eCS 2.2 purchase

[Neil Waldhauer]

So, Neil, you say Arca Noaea does not have re-sellers?

I am an Arca Noae reseller. You can buy ArcaOS from me in digital download, DVD, USB stick, virtual machine, and pre-loaded on laptops, towers and desktops.

http://www.blondeguy.com/computer/BlueLion.html

[Wendy Krieger]

ecS 2.2 only went to beta.  But it's still very good.  Buy 2.1 and use its key in the 2.2 beta.

[Eugene Tucker]

The problem with ECS as you will have to get the driver support from Arca Noae. eCS does not seem to be in development any longer. If yo want a future capable OS yo need Aara OS. Which the coming 5.1 will be able to install on a UEFI machine and wil also support Nvme drives and GPS.

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

For Hardware since about 2016, you need newer drivers than the ones in eCS 2.2 beta 2 + latest CVS additions.

For example, I always had problems with the USB drivers from the eCS times with a board from 2015. Newer systems can't even be installed without recent drivers. But due to the limited contiguous memory amount, the maximum of usable hardware is about at i5. (About 1 GB recognized memory with newer systems is too little.) Usually the RAM for a built-in video driver uses a part of the recognized RAM. Consider that and eventually use an additional video card instead.

In your case, it's a very old T42. That one is supported by Warp 4.x, eCS and Arca OS. Compared with more recent hardware, the T42 is quite slow. At least replace the HD with a SSD. Don't expect the system to work with newer Web sites. I would start with newer hardware.

[Roderick Klein]

I am testing a system here with UEFI firmware (1 year old) and I have 3.3 GB of RAM. It depends on the system.

Roderick

[Lars]

You will never know how much of system memory (RAM) is mapped below the 4 GB physical address line.

Newer systems tend to reserve a lot of the physical memory space below 4 GB presumably for the PCI(e) bus so that you can use older 32-bit PCI cards/devices, potentially requiring large amounts of physical address space (like, say a 32-bit PCI graphics card with 2 GB of video memory: it needs 2 GB of physical address space below the 4 GB address line). Newer 64-bit PCI cards are of course not suffering from this problem.

It's just a fact that every modern OS is 64-bit by now, which means, it has no problem accessing system memory if it is mapped to physical addresses beyond 4 GB and therefore it is not affected by this limit. And therefore manufacturers no longer care about this limit.

[Dave Yeo]

You will never know how much of system memory (RAM) is mapped below the 4 GB physical address line.

Booting in UEFI mode, you will know how much memory is mapped below 4GB, though there is sometimes problems with fragmentation and not being able to use it all. One problem with the newest systems is starting to be having the video buffer mapped above 4 GB, which makes the system unusable to OS/2.
I used a system with 1.5 GB's of ram at one point, no SSD or ram disk and it wasn't too bad. Generally the stuff that got swapped out wasn't used much and it was only things like linking xul.dll that brought the system to its knees. Once ran out of memory and swap so learned not to have SeaMonkey running when building Mozilla. Swap file has a 2 GB limit, I guess due to signed ints.

[Lars]

You will never know how much of system memory (RAM) is mapped below the 4 GB physical address line.

Booting in UEFI mode, you will know how much memory is mapped below 4GB, though there is sometimes problems with fragmentation and not being able to use it all. One problem with the newest systems is starting to be having the video buffer mapped above 4 GB, which makes the system unusable to OS/2.

1) Yeah. Once you have bought your new computer you can then check if it works with OS/2. Unless you find someone beforehand that has the very same computer and also uses OS/2. Great deal.

2) "Video Buffer above 4 GB (physical address line)" is a perfect example of PC manufacturers no longer even considering 32-bit OSes, left alone 16-bit OSes. It would have been a better choice if AN had accepted this fact and would have become more involved with the Virtual Box team to ensure that OS/2 will continue to run virtualized. But they decided differently.


I know one thing for sure: if my fairly old desktop computer dies, I will move away from OS/2 altogether. I already do all current development under an eCS guest running under Virtualbox.

[Neil Waldhauer]

1) Yeah. Once you have bought your new computer you can then check if it works with OS/2. Unless you find someone beforehand that has the very same computer and also uses OS/2. Great deal.

If you look at http://www.blondeguy.com/ComputersForSale.html, I list some computers that work pretty well with ArcaOS. You don't have to buy them from me. I supply the information you would need to configure BIOS and install ArcaOS. I plan to continue this after ArcaOS 5.1 makes UEFI systems available. I expect Arca Noae to solve the video above 4 GB technical issue eventually.

[Dave Yeo]

There's also the option of taking a USB stick set up to install 5.1 with you and testing if it'll boot to the maintenance desktop and doing a mem /v

[Lars]

No. Either you know somebody that lends you the USB stick that has ArcaOS 5.1 on it or you will have to buy ArcaOS. And we are back to zero.

[Roderick Klein]

You will never know how much of system memory (RAM) is mapped below the 4 GB physical address line.

Newer systems tend to reserve a lot of the physical memory space below 4 GB presumably for the PCI(e) bus so that you can use older 32-bit PCI cards/devices, potentially requiring large amounts of physical address space (like, say a 32-bit PCI graphics card with 2 GB of video memory: it needs 2 GB of physical address space below the 4 GB address line). Newer 64-bit PCI cards are of course not suffering from this problem.

It's just a fact that every modern OS is 64-bit by now, which means, it has no problem accessing system memory if it is mapped to physical addresses beyond 4 GB and therefore it is not affected by this limit. And therefore manufacturers no longer care about this limit.

Testing ArcaOS 5.1. beta (I am on the tester team) I have seen systems where all PCI devices have 64 bit MMIO addresses (I had one of these laptops). The UEFI loader remaps these back to 32 bit MMIO address ranges. Now the video card could be an issue using a lot of memory below the 4 GB. However more and more video cards have something called PCI bar resizing. This *might* help de amount of reserved RAM be reduced. When I have such a laptop I will test again and see if that is indeed the case.

Roderick Klein