Category Archives: News

New product announcement: S/390 Backup Facility

Do you still run an IBM System/390 mainframe, or more specifically, an IBM Multiprise® 3000, with an OS/2-based Support Element? How much time could you spare in the event of a hardware failure, to recover to a standby system?

Arca Noae’s S/390 Backup Facility is a self-booting, self-contained, no-installation-required, CD-based utility, providing for the quick backup and restore of one of these original Single Board Computer systems or a more modern replacement.

Built on ArcaOS, this invaluable application suite brings you peace of mind and system recovery capability as never before. Back up to multiple USB devices & restore the entire disk array, including all partition data and files, or just a single partition. In fact, if all you need to recover is a single file, that’s easily done, as well.

Licensing for the S/390 Backup Facility is per-site, so with one purchase, all IBM Multiprise® 3000 Support Elements in the same location are protected. One full year of technical support is also included.

New MultiMac NIC driver package (20181126) released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new release of our MultiMac NIC driver package.

This is a maintenance release of the MultiMac drivers. It contains some minor updates to the system libraries that affects system stability and reliability and applies to all drivers. Specifically this update fixes a defect that affected accessing devices that use port I/O. Port I/O is only used on a few old NICs. Modern NICs do not use port I/O so this update will not affect most systems. If your network device is currently working, you will not see any change with this update. However if you have an older network card that is supposed to work but doesn’t, this update might fix that. This update is recommended for all users.

As always, please read the .txt file that comes with each driver and also provided on the wiki. If you have problems with any of the drivers in this release, please read the Debugging Guide in the wiki first. If your problem cannot be resolved with the Debugging Guide, then the problem should be reported to the ticketing system.

More information about the MultiMac NIC drivers may be found in the wiki.

If you have ArcaOS, this driver package is available for download from the Arca Noae website as part of the Support & Maintenance subscription for your ArcaOS product. Please log into your account and see your ArcaOS order details page to access your software.

If you have an Arca Noae OS/2 & eCS Drivers and Software Subscription, this driver package is available for download from the Arca Noae website as part of your Arca Noae OS/2 & eCS Drivers and Software Subscription. Please log into your account in order to access your software.

If you are still running OS/2 and/or eComStation systems and haven’t yet purchased a software subscription, this is a great reason to do so now. It may also be a good time to consider moving up to ArcaOS.

It’s Black Friday… Time for our annual Black Friday Sale!

Welcome to Arca Noae’s second Black Friday Sale!

If you’ve been waiting to get an ArcaOS license, either as a return to OS/2 after a long absence or because you’ve heard the buzz about the breakthrough Blue Lion distribution, or even if you’re a current ArcaOS licensee and want an additional license or two — or three — for some other systems, now is the time.

ArcaOS 5.0 personal edition licenses are on sale for just $109 from now through Sunday, November 25. Personal edition licenses include six months of support and updates, and after that, annual support renewals are available for a great price.

ArcaOS 5.0 commercial edition licenses are on sale for just $195 from now through Sunday, November 25, and include a full year of support and updates.

Get your ArcaOS licenses while they’re available at these great discounts!

Panorama Video Driver Package version 1.11 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our Panorama Video Driver Package for OS/2 and eComStation version 1.11.

This is a maintenance release containing a minor BIOS workaround and screen object enhancements. This update is not critical but will bring Panorama in your system up-to-date with the recently released version of ArcaOS. If you have ArcaOS version 5.0.3 then you already have this update.

More information about the Panorama Package may be found in the Panorama wiki.

Arca Noae at Warpstock 2018 in Calgary…and an ArcaOS Sale

This year’s Warpstock event is scheduled for September 14-16 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.There will be several sessions devoted to getting the most out of ArcaOS and OS/2, in general.

To celebrate this year’s event, Arca Noae will be running a sale on ArcaOS personal and commercial licenses for the duration of Warpstock, Friday through Sunday. This is a great time to get in on this fresh and exciting OS/2 release or to pick up additional licenses for more stations. ArcaOS 5.0.3 was recently released, and the first beta for 5.0.4 is already in testing. Version 5.1 is scheduled for release in 2019, with a host of new features planned, including NLVs for several popular languages.

More information about Warpstock, its history, past speakers and presentations, and this year’s event may be found on the Warpstock site.

If you can’t join us in Calgary, be sure to watch the live feed on the WarpEvents page on YouTube.

Once there, locate the WarpStock 2018 Live Stream URL.

Users with OS/2 can watch the stream in two ways:

Firefox with Flash pointing to the WarpEvents site; or
Grab the YouTube URL and play it in VLC (preferred; get the latest VLC, ported by KO Myung-Hun, from Hobbes).

To ask questions during the live event, use the #netlabs channel on IRC.

There will be up to date information on OS/2 World and the following social networks:

ACPI Driver Package version 3.23.10 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our ACPI Driver Package for ArcaOS, OS/2, and eComStation version 3.23.10.

The following is a brief summary of the changes in this release. Please see the ACPI Driver ReadMe for details about this update.

Minor change to PCI setup to not disable unassigned interrupts.
Enhanced Daemon Power Manager to check for interferance from external programs.
Changed to only enable needed GPEs.
Implemented a fix for the IPI timeout problem.
Updates to the ACPICA module from Intel.

This is an important update that should be installed by everyone.

AHCI Driver Package version 2.05 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our AHCI Disk Driver Package version 2.05 for ArcaOS, OS/2, and eComStation.

This release contains minor updates including:

Changes to debug output for debug versions.
Remove init time interrupt requirement.

This is a non-critical update. This release brings the released version of the AHCI driver in line with what is already included in ArcaOS 5.0.3. If you are running ArcaOS 5.0.3 then you already have this version.

More information about the AHCI Disk Package may be found in the AHCI wiki.

Arca Noae FAT32 driver added to subscription content

With the release of ArcaOS 5.0.3, Arca Noae included a new, slimmed-down version of the OS/2 FAT32 driver. This driver is based on the same code as the Netlabs FAT32 driver, but with non-FAT32 support removed. In other words, it is just a FAT32 installable filesystem driver.

Arca Noae provides support for this FAT32 driver, and the installable package is available is available for both the OS/2 and eCS Drivers & Software subscription and the ArcaOS Support and Maintenance subscription. Just log into your account and visit your subscription order page.

This driver is not an upgrade. It includes a complete vendor change, requiring the existing driver to be uninstalled first before installing the Arca Noae driver. Note that uninstalling any previous driver will remove critical elements from the PATH and LIBPATH statements in CONFIG.SYS. Please review the uninstall actions in WarpIN carefully before proceeding, and always have a backup of critical system files available.

More information is available in the Arca Noae FAT32 wiki.

Don’t have a support subscription? Have non-ArcaOS OS/2-based systems and want new drivers and software? Please visit our store.

Critical fix available for ArcaOS 5.0.3 installations from DVD requiring USB keyboard and/or mouse

We have identified and corrected an issue in our production build system affecting the ArcaOS 5.0.3 ISO resulting in missing USB driver files normally loaded when booting from DVD.

If you normally install from USB flash drive or directly from the ISO you do not require this fix to install.

If, however, you normally install from DVD or from the ISO into a virtual machine which requires USB keyboard and/or mouse emulation, this fix is required in order to load the USB stack for the installation process.

The ending installation is exactly the same, with or without this fix, as no changes to anything installed to the local drive(s) have been made. This is only for the purpose of booting from the installation DVD and navigating through the installer.

Unfortunately, this fix requires a full download of a fresh ISO, as there is no practical way of inserting this small fix in an existing ISO or DVD. As a result, all currently cached ISOs here have been expired. At your convenience, please log into your customer portal, access your ArcaOS order from the Orders & Subscriptions page, and request a fresh ISO.

We apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused, and thank you very much for your patience. Thanks also to those who reported the issue to us.

We’re celebrating the release of ArcaOS 5.0.3 with a Sale!

The release today of ArcaOS 5.0.3 seems like a great time to celebrate with a sale! How can you lose? Get the best build of ArcaOS to date and at a great price!

ArcaOS 5.0 personal edition licenses are on sale for just $109 from now through Wednesday, August 22. Personal edition licenses include six months of support and updates, and after that, annual support renewals are available for a great price, with their own built-in renewal discounts.

ArcaOS 5.0 commercial edition licenses are on sale for just $195 from now through Wednesday, August 22, and include a full year of support and updates. As with personal licenses, annual support is available at a discounted price for timely renewals.

Get your ArcaOS licenses today!