Tag Archives: tech

Howard Winter joins Arca Noae in Customer Relations

Arca Noae is pleased to announce that we have engaged Howard Winter in our Customer Relations department. Howard will be responsible for answering your pre-sales and order fulfilment inquiries via email and telephone.

Howard brings his years of experience with sales and marketing along with his OS/2 expertise to Arca Noae, enhancing the capability of the Company to handle customer (and potential customer) concerns.

Effective immediately, Customer Relations and pre-sales telephone numbers are:

US: +1 571 758 5218
UK: +44 1727 238802

Expect to see more of Howard online, too.

USB driver package version 11.12 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of release 11.12 of our updated USB stack.

More information about the USB drivers can be found in the wiki.

Highlights of some of the fixes in this release:

  • Changed the way devices are initialized to accommodate some so-called “buggy” devices.
  • Fixed buffer management problems in USBCALLS interface.

The Warpin package has been restructured to work on both OS/2 and eCS systems. Installing an older version after installing this version may cause problems. See the ReadMe.txt file.

As always, problems encountered with this version should be reported to the ticketing system. Simply log in with your Arca Noae credentials, select USB from the list of projects, and open a ticket.

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.

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

USB driver package version 11.11 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of release 11.11 of our updated USB stack.

More information about the USB drivers can be found in the wiki.

Highlights of some of the fixes in this release:

  • Fixed the way errors are handled in USBKBD and USBMOUSE.
  • Fixed a problem with extremely slow devices in USBEHCD, USBOHCD and USBUHCD.
  • Fixed a problem with concurrent device initialization in all the class drivers.
  • Fixed a problem with isochronous transfers in USBOHCD.

The Warpin package has been restructured to work on both OS/2 and eCS systems. Installing an older version after installing this version may cause problems. See the ReadMe.txt file.

As always, problems encountered with this version should be reported to the ticketing system. Simply log in with your Arca Noae credentials, select USB from the list of projects, and open a ticket.

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.

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

USB driver package version 11.10 released

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of release 11.10 of our updated USB stack. This release builds on the work that was done in version 11.09 and contains considerable changes to all the HC drivers and to USBD.

Highlights of some of the more significant changes in this release:

  • USBCALLS: Reworked the way the DLL is built. Fixed a transfer size problem.
  • USBD: Significant changes to the way devices are initialized and how some errors are detected and handled.
  • USBEHCD, USBOHCD, USBUHCD: Significant changes in how some transfers are queued, and how errors are detected and reported. Fixed a problem for Warp4 systems.
  • USBOHCD: Fixed a problem that caused transfers to be lost.
  • USBCOM: Fixed a trap that could occur when certain devices are connected. Fixed an issue that could cause random traps in class drivers.

There are many other less significant fixes and improvements which improve the overall reliability and stability of the entire USB stack.

The Warpin package has been restructured to work on both OS/2 and eCS systems. Installing an older version after installing this version may cause problems. See the ReadMe.txt file.

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.

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

ACPI package version 3.22.07 released

An ACPI packageArca 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.

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.

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.

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.

So, what would you like to see next?

Our mission at Arca Noae is to do what we can to ensure the longest term of usefulness of the OS/2 platform, for both individuals and enterprises. Part of that mission is addressed by updates to existing drivers and applications, part by adding new functionality to those softwares, and part by adding new drivers and/or applications entirely.

What we’d like to know is: What do you need to be able to stay on OS/2?

Other platforms (both closed and open source) tend to follow their own path. A large software developer in the state of Washington in the US decided a couple of years ago that the entire desktop interface was somehow no longer useful, and needed to be scrapped in favor of something completely different, taking a one-size-fits-all approach across desktops and mobiles. Linux has had desktop wars waging for decades between Gnome and KDE, and once Unity appeared, it seemed to draw almost universal scorn from both camps (and somehow, the steering groups of various distros tend to make unilateral decisions insofar as which desktops to include by default in their distros).

Arca Noae is different in that our direction should always be guided by the needs of the community. As we have pledged to reinvest as much of our earnings as possible into further development, we need to regularly solicit input from you, so that we may be assured we are heading in the right direction.

So please drop us a note on our contact page and let us know what you need. We’re listening, we care, and we’re not going away anytime soon.

USB Stack update now available

A sort of USB stackArca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our updated USB stack. This update (11.08) contains fixes for many reported problems and addresses many of the regressions which have occured in recent updates. Specifically:

  • A problem that caused some devices to not be attached was fixed.
  • A problem where USB printers would suddenly stop working has been fixed.
  • A problem with USB drivers sharing an interrupt with other devices was fixed.
  • Resource manager entries are now created for USB keyboards and mice.
  • The USBCALLS DLL was updated.
  • Some changes were implemented to help with the problems detecting keyboards and mice.
  • Fixed a problem where the driver would not work on some UHCI hardware.
  • The ability to do Isochronous transfers was fixed.
  • The USB software is now distributed as a Warpin package.

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