All systems are back online as of 5:00am EDT, following a blackout which began at approximately 2:25pm EDT, yesterday.
Power, fiber optic broadband, and even wireless communications were impacted by yesterday’s passing of Isaias, rendering even the best of contingency plans inadequate. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Whenever you encounter a problem with Arca Noae software which you cannot resolve on your own, you should consider opening a trouble ticket. If you have a current ArcaOS Support & Maintenance subscription or a current OS/2 & eCS Drivers & Software subscription, we’re here to help in any way we can. You paid for professional support with your software license and/or subscription, and you are entitled to it. To provide that level of service, however, we need a little help from you.
Before opening your ticket, please consider whether the issue is really in Arca Noae software or perhaps in a third-party component bundled with ArcaOS. Third-party software is not produced or directly supported by Arca Noae. Look at the program’s documentation. Where does it say support requests should be directed? If it is third-party software, you should probably start there. On the other hand, if it is a third-party component but your problem seems to have stemmed from the manner in which it was installed during an ArcaOS installation or update, that would be a problem for us to at least review first, because it may involve our installation software (which is our component).
Please don’t take offense if we refer you to the program’s developer or distributor for support. Those entities are probably closer to the source code than we are, and thus in a better position to assist you with your problem. We’re not passing the buck, just trying to direct you to the best place for the help you need.
If your issue is with an Arca Noae component, please review that component’s wiki pages for information on supported configurations as well as debugging instructions. The more you do ahead of time, the more you will know and the more information you will have available when we request it in your ticket. Be sure you’re using the right driver for your hardware. Be sure your system is in a supported configuration.
As a general rule when opening tickets, you should familiarize yourself with our Reporting Problems – Best Practices and Ticket Guidelines wiki pages. While these pages don’t change often, they document the framework within which we process tickets, give you an overview of what to expect from us, and likewise, what we expect from you (see mention above of “a little help from you”).
When a technician or engineer has been assigned to your ticket, consider that person your concierge to a solution for the duration of your problem. He or she is there to help. If that technician or engineer requests logging information, that’s not a suggestion. He or she requests that information in order to resolve the problem.
Always bear in mind that not all problems are reproducible by the technician or engineer, or your problem could be a configuration or usage issue. Often the only objective information the technician or engineer has to work with is contained in the log file(s) requested. If the log file(s) contain what you consider to be sensitive information (usernames, IP addresses, etc.), simply ask the ticket assignee to set your ticket to private status. When private, only you, Arca Noae staff, and developers have access to the information. You also have the option of sanitizing your log info to your satisfaction, as long as such anonymizing does not obscure the underlying data (your ticket assignee can provide more guidance, here; just ask).
If you fail to provide requested information or log files, your ticket assignee may very well resolve the ticket as “reporter unresponsive.” You may reopen the ticket within 30 days of resolution if you provide the requested information. See this FAQ item for information on reopening resolved tickets.
When you attach files to a ticket, please also post a comment. File attachments do not trigger email notifications, and do not change ticket status from Feedback, so without a comment added, the technician or engineer will have no idea that you have provided the requested information, and this may delay the ticket resolution process.
Please do not provide extra, not-requested attachments, such as configuration files and screenshots. If your ticket assignee has need of this information, he or she will ask for it.
Our goal is to resolve your issue as quickly as possible. Some issues may require more time than others. Some issues require group input, and thus, there may be some delays in responding to your ticket. Please be patient.
Above all, our goal is to provide quality software and attentive, professional support. All we ask in return is that you follow the procedures we have put in place so that we may work as efficiently as possible, and you may get back to the business of enjoying your Arca Noae products.
From time to time, we may make feature preview releases available. Driver and software preview releases differ from new GA releases and testcase packages in several ways. Consider testcase packages first:
In contrast, preview releases serve a different purpose and are subject to different terms of use:
In the near future, we hope to bring preview releases for various works in later stages of development.
All previews will be available through the ArcaOS Support and Maintenance Subscription, However, some preview packages may not be available through the Arca Noae OS/2 & eCS Drivers and Software Subscription, so now may be a good time to consider moving up to ArcaOS.
Warpstock 2019 will be held November 8-10 at the Country Inn & Suites, Orlando Airport. Arca Noae staff and developers will be there with the latest ArcaOS news and how-to sessions, as well as a host of other OS/2 experts ready and willing to share their knowledge and expertise.
Register in the next 24 hours (before June 1) and receive a $30 Early Bird discount on a full conference registration or $20 on a daily conference registration! Spouses/family members/guests/office mates attending sessions also receive great discounts, and non-attending guests are FREE. Students with valid student ID are welcome to attend sessions at no charge, with full benefits! (This is a great opportunity for Computer Science majors and aspiring young developers and engineers to gain some exposure to a platform which is still in use in the manufacturing, finance, and insurance sectors around the globe today.)
This weekend, May 18-19, Stichting VOICE International (the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation) will present Warpstock Europe 2019 at the Ibis Hotel in Utrecht, Netherlands. For program and travel details, visit http://www.warpstock.eu.
Ticket sales will close Wednesday afternoon, Dutch local time, so visit http://www.warpstock.eu now to purchase your ticket for this exciting event.
Unable to attend? Live audio and video streams will be made available. To ask questions remotely during the conference, use IRC. For details concerning both streams and IRC participation, see http://www.warpstock.eu/2019/58-videostream2019.
Members of the Arca Noae team will be presenting on the latest application, device driver, and ArcsOS development. Alex Taylor, Arca Noae’s Chief UI Architect, will be there live to present and to answer your questions. In addition, the developers at bww bitwiseworks will be on hand to discuss their latest projects for the OS/2 platform, including Qt5 progress.
Remember that the audio and video streams will be in real time, so be sure to account for any local time difference from Central European Summer Time (CEST), which is GMT +0200.
Videos will be available from the Warpstock Europe YouTube channel after the conference. See http://www.warpstock.eu/2019/58-videostream2019 for the link.
If you want to support the activities of VOICE, please consider making a donation:
http://www.os2voice.org/membership.html
This year’s Warpstock event is scheduled for September 14-16 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.There will be several sessions devoted to getting the most out of ArcaOS and OS/2, in general.
To celebrate this year’s event, Arca Noae will be running a sale on ArcaOS personal and commercial licenses for the duration of Warpstock, Friday through Sunday. This is a great time to get in on this fresh and exciting OS/2 release or to pick up additional licenses for more stations. ArcaOS 5.0.3 was recently released, and the first beta for 5.0.4 is already in testing. Version 5.1 is scheduled for release in 2019, with a host of new features planned, including NLVs for several popular languages.
More information about Warpstock, its history, past speakers and presentations, and this year’s event may be found on the Warpstock site.
If you can’t join us in Calgary, be sure to watch the live feed on the WarpEvents page on YouTube.
Once there, locate the WarpStock 2018 Live Stream URL.
Users with OS/2 can watch the stream in two ways:
To ask questions during the live event, use the #netlabs channel on IRC.
There will be up to date information on OS/2 World and the following social networks:
We have identified and corrected an issue in our production build system affecting the ArcaOS 5.0.3 ISO resulting in missing USB driver files normally loaded when booting from DVD.
If you normally install from USB flash drive or directly from the ISO you do not require this fix to install.
If, however, you normally install from DVD or from the ISO into a virtual machine which requires USB keyboard and/or mouse emulation, this fix is required in order to load the USB stack for the installation process.
The ending installation is exactly the same, with or without this fix, as no changes to anything installed to the local drive(s) have been made. This is only for the purpose of booting from the installation DVD and navigating through the installer.
Unfortunately, this fix requires a full download of a fresh ISO, as there is no practical way of inserting this small fix in an existing ISO or DVD. As a result, all currently cached ISOs here have been expired. At your convenience, please log into your customer portal, access your ArcaOS order from the Orders & Subscriptions page, and request a fresh ISO.
We apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused, and thank you very much for your patience. Thanks also to those who reported the issue to us.
If you have a need to access a remote Windows desktop, the best option is using a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client. Using RDP, the local system’s drives may be mapped (redirected) into the remote system to access local files, and even audio from the remote system may be redirected to the local system.
Currently, the RDP client of choice on OS/2 is RDesktop, ported by Andrey Vasilkin. However, RDesktop is showing its age, and a newer, more active project, FreeRDP, has become very well known.
Andrey proposes porting FreeRDP to OS/2, which poses its own set of challenges, so in order to do that, he needs support from the OS/2 user base. This project will take several months, but when he is done, all users of OS/2 warp, eCS, and ArcaOS will have a free, modern, remote access tool.
Sponsoring units for this work may be purchased in the Arca Noae store, in $15, $25, $50, and $100 increments, and of course, it is possible to purchase multiple units at one time.
As with all of the sponsoring collected through Arca Noae 100% of your donation (subject to currency conversion) goes to the project or to the developer. Arca Noae absorbs any related transfer fees.
By popular demand, this is a summary of what happens when a subscription expires:
Arca Noae is committed to keeping ArcaOS and other OS/2 distributions usable on modern hardware. New device drivers are in active development and support is always available to subscribers.
Renew early to receive the best value for your investment.
In our last post, we discussed what happens in a customer’s account (Arca Noae’s side) when a subscription is allowed to lapse or expire. What we didn’t discuss was what happens to the installed system, drivers, and software when a subscription expires:
We still highly recommend maintaining subscriptions. The hardware landscape continues to change, and Arca Noae is committed to keeping ArcaOS and other OS/2 distributions viable on today’s and tomorrow’s hardware as long as possible. New device drivers are in active development to extend the useful life of any OS/2 system, and support is always available to subscribers, as well. Renew early to receive the best value for your investment.