Submitted by When the Blue Lion project was announced at the American WarpStock in October 2015, the name was only temporary. Following the close of events at WarpStock Europe, Arca Noae managing member Lewis Rosenthal noted in an interview that the final product name for the new OS/2 distribution is 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.
ArcaOS 5.0 is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2016, but Blue Lion remains as a code name, in much the same way “Wily Werewolf” is the code name of Ubuntu 15.10.
ArcaOS is a sort-of continuation of eComStation, since it’s founded by several eCS developers who felt eCS had ground to a halt.
Does Arca Noae have source to the OS/2 kernel, or are they just providing a new installer and set of drivers? More to the point, if a critical security issue was discovered in the kernel, would they be able to fix it? Given its age, I’d be shocked if there were no such issues in OS/2.
Given the careful wording on their “About” page, I would assume they don’t have access to the kernel source.
But, some progress is better than no progress, right?
Progress to nowhere… yay! 😉
No man, they have USB 1.1 support, so they are on the fast path to 1998.
Er,got something wrong on the internet. Not that it matters
Edited 2016-06-01 03:47 UTC
Sadly, they don’t have access to the source code so they can only do binary patches.
This is a 32-bit kernel that is/was basically meant to compete with Win2K. It is not really interesting anymore.
“Arca Noae, an organization run by veterans of the OS/2 ecosystem, obtained a license from IBM to sell a new distribution of that OS, which at present is codenamed Blue Lion.”
As usual, “to sell”. Given the code was so encumbered with Microsoft stuff, I doubt anyone other than IBM will ever get the source code to do things like that. Let alone during a time when it will matter in the grand scheme of things.
Nice. And only if there is an OS/2-like free operating system.
http://www.osfree.org/
Emphasis Mine
Someone is still doing commits to the SVN, though. Saw commits form the 28th in there.
It’s currently a one-man project ATM. I believe it had more developers in the past
I initially came to write about the uselessness of this, but after a quick read it seems they are actually working on things that seem usefull: Installer, Drivers and hardware support. Their pricing model also seems better than similar projects.
Not needing floppies to install this, having USB and Sata/AHCI support and working on Wifi seems pretty impressive. It reminded me of the fun I had with hacking together BartPE CD-ROMS.
Does anyone have any idea how big the market for “people that want to pay for a better way to run OS/2 software” is? Apparently enough to organize something like WarpStock!
You haven’t needed floppies since Warp 4.51 or a separate Boot CD since eComStation. USB came in with OS/2 Warp and SATA support pretty much shortly afterwards as a free third party option. To be honest, there doesn’t appear to be very much new in the initial ArcaOS release, but it would be surprising since it is a transitional release from eCS. More about tidying up and preparing for what Arca intends and is capable of doing with its resources.
As for the market, it seems to have dwindled to enthusiasts but there does appear to be some corporate interest. Most newer apps seem to be ports from Linux.
[Where’s my VHS?].
Best wishes to Blue Lion Team, on attracting a healthy ecosystem.
Once again, OS/2 sees commercial interest (someone paid to get that IBM license to sell it again) and BeOS doesn’t.
OS/2 had corporate customers.
BeOS, not so much. (yeah, yeah, I know there were a few A/V products but it didn’t have time to entrench in the marketplace like OS/2 did in a few sectors before the plug was pulled.)
@BryanV – You know they shipped it on Dells and Toshibas. I know you do. They count as commercial.
Unfair on my view, Kancept. Even if Communities up to the highest ideals. Everyone [of Us, also] could be subject to power pressures.
True
I miss (not) the 38 “floppy” disk installs.
I’m not joking. If you installed EVERYTHING you could with the package that had the most there were at least 38 1.44 mb floppies. Or were they 2.88 mb floppies?
OS/2 is the only OS that I actually fell in love with (not physically perverts). Every OS before and since got at best a like (Amiga, BeOS, Mac OS X – definitely not Windows).
I still remember the day that I saw the beta for OS/2 2.0 at the IBM building in Seattle, WA. This is when Windows 3.11 was king (ugh!!!) and it totally (OS/2) blew me away.
I got a copy of it either that day or soon after and installed it on one of my 386 computers and it ran faster and better than Win 3.11. Not starting up but once it was running DOS programs were faster, Windows programs were faster, and OS/2 programs … well Win 3.11 couldn’t run those. And OS/2 was FAR more stable than Win 3.11. But then stable and Windows isn’t something that really went together until Windows NT. But it still wasn’t better than OS/2.
When I got a 486 I found that I could do more on one OS/2 2.0 computer than I could do on 4 Win 3.11 computers with the exact same specs of hardware and memory. But then OS/2 could access all the RAM and I don’t think Win 3.11 could or it just did it so poorly … I’m getting redundant again.
I also found code on IBM’s bulletin board that allowed you to configure 8 or more USB ports. I also found source code for making it so that you could use four modems on each side (one local OS/2 computer, one remote OS/2 computer) where the four acted as one. I acquired the hardware that I needed and then with some extra coding and fixing several bugs that stumped for me awhile, I was able to get eight modems acting like one with about 30% overhead (at the time with modem protocols that was pretty good). I worked on that because we had dial up lines connecting servers (late 80s to early 90s because the bank I worked for wasn’t ready to buy leased lines to all the branches. I got it all set up at three of them and then they did buy leased lines. But I did show management and they were impressed. But then that wasn’t needed anymore. Still, it was a fun exercise. PS: I “borrowed” modem lines from people’s desks to show proof of concept. I was a stretch to get all those to the server closet but it was really cool.
Windows of any version never did the 8 modem test and kept it working overnight that I know of. I did. Probably the crowning achievement of my life because I don’t know of anyone else that did it. Everything else I could do could be done or at least was done by someone else.
It was a sad, sad, did I mention sad? day when IBMs stupidity and infighting caused them to declare that they weren’t updating OS/2 anymore. I still have all the boxes and in about 2006 my last PC that ran it died and I just didn’t replace it. Yes eComStation has been out and I tried their demo CDs but never bit. Maybe I’ll bite this time. I just have to find a PC where MS doesn’t get a penny from it and I think I will jump.
Edited 2016-06-01 16:42 UTC
Good engineering behind OS/2. But as said before of SUN, blindly, sadly focused on the engineering. An OS for the masses required of an merchandising strategy for the masses. Even SUN had his better chance at this. Missed ‘window’
One of the lead Bank Systems at my Country clinched to OS/2 until they teared it from their cold, dead hands.
[Are you sure OS/2 is dead meat, IBM wise?]
I fully agree.
[Corporations are so bad at scaling down. Why?]
Yeah my experience was similar. It was insanely good.
But honestly, I loved MS DOS 4, win 3, OS2, win nt, BeOS, Linux, FreeBSD. They were all magical in their own way.
OS/2 was $299 versus Windows 3.11 at $120 when I was building my first PC running an actual GUI-based OS. There really wasn’t anything else at the store to buy. Either supported the software I had. Both supported my old DOS software. Money was an issue.
Edited 2016-06-05 19:54 UTC