ACPI package version 3.23.01 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our ACPI Package for OS/2 and eComStation version 3.23.01.

This release contains the following changes:

Updated to ACPICA 20150930. ACPI 6.0 is now supported.
Documentation updates and corrections.
Fixed a problem which caused a reboot on some systems when a trap occurred.
Automatically limit to Virtual Wire mode on systems with unsupported IOAPIC setups.
Minor changes to PCI setup for systems which need to run in VW mode.
There are toolkit changes with this version.

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

More information about the ACPI 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.

Subscription renewal discounts

Did you know that the value of your Arca Noae Drivers & Software Subscription grows year over year?

Renewals are subject to a 10% discount when ordered within a month of expiration. We’ve also implemented renewal reminder emails to make renewing your subscription easier. If you renewed by making another full purchase, we’ll be getting in touch to extend a credit voucher for your next order of anything in our store, including sponsoring.

The renewal discount applies to personal and commercial editions, and applies to the total number of subscriptions renewed.

If your original purchase was through one of our resellers, you should definitely order your renewal through the same channel. It may take a short while for all of our resellers to add the proper SKUs to their stores, so be sure to contact your vendor of choice to ask about renewal ordering if you have any questions or don’t see it listed.

If you are already an Arca Noae subscriber, thanks for your business. If you still haven’t felt the need, or for whatever reason have held off purchasing a subscription, we’d welcome the chance to prove the value of our subscription service to you.

Presentation: Blue Lion – A First Peek

We’ve added a new item to our Presentations, Whitepapers, & Case Studies page.

Blue Lion – A First Peek was a presentation given by Lewis Rosenthal via Skype to the Dutch OS/2 Users Group (eCS-gg), Saturday, January 9. The discussion focuses on Blue Lion’s new Preboot environment, including screenshots of current alpha builds, and references some planned features of the new installation media and maintenance environment. The presentation is provided as a PDF.

Arca Noae Package Manager has landed

After over a year in the making, and after extensive testing and refinement, Arca Noae is proud to announce the release of Arca Noae Package Manager, a graphical tool to help keep OS/2 and eComStation systems up to date with the latest software and fixes.

The package is available in English with French and German language packs (more languages coming soon).

This open source utility is available to everyone, free of charge, regardless whether you have an Arca Noae software subscription.

Please review the wiki for important first-time installation notes and other tips.

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.

Blue Lion is Go!

Arca Noae has become an IBM business partner and has an agreement in place that enables us to produce our own OS/2 distribution. We have given this project the code name “Blue Lion” (which probably won’t be the final release name!).

This will be an independent, full OS/2 implementation for the modern environment, with updated drivers and other software, and all the software that you can run on OS/2 and eComStation will also run on Blue Lion. It will be available in multiple languages.

The focus will be on running a full OS/2 implementation on bare metal, not just in virtual machines, and towards that goal we plan to do a considerable amount of testing on popular, industry-standard hardware.

Development of Blue Lion has started, and as it progresses we will keep you informed of its status and our pricing strategy.

We will not take pre-orders until it’s ready as a saleable product – there is a lot of work to do to get this done, and we currently have a target of the 3rd quarter of 2016.

We at Arca Noae are very excited about this project and what it means for the future of OS/2, and we hope you will be too!

If you you have any questions, please contact us.