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ArcaOS 5.0 now available: new OS/2 distribution
- donpdonp 9y agothe pricing model is also from the 1980s.
- subway 9y agoPricing is cheaper than or on par with most other closed source operating systems.
- gtirloni 9y agoI think the pricing is okay for those interested. I just can't find a way to download a trial ISO or something that will let me experiment. I guess their target audience already knows very well what to expect.
- sixothree 9y agoAs is the website. I like how they describe the new graphical features without including a single screenshot. EDIT: To be sure, I'm genuinely interested in what it looks like.
- guilt 9y agoTheir installation Guide has some previews: https://www.arcanoae.com/wp-content/uploads/wiki/ArcaOS50_InstallationGuide.pdf https://www.arcanoae.com/wp-content/uploads/wiki/ArcaOS50_In...
- rmrk 9y agoAre there orgs out there still running OS/2 ?
- monocasa 9y agoThe grocery store I worked at as a teenager had an OS/2 frontend to an AS/400 that was hooked into all of the cashier stations and inventory management. I doubt that they've replaced it.
- Zardoz84 9y agobanks
- Grazester 9y agoI believe the New York MTA use OS2 for their MTA metro card activity
- notmtaemployee 9y agoThey run Windows NT 4 on the mvm and even have a custom badged start up screen http://salim.virji.net/pix/transit/mta/crashed_metrocard_vending_machine_closeup.jpg http://salim.virji.net/pix/transit/mta/crashed_metrocard_ven... The OS/2 stuff is used on the back end of the metro card system.
- Grazester 9y agoAh so they use OS/2!
- discreditable 9y agoOur voicemail server is OS/2. :(
- ch_123 9y agoThe eComStation site lists some orgs who are using it - http://ecomstation.com/ http://ecomstation.com/
- dmix 9y ago> Belgacom, Belgium Wasn't that the one NSA hacked?
- mhd 9y agoUsed to be quite popular with ATMs, so I wouldn't be surprised if a few of those still survived for banks where they connect to IBM mainframes.
- ams6110 9y agoIIRC it was pretty popular for running Lotus Notes. But who uses that anymore either?
- adrianN 9y agoIt's called IBM Notes now, and people do indeed still run it.
- techrich 9y agoSomeone will buy it that has some really old hardware attached to a machine that they just cannot let go.
- mhd 9y agoSo this is the same deal as with eCos, i.e. the provider doesn't have source access to the innards and just fiddles with some common drivers and desktop tools?
- jccalhoun 9y agoAccording to their About page https://www.arcanoae.com/about/ https://www.arcanoae.com/about/ : Arca Noae was founded in July, 2014 when several of the developers who previously worked on the eComStation project felt that the future for the platform looked bleak, a feeling which came about due to lack of progress (or any work being done at all), therefore demonstrating a distinct lack of commitment on the part of the project’s new owner.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- PeCaN 9y agoA new kernel with SMP support suggests they have at least some source access.
- mhd 9y agoThere were versions of OS/2 with SMP support, if I remember correctly.
- PeCaN 9y agoI thought it was just the PowerPC one (which had a different, Mach-based kernel), but it turns out¹ that it has had some sort of SMP support since 2.11 in 1993. 1. http://www.edm2.com/0509/smp2.html http://www.edm2.com/0509/smp2.html
- acdha 9y agoIn 1997 I had a dual Pentium 90 running either OS/2 or BeOS. It was really cool seeing the CPU monitor light up during a big compile. (I got better at picking operating systems)
- aidenn0 9y agoTIL that ALSA is available under LGPL (Uniaud, the sound-system in ArcaOS is ALSA based).
- richard_todd 9y agoThe problem I have with these OS/2 "modernizing" projects is how the feature-set locks them out of 64-bit long mode. I think the only way to really try to revitalize OS/2 is to jump to 64-bit and seamlessly run 16-bit apps in a VM/emulator. But at that point you might as well just run OS/2 in a VM, which works really well even on free options like VirtualBox. So it seems like there is only a small and shrinking audience for a native 32-bit OS/2.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- shawnbaden 9y agoI was reminded of this (http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/ http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the...) when OS/2 turned 25 in 2012. So this year marks its 30th anniversary. From page 3: > In New York City’s subway system, for instance, the travelers who gain entrance by swiping their MetroCards over 5 million times each weekday do so with the assistance of IBM’s theoretically defunct software.
- hsivonen 9y agoClassic Mac OS seems to be the system from that era that's no longer available. There's still Amiga systems on the market. RISC OS is available for Raspberry Pi. DOS lives on in the form of FreeDOS. And now there are two OS/2 distributions (eComStation and ArcaOS).
- ianlevesque 9y agoAs someone who extensively used classic Mac OS, I really don't miss it though.
- yuhong 9y agoThe fun thing is that OS/2 2.0 would have easily beat classic Mac OS if MS did not turn it into an entire fiasco.
- AkirIkasu 9y agoYou can't forget BeOS, currently alive in the form of the open-source reimplementation Haiku. In spite of their perpetual Alpha status, I'm still continuously amazed that it's even half as good as it is.
- IntelMiner 9y agoDo they actually have access to the source code? Or are they just sort of propping it up blindly and hoping the features they add hold together
- quantum_state 9y agoIs there anything OS/2 can do but other OS cannot do? Hope to be enlightened ... :-)