Warpstock Europe 2024 Follow Up

[Andrew Stephenson]

I watched the WarpStock broadcasts (some of them, at least) and was grateful that the team are working to keep OS/2's technology up-to-date. These days, there seem to be many reasons to worry about the future of OSes that do not follow the latest fashion, such as "AI", which seem designed more to put money into the pockets of a few large corporations than to serve the needs of little people. I also fear there may soon be a change in what is regarded as normal computer hardware, typified by descendants of the IBM PC. Must we soon keep our systems on-line, talking to massive servers owned by folks who demand regular rent from us? Look at the legal trouble Adobe got themselves into recently by doing this; and they were once the Good Guys, supplying free Acrobat PDF readers suited to many OSes.

I am an AOS-5.1 (ex-Warp since the 1980s) End User, not a Developer. My system has humble needs. I do not need a "cloud" to store data. I use my own Intelligence, not somebody else's grandiose Artificial aids to thinking. My work can be done at clock speeds far slower than modern multi-gigahertz marvels. That said, if a m/c runs at super-whizzy speed and its extra RAM does not get in my way and its USB-variant connectors actually connect usefully, I am content to allow them onto my desk.

What it comes down to: are we on the threshold of an evolutionary step? A few years hence, will there be one design of m/cs for Power Users ("all hail the Great AI!") and another set for traditional Practical Modest Users loyal to the likes of OS/2 and Linux (and maybe even DOS)?

To pick up on some comments...

After 7 (!) years, to still come and say how difficult a German translation is (even though almost all tools are available in German translation) is now just ridiculous.

The community here in Germany is more or less dead.

The WarpStock claims that German causes problems when translating from English puzzled me. After all, those two languages are cousins; and, indeed, European languages have become cross-connected over the centuries, through processes like commerce, invasion, tourism, science and literature. Words and phrases get borrowed ("loan words" like "le parking" in French, which apparently annoy the French Academy). Is it the structure of formal German (eg, verb at the end of a sentence) which causes trouble? (FWIW, I know a joke about that.) As some of our pseudo-English-speaking USian friends say: go figure.

One thing I REALLY want to see: AOS software packaged so nobody must download supportive software or make special tweaks to the system before it will work. I wasted >EUR25 on OpenOffice and have yet to install it -- yet OO is promoted as the great saviour of modern computer-based clerical work, which it could be if packaged conveniently and was not so hugely clumsy and... and... and... (You get the idea?)

[Martin Iturbide]

Hello

The WarpStock claims that German causes problems when translating from English puzzled me.

About this, what I understood is that German, just like Spanish, has some very long words that may not look right in the GUI, since elements like tabs, buttons, label text are visual designed in English and when you put longer text it breaks how the GUI looks (or just looks bad). I had been told that German have very long words too, even longer than Spanish.

Regards

[Martin Iturbide]

Hello

I think that Sigurd has very good points.

UEFI is very important since if ArcaOS does not boot, the rest it is just secondary, and now newer machines does not come with BIOS compatibility mode, just plain UEFI. It is not just for people that want to dual boot.

But, yes, what about the web browser, better audio driver and wifi drivers?

In my opinion, the priority should be the browser (now), since we are lacking some applications, a solid browser can help us to work out some lack of native applications with web apps.

I feel like the effort to translate ArcaOS, at the level of high quality that Arca Noae wants, it is taking too much resources. Arca Noae should focus now on the browser with all that it involves like Qt6, the javascript engine, etc. Why Arca Noae? They are the only ones with a commercial product that generates income on this community.

Regards

[Sigurd Fastenrath]

In my opinion, the priority should be the browser (now), since we are lacking some applications, a solid browser can help us to work out some lack of native applications with web apps.

I feel like the effort to translate ArcaOS, at the level of high quality that Arca Noae wants, it is taking too much resources. Arca Noae should focus now on the browser with all that it involves like Qt6, the javascript engine, etc. Why Arca Noae? They are the only ones with a commercial product that generates income on this community.

Regards

Hi Martin,

but here comes the main hopeless problem with ArcaOS:

On allmost all modern system (later than Intel Core i6 Generation) ArcaOS can only adress between 1 and 1.5GB of RAM, due to the fact that more and more Hardware manufactors reserve adress space below 4GB in BIOS for drivers.

And for every new browser to come, it will rely on QT6, and for this, one need at least 2 to 2.5GB of RAM. I tested Dooble on "modern" Hardware with only 1.25GB visible RAM, and it simply do not start, the same goes for Open Office.

As David A. told me some years ago there is no way to overcome this "Memory hole problem" for ArcaOS simply due to tecnical Limitations of the 32 BIT Operating System.

So, from an end users Perspective: No more RAM - no Browser nor Open Office.

As long as the RAM problem is not solved, UEFI and GPT are practical useless on real hardware, and so is ArcaOS.

Inside a Virtualization you can acess the full 3.5 to 4 GB of RAM, but UEFI and GPT are useless there, so is ArcaOS as you can simply achieve the same with an OS/2 Warp 4.52 or even 4 with FP 15.

[ivan]

Hi Sigurd,

I am not seeing what you are here.  I can run OpenOffice without problems and I have enough memory free to do other things.

mem -v gives

Total physical memory:      7,906 MB
Accessible to system:       3,311 MB
Additional (PAE) memory:    4,595 MB

Resident memory:              202 MB
Available virtual memory:   2,449 MB

Available process memory:
  Private low memory:         224 MB
  Private high memory:      2,240 MB
  Shared low memory:           24 MB
  Shared high memory:       2,181 MB

I don't know if the fact I am using AMD Ryzen 3 processors with built in graphics has anything to do with it (I gave up using Intel processors years ago in the days of the 486).

For a browser I use Firefox on Linux Mint and transfer anything I want to OS/2 via the network.

[Lars]

Maybe your system is old enough to foresee use of a 32-bit OS, just like mine that is about 7 years old.
The problem with (many ?) new systems is that they reserve large amounts of physical address space below the 4 GB physical boundary for PCI use (and therefore not for RAM).
I think I read somewhere that this was done for older HW that can only address below the 4GB physical boundary but needs a large memory space, for example older graphics cards with very large screen apertures and memory space to hold textures and the like.
That makes much sense if a 64-bit OS is in use but severly restricts a 32-bit OS that has to rely on that memory space to be (mostly) addressable for RAM.
The reservation of that physical address space is static to cater for a 'worst case'.

[Sigurd Fastenrath]

Accessible to system:       3,311 MB

I don't know if the fact I am using AMD Ryzen 3 processors with built in graphics has anything to do with it (I gave up using Intel processors years ago in the days of the 486).

Wich Generation of AMD Ryzen 3? The first one from 2017? That is exactly where the Intel Core i 7th Generation showed up as a Show Stopper (Exeptions possible).

I am using AMD Ryzen 7 from 2023 with the above result (only 1GB RAM). Not sure wich Ryzen Generations started with the same problems as Intel, but please keep in mind, the problem resides in the use of the BIOS of the manufactor, so there may be some (a few, very few) "Todays" Boards where one could be lucky.

For a browser I use Firefox on Linux Mint and transfer anything I want to OS/2 via the network.

That's exactly what I mean, you use Linux vie Network, not ArcaNoae for Browsing. Therefore a second installed system is necessary.

[ivan]

Third generation Ryzen 3 Pro 4350G all the others are Ryzen 3 2200G units.

[Martin Iturbide]

ArcaOS can only adress between 1 and 1.5GB of RAM, ...

And for every new browser to come, it will rely on QT6, and for this, one need at least 2 to 2.5GB of RAM. ...

---

Arca Noae should focus now on the browser with all that it involves like Qt6, the javascript engine, etc.

Yes, it is a big etc. 

[Neil Waldhauer]

I think most of us are using some other operating system to browse the internet at this point. But I've tried quite a few of the platforms and browsers, and it's not like they are so perfect.

Every one of them fails in some situation. Some sites must have MS Edge, some must have Chrome, others Firefox.

I'm a little worried about Arca Noae developing a browser. It's taking a long time just to develop a WiFi driver. Maybe supporting ArcaOS is enough.

[Dave Yeo]

I still mostly use SeaMonkey on ArcaOS for browsing with the occasional fallback to Dooble.
As for an up to date browser, I doubt that it can be done in this 64bit world. Developers have machines with lots of memory and don't care about systems with little memory, with basically all browsers having dropped 32 bit support.
As for Arca Noae, they're a small company, and I wouldn't be surprised if all the owners have other jobs or consultancy gigs, so no one working on it full time. There can't be much money in ArcaOS after paying IBM its share, paying for infrastructure etc. They were probably hoping for more volunteer help.
Edit: newest Dooble is based on Chromium 94, which itself is getting long in the tooth.

[Andrew Stephenson]

Using DuckDuckGo (free) on Win-10 on a Dell notebook. Seems to serve my needs. The combination is, as a lady of my former acquaintance who had served in the USAF would say, "good enough for government work".

DDG has the virtue of guarding one's privacy, rejecting most of those rude probes, checking clickable buttons do not lead somewhere other than what is claimed &c. Original idea was to access the Net that way until AOS-5.1 was up and running. It seems, going by these discussions, that idea may stay at the prototype stage for a while -- which I am okay with, if I can do mes devoirs on OS/2, although moving files between systems on USB sticks gets tedious at times.

And so it goes...

[Martin Iturbide]

Thanks for the interesting comments

As for an up to date browser, I doubt that it can be done in this 64bit world. ...

We are falling again on the 64bits and memory discussion, which is not wrong, it means this is an important subject today. It is like we were living in denial, trying to stall the issue as much as we can, trying to convince our-self's that 32bits was enough, but now modern technology hit us in the face.

As for Arca Noae, they're a small company, and I wouldn't be surprised if all the owners have other jobs or consultancy gigs, so no one working on it full time. There can't be much money in ArcaOS after paying IBM its share, paying for infrastructure etc. They were probably hoping for more volunteer help.

uhm... I think the same thing, but I always ask Lewis at Warpstock how is the Arca Noae business going on, he always says to me the it is fine and doing well. Maybe we have a different concepts of what is "fine" and "well", but maybe it is not "good enough business" to produce a modern browser or wifi drivers at a reasonable speed. Or maybe the other issue is that even that if you have a bag of money, there are not enough OS/2 skilled developers to create drivers and software that you can trust to commit to produce a final product. Or maybe there is not enough money to hire and train full time young developers to create drivers and port software. Sorry, too much speculation from my part since I don't have enough information.

Sadly, the lack of a long term strategy of what to do with the older IBM's close source components of OS/2, it is starting to get us. The "don't fix it if it is not broken" strategy was just "boiling the frog slowly" for us.

I still want to fight it and try to have some strategy to clone as open source more OS/2 components, but I guess there is no interest and resources to do that.

Regards

PD: I know that the "boiling the frog" metaphor is not actually true, I just used it because I couldn't find a better way to describe it.