Category Archives: Community

Community related news

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.

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.

Blue Lion, by Arca Noae - Developer Interest

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!

Blue Lion, by Arca Noae

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, by Arca Noae

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.

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.

Howard Winter joins Arca Noae in Customer Relations

Arca Noae is pleased to announce that we have engaged Howard Winter in our Customer Relations department. Howard will be responsible for answering your pre-sales and order fulfilment inquiries via email and telephone.

Howard brings his years of experience with sales and marketing along with his OS/2 expertise to Arca Noae, enhancing the capability of the Company to handle customer (and potential customer) concerns.

Effective immediately, Customer Relations and pre-sales telephone numbers are:

US: +1 571 758 5218
UK: +44 1727 238802

Expect to see more of Howard online, too.

Arca Noae: a new name, but with familiar faces

Arca Noae has been active for about half a year; our online store opened mid-November, and our popular drivers and software subscription has seen several updates. We’ve made numerous news postings, as well as personal appearances at Warpstock. We’ve even added a FAQ page and a roadmap to our site. Still, some people seem to be confused as to why Arca Noae was created, who works for Arca Noae, and what Arca Noae’s long term goals are.

For more details on Arca Noae’s history and mission, please see our updated About page.

 

The UEFI Forum

Arca Noae joins the UEFI Forum as an Adopting Member

For immediate release:

Leesburg, Virginia, USA

Arca Noae, LLC, a Delaware-based Limited Liability Company, is pleased to announce their membership in the UEFI Forum.

The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) specification defines a new model for the interface between personal-computer operating systems and platform firmware. The interface consists of data tables that contain platform-related information, plus boot and runtime service calls that are available to the operating system and its loader. Together, these provide a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications. Essentially, this layer provides a replacement for the traditional BIOS, and is the future of small computing architecture.

The UEFI Forum is a clearinghouse for all current, related documents pertaining to UEFI, the UEFI specification, and its adoption by manufacturers and software developers.

In addition, the UEFI Forum performs a similar function for ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface). Arca Noae develops and maintains the current ACPI implementation for the OS/2 and eComStation platform.

Arca Noae is committed to running OS/2 on current hardware. UEFI, like ACPI, is a continuation of the trend to move more functions from the BIOS to the operating system. Arca Noae is looking into how this new technology can be supported under OS/2 in the future.

End of press release.