another, where a critical application is less likely to be brought down simply because some other application crashed in a different session.

If you have a need to run mature applications on OS/2, Windows 3.1, or DOS, Arca Noae can help extend the life of your investment in those platforms and those applications. Our OS/2 & eCS Drivers and Software package subscription – available now – can assist in running OS/2 or eComStation on newer hardware. Our upcoming OS/2 release, codenamed Blue Lion, is being designed to provide an installable solution to deploy new systems with an updated OS/2, fully capable of handling those mature DOS and Windows 3.1 applications, as well as native OS/2 applications and ported Linux applications on modern hardware or in a virtualized environment.

Perhaps you need expertise in handling such a transition or in maintaining your mature infrastructure. Arca Noae’s experienced engineers and consultants can provide those services, as well, practically anywhere in the world. Need us? Contact us.

New Blue Lion FAQs added

We’ve been getting so many great questions about Blue Lion, along with some really positive feedback to the product, our mailbox is overflowing! We’re most grateful to the OS/2 community for this input.

To help answer some of the most frequently asked questions, we’ve started updating our FAQ page with some Blue Lion issues concerning content, scheduling, pricing, and logistics. We’ll add more as we move forward with development.

Meanwhile, if you have a question about Blue Lion which isn’t listed in the FAQ, or a comment or request you’d like to share, please feel free to contact us.

Finally, if you’d like to stay informed concerning Blue Lion’s progress and development status, please feel free to register on our website and you’ll be automatically subscribed to receive emails when our blog is updated. Remember that we don’t sell or otherwise share any email addresses or personal information with any third parties, so your account data is completely confidential (please review our Privacy Policy for more information).

Calling all OS/2 developers!

If you have had experience coding for OS/2, we want to hear from you. Arca Noae is actively seeking new devs for various phases of Blue Lion and related development. All positions are for independent contractors (no employees), some are volunteer, and some (for more detailed, technical work) will be compensated.

Please send an email of inquiry to dev-info AT arcanoae DOT com, and we will respond with a brief questionnaire including a request for references. If accepted, you will be asked to execute a standard non-disclosure agreement.

If there is something which you’d like to see in Blue Lion, whether as a desktop enhancement, an included application, or a device driver, and you feel competent to provide it, please let us know!

We’ve been slashdotted!

Thanks to some great reporting on this year’s Warpstock event by James Sanders at TechRepublic, news of Blue Lion has been picked up by a number of media outlets, including Slashdot and Yahoo! Finance. We’re also a top story on The Register and on OSnews.

We’ll be posting progress on Blue Lion as we move ahead, so keep watching our blog for updates. In the meantime, if you have an OS/2-based infrastructure, and you are concerned about the age or stability of your current equipment, we’d love to hear from you.

AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop 2015

Per Arca Noae’s commitment to Kerberos 5 on OS/2, Lewis Rosenthal from Arca Noae will be attending the 2015 AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, beginning Monday, August 17.

For those not familiar with Kerberos, there is a new Netlabs project devoted to this stable authentication platform, and the wiki page there contains several links to useful information.

USB driver package version 11.13 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of release 11.13 of our updated USB stack.

More information about the USB drivers can be found in the wiki.

The changes in this version are mostly related to the USBCALLS interface which should finally be working correctly now. The USBCALLS interface is used by CUPS, TAME, Cameraderie, and many other similar applications.

As always, problems encountered with this version should be reported to the ticketing system. Simply log in with your Arca Noae credentials, select USB from the list of projects, and open a ticket.

This driver package is available for download from the Arca Noae website as part of your Arca Noae OS/2 & eCS drivers and software package subscription. Please log into your account in order to access your software.

If you haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now.

ACPI package version 3.22.08 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our ACPI Package for OS/2 and eComStation version 3.22.08.

This release addresses the following issues:

Updated the Intel ACPICA code to the current version.
Documentation updates and corrections.
Fixed a problem which prevented the ACPI daemon from running on non-eCS
systems.

More information about the ACPI software package may be found in the ACPI wiki.

If you haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now.

New MultiMac NIC driver package (20150529) released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new release of our MultiMac NIC driver package.

More information about the MultiMac NIC drivers may be found in the wiki.

New in this release:

A new E1000B driver.
This is the first driver produced using the newly developed library for porting FreeBSD drivers that was discussed at Warpstock 2014. The E1000B driver supports more chipsets than the E1000E driver. This driver is the first release, and is still considered experimental, however, testers have been using it for a few weeks with no problems.
Updated NVETH, E1000E, R8169 drivers.
Although there are no changes to these drivers, they have been recompiled for this release. This means that any changes to the system libraries will also be incorporated into them.

As always, problems encountered with this version should be reported to the ticketing system. Simply log in with your Arca Noae credentials, select MultiMac from the list of projects, and open a ticket.

If you haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now.

Arca Noae at Warpstock Europe 2015

Our own David Azarewicz and Lewis Rosenthal will be presenting at this year’s Warpstock Europe, in Munch, Germany, June 6-7. This will be a rare opportunity to hear from two of the Company’s principals about what Arca Noae is presently doing, and what is planned for the future.

You may find out more about their discussion topics on the Warpstock Europe 2015 Presentations page.

In addition, Steven Levine will be presenting via Skype. You may find out more about Steven’s planned discussion on the above Presentation page, as well.