I hadn't worked with OS/2 in 25 years. The last time I was using it, I had it running alongside DOS 6.2, WfW 3.11, and Yggdrasil linux, all booting from OS/2 boot manager, on a 486/DX2-based custom-built PC in my parents' basement. Time marched on, OS/2 support for hardware faded, and I moved over to linux. Anyway, I recently read a news article about ArcaOS on Slashdot and bought a copy, hoping to tinker with it the way I did in the old days.
I downloaded it and installed it to Virtualbox on a linux desktop machine. It installed fairly easily, and most of the hardware came up once I had the guest additions installed. I played with it for a while, and got most of the hardware working correctly. All well and good!
Installing it to bare hardware has proven to be more of a challenge. I'm working with an Asus EEE 301, based off a dual core hyperthreading Atom D270, 4 GB RAM. I have a Verbatim external DVD drive. Linux reports the network adapters as a Realtek RTL 8111/8168/8411 rev 6 chipset, and the wireless as an Atheros 9485 rev 1 chipset. The former has a driver in ArcaOS, the latter doesn't.
I installed ArcaOS. i got the audio up and running using the Uniaud driver. Graphics seem to work best using the default Panorama driver. The Verbatim DVD drive works, and reports as drive S:. The four front panel USB 2.0 ports work fine, but the two SS ports on the back don't. What is annoying about this is that while the USB ports work, they won't recognize a USB stick (I'm wondering if I need to manually install a FAT32 driver?), and since networking isn't working yet either (more on that in a sec), I have to burn files to a CD to get them onto the machine. But, 25 years later, here I am in my own basement running OS/2's descendant - it feels pretty good! I'm starting to find my way around the system again. I was elated to see that Hobbes is still up and running - I spent a lot of time there back in the day. My eventual goal here is to get ArcaOS doing all the regular daily things I do on a linux machine - surf the web, read my e-mail, listen to music, read (and edit) documents, and (hopefully, eventually), use a VPN client to connect to my work. Looking forward to doing some REXX scripting as well.
My first major stumbling block is that I can't get networking up and running. I figured getting wireless running was going to be a laborious process, so I ran a cat5 cable from my router to the machine in my basement . The hardware manager reports that the driver (RealTek 8168/8111 B/C/CP/D/DP/E/F/G PCIe Gigabyte Ethernet Network Adapter) is loaded and assigned IRQ 16 and a range of IO and memory locations. The hardware and the wire connecting it are both tested and work currently under linux. The DHCP monitor for lan0 reports:
DDNS host name: Not Registered
IP Address: Not Configured
Lease remaining: None
Status: Discovering DHCP servers.
It sends DISCOVER packets every 20 seconds or so (with number of options requested: 6). It never gets a response.
ifconfig lan0 returns:
flags-8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,LOOPBRD>
inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0xffffffff
I suspect that lan0 isn't really bound to the hardware, but I have no idea how to troubleshoot this. I went looking through documentation that came with ArcaOS, but the install guide is pretty basic and doesn't cover networking in detail. There are forum posts about networking, but they're sporadic and split across Warp 4, eComStation and ArcaOS, so it's hard to tell what's still relevant. I thought I'd post this in case anyone can think of any obvious things I might not have configured (or might have misconfigured), maybe a parameter or two I'm not passing? Thoughts? I'll post a ticket later if I still can't get it working.
Meanwhile, on the wireless front, I found Martin's documentation for testing a generic Win32 wrapper with eComStation (thanks Martin!), and I thought I might give that a try with an XP driver I dug up for the Atheros chipset. Does anyone know if it's still relevant with ArcaOS? I noticed some of the directories the drivers are supposed to be put in for the drivers have "ECS" in them and don't currently exist in ArcaOS. However, I noticed genmac ships with ArcaOS. I'm not sure if the files would go in a different directory than in the guide, or if the guide is outdated and it won't work at all. The doc is at
http://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Testing_an_UnSupported_Network_Driver_with_GenMAC (sorry for inlining it but I'm not sure how the url tags work in this editor).
Alternately, if I can't get either network adapter working I may end up buying a USB-based wireless dongle. Has anyone had success with a dongle they would recommend?
If anyone has any thoughts about any of this, I would appreciate hearing them. Thanks!