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Upcoming OS/2 Release Will Be Called ArcaOS 5.0 (techrepublic.com)
At the annual convention of OS/2 users, Arca Noae announced their new OS/2-OEM distribution will be released in the fourth quarter of 2016, and the project, codenamed "Blue Lion", will officially be called ArcaOS 5.0. "The significance of the version number relates to IBM OS/2 4.52 -- the last maintenance release of the platform released by IBM in 2001," reports TechRepublic. martiniturbide writes: The article discusses the features of ArcaOS like USB bootable installer, USB (1.1 and 2) , ACPI, AHCI, and network card drivers, new OS installer, etc. It will be sold in two editions: ArcaOS Commercial Edition [with 12 months of priority support and updates] and ArcaOS Personal Edition...
Anyone have fond members of OS/2? Are there any Slashdot readers who are still using it?
Anyone have fond members of OS/2? Are there any Slashdot readers who are still using it?
It has a funky memory management system and I'm not sure why anyone wold want to use it now over *NIX. The synchronous input que on the GUI basically doomed it (not counting IBM), but otherwise was pretty nice for the time and fun.
Honestly, I was fond of OS/2 by the time it was the principal opponent to Win, but nowadays who would like to use an OS that was frozen for the last 25 years ?
Worked on a port of an asset management package written in DOS to Windows 3.1 and OS/2 in the early 90's, coding C++ for both.
I remember a sales guy wanted to impress with its multitasking capabilities by running installers of 4 applications at once, with another half-dozen running concurrently. It ground to a swapping halt. Still, using it overall, quite impressive capabilities on that front for the time, probably rivaled only by the Amiga in terms the consumer-level arena. Preferred coding for it over Windows MFC, as well.
Regrettably, by 2005 when working at IBM, I encountered no evidence it had ever existed. Windows and Linux boxes only, and the topic never brought up. Seems that history could have gone quite differently, with the right resources at the right time.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
We would all be using it. If only ms fucked up nt 4.
No,
I remember spending a week or so trying to get 0S/2 Warp working on allegedly supported hardware, could never get the graphics driver out of 640x480 16 colours, networking was flaky (to say the least), so the guy I was setting it up for asked about Linux, a day or so later produced a Caldera Network Desktop disc, and the rest, as they say, is history (They later switched to Redhat). Asking around at the time, I couldn't get any sensible answers as to why it didn't work, ISTR a lot of other people had hardware issues with OS/2.
Next job, several years later, two OS/2 machines were the bane of my existence (the Windows team refused to look at them, so they fell within my purview), First one, you so much as looked at it the wrong way, it went into snafu (and took the equipment it was running with it, at a horrendous cost per hour..no choice, the control software was OS/2 only and the company no longer existed). Just firing up the machine to run this equipment was like preparing for a fscking space launch. The other, I'll have to admit wasn't so much the OS itself which caused me grief, more the user..and anyone who has had the misfortune of supporting the sole OS/2 zealot in an organisation will tell you that Windows zealots have nothing on them...maybe VMS zealots come close, just maybe, (especially ones who have the only VAX cluster in the organisation in their office...and they're the sole user)
So again, no, OS/2 was fucked up in its own right, it would never have been a serious alternative choice if Microsoft had fucked up NT4
We would all be using it. If only ms fucked up nt 4.
MS did, and we don't use OS/2.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I know this is /. but it is almost 2016. At this point I think we need to assume that OS/2 is just another weird IT acronym that needs to be defined in the summaries for those who don't realise that it's more than just another app in the Appstore.
OS/2 is that thing like a small DIN plug for connecting a mouse, right? I have a PC somewhere with those.
I don't use it - loading the coal is really messy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
By the time I got ahold of a copy, it was quite some ways behind NT4 on useful desktop software, and lightyears behind on drivers.
The copy I had was a floppy diskette based installer set, with some ungodly number of diskettes in it. I remember wondering about the similarities between HPFS and NTFS.
Mostly, it felt like windows 3.1 with a 32bit UI instead of a 16 bit one, very ancient windows app support, and very little native apps.
I suppose it could have gone somewhere had IBM actually gone hard-nosed about it after being snubbed my MS when they released NT4. NT4 had some nasty warts-- no PnP support, No USB support, and a number of others. A proper reboot of the OS/2 ecosystem with proper win32 app support, WDM driver support (So it could use windows drivers, even if just using a wrapper to do so) along with proper OpenGL, USB, and PnP support would have gone a long way back in the day.
These days the features of OS/2 are so obsolete it isn't even funny. ReactOS is extreme bleeding edge alpha, and would be more useful than an OS/2 deployment.
The real windows alternatives out there today are OSX and Linux.
You don't see too many active OS/2 installs anymore, but years ago it was difficult to find an ATM that ran on anything else. The biggest business case was for those companies that ran IBM mainframes - Communication Manager/2 made it relatively easy to get OS/2 boxes to co-exist with them, which I'm sure contributed to the aforementioned popularity as an OS for ATMs. Additionally, if you had MS-DOS applications that required a specific version, the primitive VM support allowed you to run several different versions in separate windows.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I remember that you could also run Windows apps but first had to install Windows 3.11 inside OS/2.
The funny thing was that you could often get better performance running Windows software within OS/2 as opposed to a native install under DOS.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
...held in the phone booth behind the convention center...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem with OS2 has always been crap drivers. Linux did not hav ethis problem because the community releasing drivers and every user had the ability to compile one. OS/2 did not give you that ability so you were stuck.
Any side OS needs drivers, and the device makers will not write them for you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Just give it lots of RAM. 16M minimum.
I guess that's lots... when you're looking for SIMMs.
If it is possible for you please contact me at martin-os2world.com. I'm trying to consolidate all OS/2 knowledge on some Wikis. If you have some documentation that is not public I can ask formal permission to IBM to release it. Regards.
I haven't used OS/2 in many years, since around 2000 I'd say. Installation was always a challenge but once it was running it was solid and a fun system to use. I had custom built a computer specifically for OS/2 with a Pentium Pro 200 MHz, Matrox Millenium II video and Sound Blaster AWE64 which I ran for quite a long time. I'm looking forward to playing with this release although I admit it won't be a primary or even secondary OS for me at all.
In the mid-90's into the mid-2000's, OS/2 was very popular in the banking industry. I'd say about half of my customers ran OS/2 on the teller's machines and most other desktops that had to do with customer data (most likely because most of these banks used IBM AS/400 Mainframes, and the clients to these apps were written for OS/2). I started seeing a lot of banks switch to Windows-based PCs in the mid 2000's, then connecting to the mainframes via terminal software.
I bet you didn't really run linux around that time. It was very rare that mainstream hardware actually worked. Winmodems & hp inkjets *shiver*.
A friend of mine and I both used OS/2 as a DOS multitasker for running FidoNet BBSes back in the '90s. I remember one time he was unable to install because he had an Oak brand VGA card which was somehow not 100% compatible with the IBM original. I never really cared much for it other than it was probably the best multitasking environment for DOS programs. I still have that old PC stowed away somewhere, and it still boots OS/2.
As far as OS/2 being fucked up, I would say that the blame lays mostly with IBM, including their original requirement to run the 286, just as the 386 was becoming the hot thing. (Microsoft's ambitions didn't help things get better, either.) The 286 was honestly a very dumb design on the part of Intel, if only because of the 64K segment size. The other dumb thing about the 286 was ignoring the base of real-mode code out there that did tricks to get over that 64K segment size. You literally had to reboot the machine and have BIOS check a flag bit in the CMOS to get back to real mode, which shows just how far the heads of the 286 design team were up their asses.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The kernel was 32 bit. The only 16 bit piece left as of OS/2 4 was the HPFS driver.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There were two versions of OS/2 Warp. One came with Windows 3.1 built in, and that version was legendary for the fact that it could run Windows apps faster than a native Windows system (the rumor I heard was that it was because IBM had recompiled Windows 3.1 with the Watcom compiler). The other version, which I owned, was cheaper, but required you have a copy of Windows 3.1, and then OS/2 could use its native DOS support to run Windows apps. You could also run the Windows apps either in the IBM GUI where they would be managed alongside OS/2 windows, or you could run it full screen.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If BeOS can live a zombie life as Haiku, why can't we have a zombie version of OS/2 as well?
Actually most of the drivers were 16-bit. The network and disk drivers were all 16-bit. I know because I worked on them. There was no easy way to write 32-bit drivers in OS/2 (at least through OS/2 4.0 and whatever the next release was called.
It was a real PITA since I worked on a very large driver (around 100,000 lines of C++) and had to make sure classes could fit in a 64K segment. The driver was around 1MB in size. C++ on the other hand was even more tricky. While it worked out well I was limited to only being able to use Watcom C++ 10.0B, not revision C or later. The originator of the codebase did a lot of work so the C++ code could be used.
My experience with C++ in a driver was actually a very positive experience. It made doing a number of things much easier and I wish it were more mainstream.
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