Arca Noae is modernizing OS/2 Warp for 21st century PCs

Retro Tech Week Although the creator of OS/2 now owns Red Hat and has different fish to strive, OS/2 lives on. The Reg spoke with Arca Noae’s Lewis Rosenthal concerning the problems with updating OS/2 Warp for trendy PCs in 2023 – and past.

OS/2 has had an extended and generally troubled historical past, which The Register checked out in depth when the OS turned 25. IBM stopped promoting OS/2 Warp again within the early a part of this century, however that wasn’t the tip of the road for this indomitable OS.

After IBM stopped promoting even the server model, eComStation continued assist, and later supplied their very own up to date model, and had plans for additional modernization.

After that, Arca Noae picked up the baton with what was initially codenamed Blue Lion. It went on to supply it for sale as Arca OS 5.

The present model, Arca OS 5.0.7, can boot straight and set up from a USB key, which is a primary for the OS/2 household – and a major assist.

On 64-bit {hardware}, Arca OS can use PAE to show reminiscence over 4GB into a big, very quick RAMdisk. Version 5.1 is presently in beta testing, and can assist set up on UEFI-only machines and onto GPT disks – which means that it might probably assist media over 2TB in measurement.

For Retro Tech Week, The Reg FOSS desk spoke with Rosenthal about what the corporate was doing with OS/2 at present. He instructed us about what Arca Noae needed to do to be able to enable this 32-bit OS to put in and run on current-generation {hardware}, together with trendy browsers, Open Office, Samba for SMB networking over TCP/IP, and extra.

He additionally instructed us about what sort of prospects want Arca OS at present, and the way helpful it may be to DOS and 16-bit Windows software program straight on trendy {hardware}. ®