I would like to Report my
personal experiences with Arcaos5 right from the beginning.
Please note:- These are my personal experiences, yours may and will differ
- These are my personal opinions, yours may and will differ
- English is not my mothertongue, so if something sounds harmfull for some People - this is not my Intention!
- I will avoid to use personal emotions, just writing Facts
- It is not my Intention to harm Arcanoae nor anyone else related to the ArcaOS Project!
- I am very happy that at least there IS a new OS/2 Distribution!
- I do have great respect for all those involved in this Project!
- My Intention is to give some Feedback, besides a bug tracker, from a users Point of view
- I will go on with this thread once I have new experiences, just like a diary, but unfrequenty
Before:I was able to get an iso of the ArcaOS5 as soon as it was released on May, the 16th (Europe time, it may have been the 15th in US). Besides other Hobbies one of mine is to collect some Laptops for some years now. As a result I do have a relativ wide range of Hardware from different periods with These I could test the ArcaOS.
I.e:Thinkpads: 701c, Transnote, X41, X200T, W700, X230T, Helix 2, T450S
MSi Wind Netbook
Sony Vaio Pro 13
Samsung Serie 7 Slate PC
Microsoft Surface Pro 4 -> actually this is during the last 6 months the "one and only" Computer I am using any more.
Besides the Helix 2 and the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (both UEFI only without CSM) I was able to install OS/2 Warp 4.52
native on ALL of These devices.
I like to have the "original Software" as well on all devices, so all of them came with the AirBoot Manager and the OS with that those have been released in the past.
But - In the end I do not know exactly why, but I never became a member or the "beta" Team. So my first experience started on May 16th.
Start:I decided to start with the W700 at first. I attach some Pictures here. Unfortunately I still have not figured out how to insert a Picture here inside the text. If someone is interested in (like Martin may be

) one can use the Pictures the way he/she likes.
The W 700 has two HDDs, one with 320GB and one with 1 TB. Windows Vista is preinstalled but I already have spare room for the OS/2 Installation (i.e. used by mine before).
Picture ArcaOS0: here you can see the W700, on the left side the Surface Pro 4.

Picture ArcaOS1: this is one of the preinstall screens, please notice the correct recognation of the Hardware in the bottom of the installer (I marked it manually with red)
Experience:
-
the Installation failed in several tries- Problems occuring:
- the Disc checker was not able to see all of the Hardware
- the Disc checker tells me that it has to fix some of the LVM entries and so on, (please see Picture ArcaOS4) and adviced me to let it be repaired by it

- as this seems to work for Disc one, it never worked for Disc two, so I run into an endless circle where it allways tells me to repair Disc two each time I started the Installation from the beginning
- I once get (by accident?) past this Point and than it says it has to resize one Partition
- I stopped there after already some hours have gone by...
Conclusion: -> I will disassemble Disc two and give it later another trySecond: I started with the T450s, where my cloned Version of Warp 4.52 does make a good Job!
- Picture ArcaOS2: here you can see the T450s, with the Samsung USB DVD drive

- Picture ArcaOS3: the Hardware is detected correct as well (I assume some Kind of BIOS Information is read and displayed here)

It Comes with the Airboot Manager and Windows 8.1. It has two SSDs installed, one with 512 GB, one with 256GB.
Experience:- in the end I got no working Installation again- Pro: - the Installation process itself started from DVD where ecs 2.2b2 mostly failed
- I had at least one succesfull attempt, that leads after a few Moments to a "not usable System"
- I like the small program for the RAMdisk
- Con: - the Disc checker reported Problems as well, it was some Kind of Trial and error to get past this stage
- I do not know why, but it took me several attempts to let the System see the Installation drive
- a "full" Installation was never possible, each time the System stops during Phase 2 of Installation, while copyiing files, at 44%
- Once I got a working System, i discovered the following (no real surprise though)
- all the Things that did not work with my "tailored" System or "ecs 2.2b2" did not work as well (no Sound, no WLAN, so dossession, no winos2, no snap...)
- starting a dossession leads to a unusable System
- starting a winos2 session as well
-
Renaming folders leads to an unusable System -> I never had this before, I just wanted to translate some Folders from english to german - just like "drives" to "Laufwerke", but after that, and a reboot, alle Folders have been empty
- as some hours past away as well I had to stop for the moment
-> Conclusion: I will try to get a working System with as much parts of the System as possible and extract a clone of it. But as well I will try to find a way to install it from DVD on this device.
- Picture ArcaOS5 and ArcaOS6 do Show some of the possbile choices during Installation.


To be continued.