Category Archives: General

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.

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.

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.

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.