ArcaOS 5.0.6 includes refreshed content and fixes since 5.0.5 was released. If you have experienced difficulty installing previous releases of ArcaOS on your hardware, 5.0.6 may address your issue(s). If installing from USB stick, the image may be created using any major operating system at hand (Windows, Linux, MacOS, and of course, OS/2, eComStation, and ArcaOS). Once built, the USB stick can be inserted into any USB port in the target system to boot into the ArcaOS installer/updater.
It’s a relatively minor release, but anything that improves the chances of being able to install ArcaOS I’ll take. I’ve had some major issues getting it to boot on modern hardware – despite excellent help from the ArcaOS team, we couldn’t get it to work – so I hope I can find some time somewhere to try it again.
Well, this is not very promising:
They might benefit from a better sales team. It should not be too difficult to provide a demo version to test hardware compatibility. Similar to what Windows Server Core(?) Edition does, just boots up a GUI, and brings up a terminal screen, with some other limitations. At least this would sound better than “pay $129 for our product, and risk it not working at all, we will not refund your money”.
sukru,
Ouch! It sounds like they’re very aware of a problem and they don’t give a crap whether they earn your money or not. The thing is, if it isn’t fit for purpose, you may be entitled to a refund both legally as well as through your credit card regardless of whether they want to offer it or not. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve needed to charge back credit card transactions from non-compliant vendors. Other than spending some time on hold, it’s quite straitforward and in 100% of those cases the credit card processor sided with me as the customer. I’d say someone would have a decent shot at getting their money back regardless of what they say, but ugh… they really should have more confidence in their own product not to have to do that.
Hi
I’m in the day to day of the OS/2 community on OS2World.com. For the moment ArcaOS remains a continuation of OS/2 with the idea to bring OS/2 running on modern hardware. The issue is that it still remains a niche OS for people that used or need OS/2, and hardware remains limited to x86 architecture and not all the latest hardware is supported. Sadly, if you want to use ArcaOS on real hardware, you need to be sure of where to run it first.
About the demo or the price, Arca Noae to be a legal company needed to get a deal with IBM, and every ArcaOS license pays the fee to IBM, so you can be legally entitled to OS/2’s binaries. I guess a demo CD can be possible, since other company that made an OEM agreement made an eComStation bootable demo CD, but I don’t know if the private agreement between Arca Noae and IBM allows them that.
Currently ArcaOS 5.0.5 and 5.0.6 got an important milestone, to have USB 3 drivers and UEFI support, which opened the possibility to be installed in more hardware. But a lot of things are required like international localization, and possible in the future an strategy to modernize more parts of the GUI.
But if you want to experience OS/2 Warp 4.52 you can always get a virtual machine from several sources like: https://gekk.info/articles/os2.html
Regards
martini
And that’s exactly what gives sukru’s point merit.
You say Arca Noae may have entered a bad agreement with IBM. Who knows, but I don’t see why a 3rd party agreement that no one is privy to would necessarily change the outcome of a disputed charge.
Except, who is saying OS/2 is the future and new systems are going to be OS/2 based?
Anyone who is considering ArcaOS has made the decision that some legacy app is a precious, precious national treasure and needs to be kept running at all costs, and they’re going to make operations do the work to keep the thing floating.
That statement is not a problem at all for the customer Arca Noae is targeting.
ArcaOS is not meant to be used at home but by enterprise for niche and legacy software. That kind of customer will acquire the hardware that is supported by the software, not the other way around.
In fact, in enterprise, it’s like that even with modern software, from operating systems to storage to networking: you only acquire certified hardware.
pgquiles,
Additionally they offer personal editions for $100 less.
If you have or go buy a random computer and it doesn’t work, we that’s kind of your own fault. But they have officially posted requirements, so if you follow those requirements in good faith and it still doesn’t work, well then customers have a reasonable expectation that it was supposed to work and I think they’d have a stronger case against the no refund policy. I’m not usually a fan of credit card processors, but in cases like this they can actually protect consumers even after they purchased something that didn’t work and the seller refused to make it right.
Sometimes sellers will issue a refund minus a restocking fee, which could be more reasonable. I’ve accepted refunds where we both take part of the loss, especially when I know the seller took a loss on shipping and they were extremely nice throughout the process. I am reasonable and understand their position. But if the seller’s product isn’t fit for purpose and they make no attempt whatsoever to refund anything to the customer, I honestly think that’s wrong and could increase the customer’s odds of overturning the entire charge successfully.
Hopefully it runs fine of course if your computer fits the system requirements, but it’s just disappointing to read that blurb and know that they explicitly don’t stand behind their own products.
If this problem has been common enough for Arca Noae to put a nasty memo on their website, then maybe a better approach would be a limited demo as suggested by sukru. Not giving consumers an opportunity to check compatibility is bad.
I still wish that OS/2 will be open-sourced before it’s ecosystem die out completely. As fun as it have been in the past right now it would not suite my needs at all. And without gaining much more traction and popularity among users and developers and do not see this changing any time soon.
Sadly i think that neither you nor me is the intended user. but i can be wrong. Updated drivers will keep industrial systems running ehen systems natively fails. the enthusiast market is just icing on the cake.
The dream of an open source OS/2 remains there. I’m trying to consolidate all OS/2 knowledge on the OS2World wiki, development material on the EDM/2 wiki, source code on github.com/os2world , There are even some ideas on the OSFree projects, but we lack of people and developers to actually put their hands and time on it. Anybody that will like to clone even the smaller OS/2 component as open source, will have my support.
Regards
martini
Any idea how ArcaOS stacks up against ReactOS?
NaGERST is right. I don’t think we’re really the intended audience as much as the rest of the userbase would like it to be. As an OS/2 user from 96-01, it was sad to leave it. I did purchase an Arca personal license when it was 5.0.3 and it was a fun albeit shortlived trip down memory lane. Managed to get it setup for a dual boot on a secondary system, but neither the audio or wifi functioned, the video being somewhat accelerated. It’s too bad the current userbase just isn’t large enough for it break out of its current state. On one hand, eComstation/ArcaOS were very much needed in order to keep existing mission critical systems going. But on the otherhand, I do feel like there needed to have been a project similar to what Mac did with BSD in order to succeed on a broader audience level (make an emulation layer of some kind for existing OS/2 apps running on top of Linux or BSD). The Linux/BSD side could handle the hardware support that OS/2 lacks.
Yeah, thats an oversimplification of what MacOS is in relation to BSD, but you get the point.
An emulation or translation layer for a FOSS OS is probably the longer term solution. OS/2 is a frozen API/ABI, so it’s not like they’re chasing a live target the way Wine does with Windows.
It’s also not like this is a really foreign concept. FreeBSD has the Linux translation layer which reports as a CentOS 7 system.
It would be an interesting article to figure out why this hasn’t been done. Lawyers, technical, certifications, political?
If I’m remembering correctly, OS/2 uses the ring states of the processor more then other operating systems. While Linux, *BSD, and Windows use rings 1 and 3, OS/2 uses rings 1, 2, and 3. Or however the rings are numbered.
That might be part of it.
It’s probably a long tail situation. Choices were made, OS/2 was deployed, and the choices were never reevaluated even though they turned out to be bad bets.
Computer systems are living things, and some people don’t tend them to keep them in a healthy state.
We have an overabundance of choice so naturally we complain.