Tag Archives: support

Join Us at Warpstock 2019 in Orlando

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.)

Warpstock Europe 2019 is this weekend!

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

Arca Noae at Warpstock 2018 in Calgary…and an ArcaOS Sale

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:

Firefox with Flash pointing to the WarpEvents site; or
Grab the YouTube URL and play it in VLC (preferred; get the latest VLC, ported by KO Myung-Hun, from Hobbes).

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:

Critical fix available for ArcaOS 5.0.3 installations from DVD requiring USB keyboard and/or mouse

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.

Support FreeRDP for OS/2!

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.

Everything you need to know about subscription expiration

By popular demand, this is a summary of what happens when a subscription expires:

Any installed Arca Noae drivers and software continue to function normally (including ArcaOS).
Any drivers and software which have already been downloaded may be installed and will function normally (including ArcaOS).
All free Arca Noae RPM repositories continue to work.
Free downloads from the Arca Noae site will remain accessible.
An expired subscription cannot be renewed. You must buy a new subscription if yours expires.
An expired subscription will not have any downloads available.
Any subscription-only Arca Noae RPM repositories will not be accessible.
Bug tracker will not be available.

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.

What also happens when a subscription expires?

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:

The installed ArcaOS system, drivers, and any related software continue to function normally.
Content from the relevant Arca Noae free repository/ies will continue to be accessible (arcanoae-rel, and even for those with separate access, arcanoae-exp).
Free downloads from the Arca Noae site will remain accessible.
Subscribing again after a subscription has lapsed requires a new purchase.
NOTHING ALREADY INSTALLED WILL STOP FUNCTIONING AS A RESULT OF A SUBSCRIPTION EXPIRING. NOTHING. REALLY.

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.

What happens when a subscription expires?

Subscriptions must be renewed to remain in force. Allowing a subscription to lapse or expire will cause the following actions in the customer’s account:

The order details, accessed through the customer portal, will no longer have downloads available. Any updates or interim enhancements released in this manner will no longer be accessible.
Subscription-only content available from the relevant Arca Noae subscription repository/ies will no longer be accessible.
For ArcaOS, the ISO download will no longer be accessible.
Access to the Mantis bug tracker to open new issues, report on existing issues, or as a knowledgebase of reference material will no longer be available.
Subscribing again after a subscription has lapsed will not qualify for any renewal discounts.

We highly recommend maintaining archives of any downloaded content, as it may not be possible to access this again (even the last versions available when the subscription was in force).

ArcaOS 5 included Support & Maintenance Subscription length

We have recently become aware of some possible confusion surrounding the amount of time (term) of included support for personal vs commercial edition licenses of ArcaOS 5. It therefor seemed appropriate to review our website content, and to our surprise, we find that we really have not done a good enough job of making this particular — though critical — issue very clear. Hopefully, this post will set the record straight.

In an earlier post, we discussed the process for renewing subscriptions, and mentioned that it was renewal season for early adopters of ArcaOS 5. That reference was to those who purchased personal edition licenses for ArcaOS 5 six (6) months ago.

ArcaOS 5.0 personal edition includes six (6) months of Support & Maintenance.

ArcaOS 5.0 commercial edition includes twelve (12) months (one full year) of Support & Maintenance.

Renewal reminders are normally sent one month prior to expiration, one week prior, and finally on the day of expiration.

Although the personal and commercial editions of ArcaOS 5 are code-equivalent (there is no difference in the operating system or kernel itself, e.g., both support up to 32 processor cores and an unlimited number of connections, with the same storage volume types and capacities and included device drivers and applications), there are other differences between the two, namely the level of support and the term (length of time) of the included subscription. The commercial edition includes prioritized support for twelve months (one year), whereas the personal edition includes standard support for six months.

Support renewals for both editions are for one year. For example, a personal edition license purchased June 1, 2017 will be due for a Support & Maintenance subscription renewal on or before November 30, 2017 and the renewal will extend the support a full year until November 30, 2018. A commercial edition license purchased the same day (June 1, 2017) will be due for a Support & Maintenance subscription renewal on or before May 31, 2018 and the renewal will extend the support for a full year until May 31, 2019.

If you miss the deadline for a timely renewal of your included Support & Maintenance subscription, you may still “renew” your subscription at the regular price. Missed the deadline because you didn’t receive your reminder emails for some reason? No problem. Just contact us or open a customer service ticket, and we will be glad to help make things right. That’s our commitment to you as an ArcaOS licensee.

Finally, for those of you with existing OS/2 & eCS Drivers & Software subscriptions, concerned about the differences between the two subscription “tracks,” we have a handy table which compares the two, available here.

We believe there are compelling reasons to move up to ArcaOS 5, and to keep in force a Support & Maintenance subscription, ensuring regular updates and the availability of technical assistance for the operating system as a whole. While there is no requirement to renew Support & Maintenance to continue using ArcaOS 5, doing so ensures uninterrupted access to updates, refreshed installation ISOs, and support.

Please review this post for the specifics on how to renew your existing subscription.

New subscription renewal process

It’s renewal season for early adopters of ArcaOS 5, and with that, comes a new renewal process for all subscriptions.

As expiration dates approach, renewal reminders will be emailed. In each reminder is a link to the original order as well as a link to add the renewal to the shopping cart. Be sure to log in first before clicking the links. Reminders are sent one month before expiration, one week before, and on the day of expiration. A renewal extends ArcaOS support and maintenance for one full year.

The original order will also have a handy renewal link, so there is no need to wait for a reminder. Just log into your customer portal at Arca Noae and access your order for ArcaOS to add it to your cart. (Renewals for other subscriptions are now handled the same way.)

ArcaOS Support & Maintenance subscriptions renewed before expiration qualify for a 10% discount, too. Note that the full price will be reflected in the cart but the discount will be shown at checkout. It is still possible to renew an expired ArcaOS Support & Maintenance subscription after it has expired, but without the renewal discount.

Be sure to order the correct subscription! The OS/2 & eCS Drivers & Software subscription is for non-ArcaOS systems, and does not include support or updates for ArcaOS. Likewise, the ArcaOS Support & Maintenance subscription is only for ArcaOS systems, and is not available for purchase without an ArcaOS license.

If you currently have an active OS/2 & eCS Drivers & Software subscription as well as an ArcaOS license, and you no longer need to maintain OS/2 Warp or eComStation systems, you may trade in your subscription for additional time or a discount on your ArcaOS Support & Maintenance subscription. See the Subscription Trade-Up Request form for details.

Handy links:

Subscription comparison table
Subscription Trade-Up Request
Frequently Asked Questions
ArcaOS Wiki