Submitted by Lewis Rosenthal announced at Warpstock that Arca Noae is now licensed by IBM to create a new OS/2 distribution; it is currently codenamed “Blue Lion” and has a tentative release of Q3 2016. It will be based on OS/2 Warp 4.52 (MCP2) and the SMP kernel, with a new installer which does not require floppies or optical media (USB and possibly network installs), the Arca Noae driver updates including ACPI, USB, and MultiMac, and an updated version of SNAP Graphics. Lewis made it clear that there is no agreement between Arca Noae and XEU (formerly Mensys), and they intend to be a better OS/2 distribution than eComstation. Note that eComstation has been effectively dead since December 2013, despite some vague promises earlier this year that 2.2 would finally be released this month.
Not sure if the harsh words for eComStation are entirely warranted, but the long, long release cycle for eCS 2.2 and IBM engaging in this new agreement is, honestly, quite telling.
Not building my hopes up as any OS development is a massive undertaking but the problem I saw with eCs is that pretty much all the development seemed to be tinkering around the edges and I gave up after 2.0 was released.
Would like to see 3D graphics drivers and better support for connectivity like USB 3.0 and WiFi. Presentation Manager needs a major cosmetic overhaul to bring it into the 21st century. Hopefully, AN will be given proper access to the kernel and we can finally see something like 64 bit development.
There is a lot that needs doing but interest in OS/2 and resources have dwindled. Good luck guys; at least you are trying.
I am afraid this is not going to change anytime soon. The problem is OS/2 was meant to be a joint IBM-MS project for a platform to replace DOS. MS changed their mind after Windows had gotten some traction; nonetheless, OS/2 contains MS input and that fact may pose a legal barrier to enable external development of the core OS/2 components. Even if we cast away the above obstacles, I see no business reason to resume OS/2 development. Too much time has passed since IBM abandoned OS/2. The only market left are customers willing to run some trusty and rusty legacy apps and that market is naturally dwindling. Those custiners will be happy with an easy-to-install, VM-friendly OS/2 distro and nothing more.
I highly doubt that will happen. Unless IBM had a serious change of mind, this is just a way to placate a tiny minority of their customers without a whole lot of effort on their part. They licensed eComm to support OS/2, not perform active development and certainly not determine direction of the platform. I don’t see any reason why they would treat anyone else doing it differently.
As far as IBM is concerned OS/2 is deprecated. Part of the responsibility of any 3rd party support contract will be keeping it that way…
I would like to see it go somewhere too (I have fond memories), but that simply isn’t going to happen.
Edited 2015-11-03 00:16 UTC
^ This! I always thought the same, and always hoped to see some progress of this kind on eCS’ side. Although I know the original code is not really that accessible, therefore I wonder how the new developers will do in this respect.
I have a soft spot for OS/2 like many – it’s been the only alternative OS I could gain access to in my first PC days (besides the various (PC)DOS / Windows combinations) and at the time it showcased a slew of pretty rad ideas (shadows. anyone? ;-)) and a good-looking desktop – for that time, at least.
Nowadays, it would be a killer move from IBM (and MS for that matter) to finally opensource it – at this point, can it still be a real threat to anybody’s market control? Has somebody got any interesting thoughts on this?
I concur.
Unless the agreement includes access to the OS/2 Source Code, this venture will have a though time delivering something better/different than what eCS has done so far.
It is unfortunate that this venture is taking such a path rather than collaborating with the eCS team, or even, by contributing to existing OS/2 recreation projects such as Voyager or OSFree.
Funny timing – Back in 1992 IBM came out with the beta for OS/2 2.0 and I LOVED it. In fact, it’s actually the only OS that I’ve truly LOVED working with.
BeOS had some great ideas but died too soon.
Mac OS X is better than Windiows but still has too many issues with Apple killing off features like capitalizing the first letter of every sentence in Pages back in Pages ’09 and they STILL haven’t brought that feature back. Sure it isn’t a big feature but it just one of hundreds of cuts that end up causing me to bleed. But I still like it better than Windows that has tens of thousands of cuts that I can’t stand with it.
I’ve used more than OSs that run on “PC” hardware so I know what I’m talking about. Yes OS/2 has issues, mainly IBM having stupid ads which made most people totally clueless what the ads were about. But I could make OS/2 do pretty much anything that I wanted and I could have it up and running for three years without having to reboot (server and desktop). When was the last time you could say that about a Windows desktop or server? Never!
Anyway, I’m really excited about the possiblity of this coming to market. Even if they make it for business only I’d buy a business license (if it was required) just to buy it.
All of my OS/2 boxes including the 40 OS/2 apps I bought back in the ’90s are still on my shelf. If I can pull them out and install them on this new version that would be great. Of course I’ll be new software too.
I absolutely loved Warp Connect (OS/2 v3.0) – I used it for many years as my desktop of choice. I did programming on it, and also ran my BBS on it for some 4 years.
I still have OS/2 VM’s of v2.1, v3.0 and v4.5 available. I still fire up v4.5 every now and again to do some INF testing. I implemented my own cross-platform INF viewer called DocView for the fpGUI Toolkit project, and want to stay backwards compatible with original OS/2 INF files.
DocView screenshots:
[http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/screenshots_apps.shtml]
Edited 2015-11-03 17:54 UTC
As someone who developed an ATM (automated teller machine) solution which ran on OS/2, the only compiler/linker chain that were available came from IBM, and they were pretty nice for their time. What other options are out there? When I do a search, all I see is what comes from eCommerce.
Watcom Compiler was open sourced and an OS/2 version is still being developed
http://www.openwatcom.org/
Apart from that GCC has been ported
http://os2ports.smedley.id.au/index.php?page=gcc
Take a look at the Free Pascal project [http://www.freepascal.org]. I use it in my daily work and personal projects – it is brilliant. And let me just say… It is Object Pascal – NOT the Pascal from the 90’s. Object Pascal is modern and up to date with any current language out there.
Free Pascal also supports something like 15+ types of CPU targets (from RPi’s to IBM Mainframes) and even more OS platforms. OS/2 definitely being one of them.
There is also WDSybil – another Visual Development Environment. It includes a compiler, ide, visual components etc. [http://www.wdsibyl.org/]. I think the latest version actually uses the Free Pascal Compiler now.
What are you talking about? The 90s? You must mean the 80s. I haven’t done any Pascal development since 1994, but even back then Turbo Pascal 5.5 and 6.0 had been released for several years and both of them were basically Object Pascal–they certainly supported objects. Delphi 1.0 was released in February 1995. Turbo Pascal was the tool I used to learn OOP.
I was very much into BBS’s between 1989-1994, and a LOT of software was written in Pascal in those days. If it used Objects I don’t really remember. All I remember is that it was DOS or OS/2 command line programs, written mostly with Turbo Pascal or Virtual Pascal.
Lets then rephrase it as: “It’s not the Pascal from the 70’s and 80’s!“. 😉
Edited 2015-11-06 20:01 UTC
Object Pascal is from the 80’s? If you are referring to Delphi (a proprietary version/derivative of Object Pascal) then no, Free Pascal isn’t fully compatible.
Discussing what’s a modern language and not is complicated as many “modern” features existed in older languages and some “features” really aren’t.
Indeed. All I meant with that statement was that it supports things like pure Interfaces, full OOP, Generics, Anonymous Methods, Windows COM any many more. It is suitable for Embedded environments all the way to Mainframe systems. Console, Services/Daemons, Web and Desktop applications included. It also has a very rich Runtime environment and huge Free Component Library (non-visual) all included as standard.
Interesting news.
Interesting.
However, what is behind the selection of the “Blue Lion” code name for the distribution?
It seems that one can interpret “blue” as coming from the IBM side of the original OS/2 venture and “lion” as making allusion to the Microsoft side attempting to replicate the Apple OS experience (which use felines for OS X code names until recently)?
Just to say that the comments re eCS in the article are quoted verbatim from the news item, they are not something I added! 😉
I’m hoping that they can price this at a point that is more attractive to casual users than the current eCS price point. I’m still on eCS 1.2R because even the update price is somewhat steep for hobbyist use. This might be out of their control if IBM dictate the base price per unit, mind.
To Sparrowhawk specifically, there was no harsh words used in the presentation at warpstock directed at any of the ECS developers or distributors.
The most negative in the en it’s entirety was only “they are our main competitors, and our goal is to provide a better product” and that is just a applaudable intention to set for any business.
If you want to watch it all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9-oyli_lzQ
Edited 2015-11-03 19:23 UTC
As I said in my comment, the quote was taken verbatim from the news feed – I didn’t want anyone thinking it was my opinion
I saw the Warpstock presentation video and as you say it did not seem negative
The good news is that Blue Lion is already making headlines on some of the bigger tech sites such as Ars Technica and Slashdot.
I’ll be buying a license myself if, as I mentioned before, they can hit a decent price point and also get broad hardware support including wireless.
Correction: not Ars, The Register.
I had both tabs open when I posted the above comment and got confused.