OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - General > Events

User Meeting Cologne November, 5th 2022 confirmed

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Mike Kölling:
Hi Lewis,

I cannot speak for Sigurd. However I know him for a long time by now. We have seen us in Cologne and we have worked together to get our TP X200 and TP 250 working with OS/2 as best as possible. But I can understand his opinion about AN focusing on industry. I guess things might be different if you had brought up in your newsletter a continuous stream of progress updates about the new AOS5.1, the long time ago announced WiFi drivers and so on. Staying in the dark as an outsider leads to guess-working about whats going on. Better communication from AN might be the key to overcome such guessing.

By the way, I need to buy a new laptop in near future. May plan has been to buy it after AOS5.1 is in the open to be sure it will run it on this laptop (which shall replace my older X250). Any update to the release date?

Last but not least I personally do appreciate your work and efforts very much - Thanks for that. And I am sure making OS/2 ready to work on recent hardware is a hard task for a small company.

Greetings from Potsdam / Germany,
Mike

Sigurd Fastenrath:
Hi Lewis,

thanks for your words, I know that you are usually do not have the time to answer in a forum because you invest it in the work on ArcaOS.

Though I try to speak english for about 50 Years now, I still can not express my thougths in the same way as I am able to do this in my mother tongue, German.

What I worte is what Thomas Müller and me think about the current situation and what we concluded from this regarding organizing an event like we did.

It is as allways our personal view, in this case here I do now only speak for myself.

We just summed up what did happen to our personal situation regarding OS/2. As I wrote we did not take anything personal. We just looked from our point of view: what is the current situation, what would we have expected or wished to be it as of today.

I made it clear not only above but allways when I wrote about ArcaOS / ArcaNoae that I am not interested in nor in the position to make a judgement about the work that is going on or not at ArcaNoae. I am not entitled to that.

We looked from what we know and what we can have access to today. The things I mentioned above are things we would like to have had, may be "exaggerated expectiations" from both of us.

But the situation is for us the way it is.

It was a pleasure for us to organize the meetings, it was allways a great time! We are and have been allways gratefull that attenders took part even from far destinations like Austria or Holland, for some the journey to come took more time then the time we could spent together. That was a great honour for us.

So, we - Thomas Müller and me - both have a clue without knowing exactly how much work you and your team are investing in ArcaOS and the big milestones you already mastered (USB 3, ACPI ect. etc.) and you will master.

I wish you all the best, most - like to all the others here in the forums - I wish that all of you stay healthy, and in a secure and peacefull place!

Sigurd



Lewis Rosenthal:
Hi, Mike...


--- Quote from: Mike Kölling on July 07, 2022, 10:00:51 am ---But I can understand his opinion about AN focusing on industry. I guess things might be different if you had brought up in your newsletter a continuous stream of progress updates about the new AOS5.1, the long time ago announced WiFi drivers and so on. Staying in the dark as an outsider leads to guess-working about whats going on. Better communication from AN might be the key to overcome such guessing.

--- End quote ---

Whenever the question arises about us not providing enough updates, I answer that with the question:

If we are still working on things, what should we say in a blog post?

In other words, we've said that we are working on ArcaOS 5.1, UEFI, GPT, WLAN drivers, and other things. Nothing has changed. We're still working on these things, and nothing has reached the point of us being able to release it as finished product. I could put that in a blog post every week, but then our blog posts would go from being few and informative to being frequent and redundant, saying nothing of any value.

We haven't gone out of business. We are processing new orders every day. We have released a steady stream of updates to USB, ACPI, and other things, including releasing a new NVMe driver (again, not for any commercial customer in particular, and not even prompted by a request from a commercial customer). I fail to see how or why anyone would get the impression that we had somehow shifted our focus from individual and small business users to large enterprises.

Again, to reassure everyone reading here:

Arca Noae remains committed to keeping OS/2 running on as many modern, bare metal systems as possible for as long as possible, whether those systems are owned by individuals at home or at school, or by businesses, small or large. Our driving force is just to keep OS/2 viable for those who need it or want an alternative to the ever-more-invasive mainstream OSes and the Powers behind them (Big Tech).

Sigurd, my friend:


--- Quote from: Sigurd Fastenrath on July 07, 2022, 10:02:28 am ---We looked from what we know and what we can have access to today. The things I mentioned above are things we would like to have had, may be "exaggerated expectiations" from both of us.

--- End quote ---

I can understand about exaggerated expectations. Arca Noae's human development resources are limited. Whereas IBM could put a dozen or more engineers on a single task, we have a dozen or so tasks for a single engineer. This kind of flips the development cycle on its head. We have a queue of projects running in order to get to the next release. GPT was a major part of getting us off the ground (though GPT is by no means a requirement for UEFI - far from it). UEFI has been a monumental task, and then integrating that with the traditional BIOS install which we have had since ArcaOS 5.0, so that one ISO can boot under both environments and the installer can intelligently provide the correct options for the booted environment (correct options=ESP selection, as the ESP is necessary for UEFI boot, but makes no sense under traditional BIOS), has taken an enormous amount of time and effort. It is not easy to re-imagine the OS/2 installation process with UEFI involved, as it's decidedly un-OS/2-like.  :)

Somewhere in that work queue is continued USB3 development as tickets are submitted about this and that not working under a given controller (and USB technology itself - not the drivers we have on OS/2, but the specs and mis-application or ignorance of them by hardware manufacturers - continues to be an ongoing uphill slog). Behind that - and I do mean at the end of that list of priorities - is WLAN support, which really is moving along (though not ready for even a technology preview, yet).

The ordering is simple: First, be able to boot the machine. Next, be able to connect it to things, such as USB and LAN. If there are already supported drivers for wired networking, that's an acceptable workaround using bridge devices until such time as we can focus more attention on WLAN driver development. Otherwise, we'd be "all dressed up with nowhere to go," because who cares about a Wi-Fi driver when the computer can't boot or the display is black?

I understand that what's important to some may not be what's important to others or that on a scale of want-like-need-urgent, people will have many of the same things placed in different categories ("I have no working video, so video is urgent, while Wi-Fi is something which would be nice to have;" or, "My computer boots, video is fine, but I have no working keyboard or mouse - and only a single xHCI controller, so working USB is urgent.")...

Again, I fully understand the amount of work which goes into organizing a meeting of any type, and at a certain point, it's normal to stop and reassess the amount of time and energy vs the return on that human investment - for all concerned. I just don't know that ArcaOS 5.1 or Wi-Fi driver availability today would really make much of a difference in that picture (though it would give you more topics to cover, and considering that we really do anticipate 5.1 to be GA in the next couple of months - yes, we're that close - you may indeed have lots more to discuss by the time November rolls around).

ATB

Alfredo Fernández Díaz:

--- Quote from: Lewis Rosenthal on July 09, 2022, 03:32:11 am ---Whenever the question arises about us not providing enough updates, I answer that with the question:

If we are still working on things, what should we say in a blog post?
--- End quote ---
A good answer/question that deserves another on its own. If anything absolutely and fatally catastrophic happened, what would you say in a blog post? By definition, nothing. So how would people know what happened? Probably by poking around after a while, starting here -- oh, what a coincidence! ;)

It is good to hear that you are not dead (you owe me email replies -- will be glad to resend the messages if they got lost), but frankly it would be even better to hear signs of life every once in a while, "Still working hard pushing X/Y/Z <Last update on such-and-such>" would be more than enough for me. I agree that that is still not very informative, though, and thus no need to say it too often. But maybe you could spend literally two minutes on doing that every two months?

Please take this as a constructive criticism, for that is how it is intended -- I am guilty of exactly the same somewhere else, and I (hate to) admit that people are right when I am told so. It is incredible how much a simple, periodic 'still working on it, not quite there yet' spares me when I remember to issue one :)

Lewis Rosenthal:
Greetings...


--- Quote from: Alfredo Fernández Díaz on July 09, 2022, 04:02:51 pm ---you owe me email replies -- will be glad to resend the messages if they got lost

--- End quote ---

My friend, I sent you no less than five replies to your Yahoo! address on June 5, in response to your email to me of the same day from that same account, when I was recovering from cataract surgery and could barely see the screen. To date, I have no follow-ups from you, so...  ;)

I have another (much longer) one in draft which I'll finish one day soon (I hope).

As always, I am open to suggestions as to just what to say in such "we're still working on it; don't give up...there's still a pulse" posts which are not simply that. You're on the dev team, so if you ever feel that we've been sitting silent for too long, feel free to post something to the dev mailing list (substantive suggestions for verbiage always welcome and a plus), and I'll do my best to snap out of my doldrums to oblige.

You see, for me, in the thick of the forest, it's hard to tell what others might conjure...er...imagine...er...surmise left to their own devices. As I said to a consulting client a few years ago, in response to his comment to me about the age of most of the OS/2 code in his enterprise, "I see new OS/2 software every day."

Cheers

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