Submitted by Per Arca Noae’s revised release schedule, and as announced at Warpstock 2016, Blue Lion (ArcaOS 5.0) moved into beta testing stage today. The first beta release has been made available to the test team, and we anticipate a rigorous round of installation, modifications, formatting, deletion, disk wiping, and all that other fun stuff which accompanies a healthy beta test.
We do not anticipate a public beta cycle nor are we planning a gamma release or an untold number of release candidates. Instead, we fully expect ArcaOS 5.0 to emerge from beta testing at the end of March and to become generally available at that time.
As mentioned during earlier coverage, ArcaOS is a sort-of continuation of eComStation, since it’s founded by several eCS developers who felt eCS had ground to a halt.
I’d do anything for open OS/2 successor, or at the very least “free as in free beer” one. There are so much fun OS/2 games that have never been ported.
I really do miss OS/2. Stellar Frontier FTW. I remember doing a Stardock competition once that had to do with taking a photo of you and your Stellar Frontier boxed copy. I had mine with all of my other StarDock merch.
But like all OSes I’ve loved, it has OS in it’s name.
Sure, its probably fun to play with. But I’m not expecting much. OS/2 warp and BeOS were both a similar experience to me. Compared to the MS offerings of the day, both shocked me as to how well they ran and the performance they offered. While at the same time, saddening me that critical software packages I needed weren’t available.
My undergrad research project was ported to both.
An alternative OS needs to build a user base. Unless they target a specific market, and do not expect growth (like ATMs, CNC machines, etc) they need to have a free version that students can play with.
The OS has become more or less a commodity. For example, Microsoft realized this, and have been giving away free Windows licenses to universities for about ten years now. We of course have Linux, FreeDOS, Haiku, among others readily available.
And the alternate hardware market has more or less died as well. We have PC and Mac. No more Commodores, Amigas, Sinclairs, Z80s. (Which is another shame). If there were competition on the hardware front, that might have given them an edge, unfortunately that no longer exists.
So if they want to be relevant, and have growth, they need to invest in the next group of users (students).
They should target ARM, specifically the cheap ARM desktops now running Android. OS/2 could squeeze insane performance back in the day from seriously weak hardware, can you imagine what they could do running their own ARM quads or octocores tweaked to give OS/2 max performance?
And with ARM licensing and production so cheap they could probably make a quad core desktop with 256Gb SSD and a couple of GB of RAM for around $100 and still leave them a nice profit while having a system that would be peppy and could do 1080P without issue.
Lets face it with so many only using online applications and websites this could be a good market to target.
No, I can’t imagine that. It was written for x86. Porting and keeping performance sane isn’t easy. ARM is kind of a mess right now as well, even in Android world. Like how there isn’t a single Andriod rom that works on all models. Each model has its own image, due to drivers, and chipset differences.
The Arm server standard being worked on by linaro holds promise to standardize the platform at least for servers, but the hardware is scant.
They don’t have the source code (neither did Serinity Systems)… Porting to anything is a complete pipe dream, even 64-bit x86 is a non-starter. The extent of what they can do to OS/2 is limited to minor assembly level tweaks, drivers, hooking into SOM libraries, and adding software (mostly open source written by others).
They can add things, they can rewrite simple things (like the way they Serenity Systems rebuilt the installer), but they can’t really change anything fundamental.
More people should realize this. I have nothing against what these guys are doing, but it is the equivalent of a Linux distro – they are basically like Red Hat, except they don’t have the source code, the binary packages they are working with are almost 20 years old, and the upstream provider doesn’t want their change sets even if they could make any. There is no bluetooth, no USB 3 (just adding that, if they succeed, will likely be their biggest accomplishment), no real hardware OpenGL, or any 3D support at all, a hard 4GB memory limit unless you use segmentation, a hard 2TB hard drive size limit, no knowledge of GP partitioning, no EFI, no webcams, no tv tuners, etc. etc.
They can only do so much, and frankly what they can do is pretty uninteresting imo. If you pine for a revival of OS/2 I sympathized, but this isn’t that.
Edited 2017-02-08 02:09 UTC
Then they have no chance in hell, simple as that. MSFT is giving away Windows 10 on Atom so cheap X86 is right out (not to mention it looks like we are gonna see another Wintel resurgence as Intel makes more and more features in their newest chips Win 10 only and X86 is being killed off for 64bit chips) and eComestation has a lock on all those legacy systems like ATMs and banks because they have the support contracts and those kind of places don’t switch unless the company shits the bed or fucks up royally.
Their only chance is to find a niche nobody is dominating and carve a space out of it and many of the OEMs that make Android desktops aren’t thrilled with Google because of being forced to have gapps, if they have to stick with rapidly dying X86? Yeah they be fucked, we’ll be reading in a year or two about them closing their doors with many going “who were they again?”
The OS is not a commodity. For it to be a commodity, it would have to be interchangeable. It is often difficult for people to switch to another OS, because hardware and software they depend on may only support MS Windows. Trying to convince people to switch to another OS is like trying to convince people to switch from speaking English to speaking exclusively Esperanto, when all their friends speak English, and the media they read and listen to is all in English. It doesn’t matter how crap English is as a language, or how nice Esperanto is, it’s still a hard sell.
Bad example since E-o is secondary only. (Dual boot, FTW!)
I had other stuff to say, but I couldn’t seem to make a coherent point. Something about the virtues and difficulties of supporting two or more targets (or legacy vs. modern, old vs. new, compatibility vs. innovation), that there’s no one-size-fits-all, etc.
It’s just difficult, period, making things work in computing. And things do change too fast. Even working free solutions are a hard sell. (Hey, OS/2 user, just use Linux! It has WINE, DOSEMU, and various REXXes!)
I wonder what kind of crazy effort would be needed to add to Wine some OS/2 emulation.
Adding WINE to OS/2? That is extremely perverted! That’s like asking to add Windows XP to Windows 95!!
I’m pretty sure it was meant the other way around.
Do not click if your squeamish…
https://trac.netlabs.org/odin32
OS/2 was slightly better than Windows 95, slightly not as good as Windows NT 3.51. With a fraction of the users and a fraction of the software titles. But it was a better DOS than DOS, and it was a better Windows 3.11. than Windows 3.11 so there is that!
OS/2 was significantly ahead of Windows 95– and that was OS/2 Warp (3.x). The 4.x was an improvement over that. Unfortunately, it was DOA when shipped, since you couldn’t even buy an IBM ThinkPad with OS/2 preloaded.
OS/2 should have included TCP/IP support by default as early as the 2.x series, but both Novell and IBM underestimated the impact of TCP/IP.
OS/2 could run win16 binaries as well as windows 95, and OS/2 32-bit native binaries better than NT could run win32 binaries.
All three suffered from DLL hell, but I have yet to meet a desktop as functional as the truly object-oriented Workplace Shell.
In terms of performance, OS/2 desktops could easily run multiple full-frame videos on a single desktop. Today, that’s not saying much, but in 1995, it was pretty damned impressive.
I’m reminded of the old list of “If operating systems were like chickens”:
NT Chicken:
Will cross the road in June. No, August. September for sure.
OS/2 Chicken:
It crossed the road in style years ago, but it was so quiet that nobody noticed.
Win 95 Chicken:
You see different coloured feathers while it crosses, but cook it and it still tastes like … chicken.
Mac Chicken:
No reasonable chicken owner would want a chicken to cross the road, so there’s no way to tell it to.
See http://www.plig.net/things/chickenroad.html for the complete list.
OS/2 – The first OS I every loved. BeOS the second and last one I loved.
OS/2 opened up a new world for me compared to DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows ’95 was like driving backwards on a freeway as there were many things in OS/2 that Win ’95 didn’t have like stability, security, true memory customization for each application.
The only thing Win ’95 had going for it (*** for me ***) was that it looked prettier. OS/2 was always ugly in comparison but ’95 beauty was only skin deep where beauty with OS/2 was as deep as the ocean.
With the writing supposedly on the wall, Describe and other companies stopped updating their applications and there were plenty of things I needed that OS/2 just didn’t have. Like a great video and/or photo editors.
I eventually moved on to Macs but the love affair that I felt with OS/2 just hasn’t been there. I support multiple version of Windows and Macs where I work. You have to pay me quite a bit to use Windows but I still do everything I can use alternate OSs if possible. If I could drop Windows (They require that we have a Windows computer at work. I could pretty easily replace everything on Windows with apps on Mac OS X and for the most part that is what I use every day.) But if I could make room on my crowded desk (two computers with five monitors) I would add OS/2 and wish for BeOS and Amiga.
How about virtualization? I play with all of my (x86) alternate OSes in VirtualBox. (In fact, I do everything in VMs – my host machine is a minimal *nix install.)
“How about virtualization?”
I’ve seriously thought about that and may do that.
OS/2 is my holy grail of OSes I’ve heard lots about, would love to play with, and haven’t ever had the opportunity to. Well, that and VMS.