Category Archives: Arca Noae

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.

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.

USB driver package version 11.10 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of release 11.10 of our updated USB stack. This release builds on the work that was done in version 11.09 and contains considerable changes to all the HC drivers and to USBD.

Highlights of some of the more significant changes in this release:

USBCALLS: Reworked the way the DLL is built. Fixed a transfer size problem.
USBD: Significant changes to the way devices are initialized and how some errors are detected and handled.
USBEHCD, USBOHCD, USBUHCD: Significant changes in how some transfers are queued, and how errors are detected and reported. Fixed a problem for Warp4 systems.
USBOHCD: Fixed a problem that caused transfers to be lost.
USBCOM: Fixed a trap that could occur when certain devices are connected. Fixed an issue that could cause random traps in class drivers.

There are many other less significant fixes and improvements which improve the overall reliability and stability of the entire USB stack.

The Warpin package has been restructured to work on both OS/2 and eCS systems. Installing an older version after installing this version may cause problems. See the ReadMe.txt file.

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.

Bitcoin now accepted

For those crypto-currency lovers in the OS/2 universe, we are now proud to announce that Arca Noae is able to accept Bitcoin as a method of payment. Simply select the option to use Credit Card or Bitcoin (via Stripe), and click the Bitcoin option in the popup window during checkout.

Please note our Bitcoin Payment Policy Addendum to our Acceptable Use Policy for important terms and conditions before purchasing with Bitcoin.

Arca Noae now processes major credit cards through Stripe

We understand that not everyone is enamoured of processing payments through PayPal’s gateway, for a variety of reasons, whether they be security concerns or other bad customer service experiences.

We feel strongly that how you pay us should never become an obstacle to transacting business with us. We remain committed to providing our customers with the broadest possible range of payment solutions to get the business end of things out of the way as quickly, easily, and painlessly as possible.

We know that for some of you, the wait has been long. Today, we are pleased to announce that Arca Noae has established a relationship with Stripe to handle our credit card processing for all major credit and debit cards, internationally.

Based in San Francisco, California, USA, Stripe’s investors include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Elon Musk. Read more about Stripe on their press page.

N.B.: As always, if you have any difficulties with your shopping or payment experience, please contact us immediately, either via our convenient web form or direct email (sales AT arcanoae DOT com).

Arca Noae and Serenity Systems International

For immediate release:

Leesburg, Virginia, USA

Arca Noae, LLC, a Delware-based Limited Liability Company, is pleased to announce the acquisition of the remaining assets of Serenity Systems International, including its domain name. The site is now hosted on the same servers hosting arcanoae.com, the Company history on the About page has been updated, and the links on the main page have also been modified to be more relevant.

We are happy to continue Serenity Systems’ tradition of providing value to OS/2 and eComStation users, whether they be individuals or businesses, and we look forward to welcoming Serenity Systems’ customers to our subscription services.

End of press release.

ACPI package version 3.22.07 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our ACPI Package for OS/2 and eComStation version 3.22.07.

This release addresses the following issues:

Updated the Intel ACPICA code to the current version.
Updated the WarpIn installer to allow installation on both OS/2 and eCS systems.

There are no OS/2 specific changes in this release.

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.

Current happenings

While our blog posts have been infrequent, our developers, beta testing, and translation teams have been quite busy the past few weeks. Here are some highlights of what’s been going on behind the scenes at Area Noae:

USB: Work is continuing on various USB problems, including the “hub-attached devices” issue.
Graphical update utility (YUMIE): We have been through several more test versions in the past few weeks, and with the help from our friends working on YUM and Python (more on this, below), we are getting closer to a release date, with much of our planned functionality for version 1.0 in place.
Graphical update utility (YUMIE): National Language Support is planned for English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Finnish, Korean, and Japanese, and translators for these languages are engaged and working. We are also hopeful for more languages, such as Russian, Chinese, and Swedish, and continue to seek willing translators.
Outside projects: Arca Noae continues to support the efforts of our strategic partner, bww bitwise works, GmbH, and their excellent work on Firefox and OpenOffice, as well as the ever-growing list of ported applications and tools available from the Netlabs repositories. Our work has intersected theirs regarding the YUMIE project (see above), and they have been extremely responsive to our reports and update requests, enabling us to move forward without delay.
Arca Noae web services: Thanks to the tireless efforts of Paul Smedley and Steven Levine, our web platform grows more stable and robust. We have implemented a number of recent updates to the Apache web server software, including current OpenSSL technology to safeguard our subscribers’ data while communicating with us over the web.
Arca Noae in the news: Look for an upcoming announcement about some new strategies for the Company, and an association with a familiar name.

If you haven’t purchased a subscription for the Arca Noae drivers and software package, now is the time.

USB driver package version 11.09 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our updated USB stack. This interim release (11.09) addresses the following issues:

USBCALLS: Fixed a compatibility problem which made the most recent version of USBCALLS.DLL incompatible with USBRESMG.SYS.
USBRESMGR: Incorporated a small change from Wim Brul.
EHCI: Fixed a queue management problem which would cause some USB transactions to be lost. This was mostly noticed because it would randomly cause keyboards and/or mice to not work depending
on which one got initialized first. Any USB device could be affected, though.
EHCI: Reworked the code that handles BIOS/OS ownership change. No one should notice any difference because of this, but it will help some obscure systems initialize properly.
USBKBD: Fixed a problem with shared devices. In some situations when the mouse and keyboard both were part of the same USB device, the USB keyboard driver would stomp on the mouse interface causing the mouse to stop working.
Some of the USB drivers are not compatible with different versions of other USB drivers. Previously, no checking was done. So if the user mixed incompatible versions, he or she could get a partially working or non-working USB stack, system hangs, or other strange, random problems. Code has now been added to check for compatible versions of certain critical drivers so that they will not blindly try to connect with each other and cause problems.
Reworked and enhanced tracing capability for better debugging support.

There are still a couple of outstanding issues to be addressed, but we felt this interim release was important as some major problems have been fixed.

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

Updated roadmap and anticipated changes

We have updated our roadmap to reflect some recent changes in project status, namely the beginning of the beta testing phase of our graphical package management tool, our participation in some very exciting USB development, and our initial investigation of support for some SATA RAID and SAS controllers.

Also of note are some upcoming changes to our store checkout which will soon allow for credit card processing through Authorize.net, a recognized world leader in payment processing. We know that this will be a welcome option for those who prefer not to transact business through PayPal. We anticipate this capability early next year.

Our online store has been open for exactly one month today. The response has been overwhelming, and customer feedback has been of immense help. We continue to work hard to address some lingering issues with server performance and website compatibility across browsers and platforms, and appreciate the valuable input from all reporters.