Category Archives: Arca Noae

Arca Noae and Serenity Systems International

For immediate release:

Leesburg, Virginia, USA

Arca Noae, LLC, a Delware-based Limited Liability Company, is pleased to announce the acquisition of the remaining assets of Serenity Systems International, including its domain name. The site is now hosted on the same servers hosting arcanoae.com, the Company history on the About page has been updated, and the links on the main page have also been modified to be more relevant.

We are happy to continue Serenity Systems’ tradition of providing value to OS/2 and eComStation users, whether they be individuals or businesses, and we look forward to welcoming Serenity Systems’ customers to our subscription services.

End of press release.

ACPI package version 3.22.07 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our ACPI Package for OS/2 and eComStation version 3.22.07.

This release addresses the following issues:

Updated the Intel ACPICA code to the current version.
Updated the WarpIn installer to allow installation on both OS/2 and eCS systems.

There are no OS/2 specific changes in this release.

This driver package is available for download from the Arca Noae website as part of your Arca Noae OS/2 & eCS drivers and software package subscription. Please log into your account in order to access your software.

More information about the ACPI software package may be found in the ACPI wiki.

If you haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now.

Current happenings

While our blog posts have been infrequent, our developers, beta testing, and translation teams have been quite busy the past few weeks. Here are some highlights of what’s been going on behind the scenes at Area Noae:

USB: Work is continuing on various USB problems, including the “hub-attached devices” issue.
Graphical update utility (YUMIE): We have been through several more test versions in the past few weeks, and with the help from our friends working on YUM and Python (more on this, below), we are getting closer to a release date, with much of our planned functionality for version 1.0 in place.
Graphical update utility (YUMIE): National Language Support is planned for English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Finnish, Korean, and Japanese, and translators for these languages are engaged and working. We are also hopeful for more languages, such as Russian, Chinese, and Swedish, and continue to seek willing translators.
Outside projects: Arca Noae continues to support the efforts of our strategic partner, bww bitwise works, GmbH, and their excellent work on Firefox and OpenOffice, as well as the ever-growing list of ported applications and tools available from the Netlabs repositories. Our work has intersected theirs regarding the YUMIE project (see above), and they have been extremely responsive to our reports and update requests, enabling us to move forward without delay.
Arca Noae web services: Thanks to the tireless efforts of Paul Smedley and Steven Levine, our web platform grows more stable and robust. We have implemented a number of recent updates to the Apache web server software, including current OpenSSL technology to safeguard our subscribers’ data while communicating with us over the web.
Arca Noae in the news: Look for an upcoming announcement about some new strategies for the Company, and an association with a familiar name.

If you haven’t purchased a subscription for the Arca Noae drivers and software package, now is the time.

USB driver package version 11.09 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our updated USB stack. This interim release (11.09) addresses the following issues:

USBCALLS: Fixed a compatibility problem which made the most recent version of USBCALLS.DLL incompatible with USBRESMG.SYS.
USBRESMGR: Incorporated a small change from Wim Brul.
EHCI: Fixed a queue management problem which would cause some USB transactions to be lost. This was mostly noticed because it would randomly cause keyboards and/or mice to not work depending
on which one got initialized first. Any USB device could be affected, though.
EHCI: Reworked the code that handles BIOS/OS ownership change. No one should notice any difference because of this, but it will help some obscure systems initialize properly.
USBKBD: Fixed a problem with shared devices. In some situations when the mouse and keyboard both were part of the same USB device, the USB keyboard driver would stomp on the mouse interface causing the mouse to stop working.
Some of the USB drivers are not compatible with different versions of other USB drivers. Previously, no checking was done. So if the user mixed incompatible versions, he or she could get a partially working or non-working USB stack, system hangs, or other strange, random problems. Code has now been added to check for compatible versions of certain critical drivers so that they will not blindly try to connect with each other and cause problems.
Reworked and enhanced tracing capability for better debugging support.

There are still a couple of outstanding issues to be addressed, but we felt this interim release was important as some major problems have been fixed.

If you haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now.

Updated roadmap and anticipated changes

We have updated our roadmap to reflect some recent changes in project status, namely the beginning of the beta testing phase of our graphical package management tool, our participation in some very exciting USB development, and our initial investigation of support for some SATA RAID and SAS controllers.

Also of note are some upcoming changes to our store checkout which will soon allow for credit card processing through Authorize.net, a recognized world leader in payment processing. We know that this will be a welcome option for those who prefer not to transact business through PayPal. We anticipate this capability early next year.

Our online store has been open for exactly one month today. The response has been overwhelming, and customer feedback has been of immense help. We continue to work hard to address some lingering issues with server performance and website compatibility across browsers and platforms, and appreciate the valuable input from all reporters.

New store items: bww bitwise works GmbH sponsoring and InJoy Firewall

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of InJoy Firewall, the premier firewall and VPN solution for OS/2, eComStation, Windows, and Linux in our online store. All three licensing options (Personal, Professional, and Enterprise) are available, in all user counts.

In addition, sponsoring bww bitwise works GmbH has never been easier. bww bitwise works is responsible for the ongoing work on the Firefox port for OS/2, Qt, Java, and so many more bits and pieces which make it possible for others to build great software for the platform. 100% of the net proceeds of your sponsoring go to funding this important work.

bww bitwise works GmbH is an Arca Noae strategic partner.

Where’s my stuff?

It may not be apparent if you haven’t yet ordered, but upon completing your order, all of your downloadable products will be accessible from your account page. Just click the Account link on the main menu, log in (if you haven’t already), and your recent orders will be listed on your account page.

Clicking either the order number or the View button will open the details of the order, including handy links to download your software.

Upgrade entitlement for some third-party software in our store

If you are already a registered licensee of Keith Merrington’s SearchPlus, SigmaMD5, or EasySync, there is no need to purchase any of those packages again from us in order to obtain the latest version(s).

Interested upgraders should go to Hobbes and search for the program name(s) and download them there. As of this writing, your existing registration entitles you to free updates. Just download and install.

While you are visiting Hobbes, we encourage you to donate. The Hobbes OS/2 Archive is an all-volunteer effort, and not a university-sponsored project. Thus, Hobbes exists solely from the appreciation of the OS/2 community. Arca Noae fondly acknowledges this longstanding and valuable resource.

Commercial Edition of Arca Noae’s OS/2 & eCS drivers and software package now available

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our popular OS/2 & eCS drivers and software subscription service for commercial enterprises, non-profits, and government agencies.

The Commercial Edition is priced per-system (one physical workstation or server, or one active virtual machine), with volume discounts available. In addition, the commercial edition entitles the subscribing entity to prioritized support and elevated consideration of feature and enhancement requests, as well as requests for new packages.

Subscriptions up to 100 seats can be bought directly from our webstore; please contact sales@arcanoae.com for price quotations of 100 seats or more.

Searching for something? – Try our OpenSearch plugin

As we continue to add content and products to the Arca Noae site and online store, we thought it might be handy to have a way to search that content from Firefox or SeaMonkey (or any other browser which is OpenSearch-compatible).

To add it to your browser, simply follow this link to the Mycroft Project, click the Arca Noae link, and allow the search provider to be added to your browser.