OS2 World Community Forum

Public Discussions => General Discussion => Topic started by: Eugene Gorbunoff on April 22, 2016, 10:38:19 am

Title: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Eugene Gorbunoff on April 22, 2016, 10:38:19 am
What do you expect after release of Arca Noae OS/2?
http://en.ecomstation.ru/commentnews.php?id=2443

* Imagine that the system will be released in the autumn
* how many reviews of new OS/2 do you expect to see?
* how many users will buy new OS/2?
* how many new users will appear till the end of year?
* how many new commercial companies will buy the system till the end of year?
* Do you think that the developers will update their OS/2 applications for compatibility with  Arca Noae OS/2 (or simply refresh packages)?


Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Thomas M. on April 22, 2016, 01:58:45 pm
As long as I don't know what "Blue Lion" will include I couldn't tell what to wish for the future :).
Thomas
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Sergey Posokhov on April 22, 2016, 04:34:59 pm
I hope they will invent a way to get rid of your annoying ads, eventually.
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Martin Iturbide on April 22, 2016, 05:07:48 pm
Hi

I just hope (personal opinion) that gets really really cheap for non-comercial/individual users. Today the market of Operating System is almost dead. The OS today is seen as something embedded on devices. On the individual user market  the OS turned into a commodity.

Paying $100 for an OS that may or may not work with your system is not an option anymore. So it has to be really really cheap specially for people that do not have the business need for the OS.

Corporate and commercial use is a different subject.

But it is easy for me to say this since I don't know how much Arca Noae spent on their IBM Agreement. If I would have some debt of this kind I will be pulling my hair until I pay it.

Regards
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Rich442 on April 22, 2016, 08:52:50 pm
I don't mind the license fee because, all told, it is still cheaper than a Windows subscription (Windows 10.x, Office 365, Visual Studio 2015) over a similar amount of time.

Then again, if no one pays a developer for their work, updates and bug reports would go unfinished.
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Martin Iturbide on April 22, 2016, 09:16:12 pm
Hi

Then again, if no one pays a developer for their work, updates and bug reports would go unfinished.

I agree but you have to see the market. If it is to expensive there will be no critic mass for the product to be sustainable in the future. I don't think that selling OSes is a niche when people are making money today.

Regards
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Rich442 on April 22, 2016, 10:04:23 pm
I agree but you have to see the market. If it is to expensive there will be no critic mass for the product to be sustainable in the future. I don't think that selling OSes is a niche when people are making money today.
Regards


I think that MS is doing a good job by offering subscriptions to their most popular apps while offering Windows 10 for "free." The OS is free (of cost) but it will not be practical without a subscription to a half-dozen other  priced things.
I would be "in" for a Monodevelop  (http://www.monodevelop.com/)and/or open-sourced .NET port (http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/11/04/red-hat-microsoft-making-dot-net-on-linux-for-enterprises/) for OS/2. It might help bridge the gap a little bit.

If AN provided some well-maintained (through subscription) development tools, I would be totally supportive of that. :)


For me personally, I am most interested in still being able to run my Warp 3 and 4 applications.
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Rich442 on April 23, 2016, 03:29:52 pm
Looking forward to seeing what AN puts out there.  :)
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Eugene Gorbunoff on April 26, 2016, 10:07:44 pm
There are eternal barriers and temporary critical problems.

Temporary critical bugs / problems:

3) Uniaud doesn't work properly on modern computers

..

8) New users ask about test CD which will give report about compatibility of PC with OS/2

9) Memory leaks in MMOS2 / IO Procs.

..


Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Rich442 on April 27, 2016, 02:21:25 am

Temporary critical bugs / problems:

3) Uniaud doesn't work properly on modern computers
Could you expand your comment a little?
What constitutes a "modern computer" in your opinion? Does it need to be a certain brand or chipset? Should UNIAUD work seamlessly on many chipsets?

Would you prefer something like a port of the ALSA  (http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page)driver?

As an example, I use UNIAUD on a:

2005 IBM Thinkcentre M52 model 8215
2009 Dell Latitude E6400-series, and, finally, a
2015 Dell Inspiron 5755

 
desktop. All of the above systems support sound well through the current UNIAUD 1.1 software. The Thinkcentre skips a bit while playing a video clip but I don't think that computer was designed for  multimedia, streaming or fancy sound events.

In my opinion, the Latitude e6400 and the Inspiron 5700 could be considered to be "modern computers." Both have multiple processors (The Latitude has 2 processors and the Inspiron has 4). I am excited about the Inspiron because it uses an AMD chipset. Previously, I have had the best results from IBM and Lenovo computers that feature Intel chipsets and wireless adapters.

Dell (like many other vendors) has a very interesting collection of chipset configurations. I have learned a ton of stuff from working with the systems above.
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Dave Yeo on April 27, 2016, 05:01:11 am
Uniaud is a port of Alsa. The problem is that sometime ago Alsa was moved into the Linux kernel and since then the people maintaining uniaud have not been able to update our port so we no longer have support for the newest audio chipsets.
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Rich442 on April 27, 2016, 06:56:26 am
My bad.

I think it is easier to accomodate a sound card/ graphics card by compiling  a custom kernel but modules are easier to make and may contain clues about how to support OS/2 and eComstation. Passing modules to the kernel at boot time always seemed difficult to me.

I wish there was a list of hardware (similar to the hardware compatibility list (http://www.os2warp.be/index2.php?name=wifi)) where we could take a non-working device and try to analyze it.


Here's what I was happy to learn:
Netlabs trac site  (https://trac.netlabs.org/uniaud)provides detailed instructions for building the  UNIAUD driver software from the latest stable sources (and how to check out a recent build). I get that some of the development is dependent on  the progress and structure of the linux kernel but I feel that there is some information missing.

My Inspiron 5700 uses a proprietary driver from AMD, but the A8 chipset worked out-of-the-box with ubuntu 14.04 (LTS) and CentOS ( 7.2 release). Those distributions used drivers based on  alsa-lib 1.0.2. I think there is a good bit of mystery to be solved. :). Thank you for your response.
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Andreas Schnellbacher on April 27, 2016, 09:19:02 pm
3) Uniaud doesn't work properly on modern computers
What constitutes a "modern computer" in your opinion? Does it need to be a certain brand or chipset? Should UNIAUD work seamlessly on many chipsets?
This time I have to confirm Eugene's statement. From what I heard and what I experienced myself with recent or almost recent sound chips, the support is near to null. Especially the widely spread Realtek on-board chips seem to be a no-go. I myself use supported but ancient PCI cards (Soundblaster Live, Cristal) to overcome that issue.
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Rich442 on April 27, 2016, 09:58:11 pm

I experienced myself with recent or almost recent sound chips, the support is near to null. Especially the widely spread Realtek on-board chips seem to be a no-go. I myself use supported but ancient PCI cards (Soundblaster Live, Cristal) to overcome that issue.
I was talking about on-board sound cards, too (but really low-end ones like the radeon R5). I think I misunderstood the question.
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Martin Iturbide on April 27, 2016, 10:45:09 pm
Hi Richard

I wish there was a list of hardware (similar to the hardware compatibility list (http://www.os2warp.be/index2.php?name=wifi)) where we could take a non-working device and try to analyze it.

You can give it a try to use the OS2World Wiki (http://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) (with the same userid and password of this forum) to make some "sandboxing" of your idea. It is a MediaWiki script just like Wikipedia.

You can give it a try and I will check your progress and If I can improve / organize your post in any way I will try to.

Regards
Title: Re: Forecast for Arca Noae's OS/2
Post by: Rich442 on April 28, 2016, 01:31:09 am
Especially the widely spread Realtek on-board chips seem to be a no-go. I myself use supported but ancient PCI cards (Soundblaster Live, Cristal) to overcome that issue.

One of my good machines uses the "Intel Integrated Audio" for the core 2 Duo and does so fairly decently (along with the flash plugin wrapper and UNIAUD 1.9). I can totally see how some of the nicer ones like the Dell alienware  (http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh&brandid=2202&fid=111074) PCs and the Radeon Pro Duo  (http://www.pcworld.com/article/3061177/hardware/amd-radeon-pro-duo-grabs-top-graphics-spot-for-now.html)would have trouble. AMD sometimes releases firmware for linux  (Ubuntu, usually), but they might decline to give assistance to other platforms (like OS/2).

Those systems are very new so I thought they might be interesting to mention. :-\
Hopefully, Arca Noae will pick up some of the work going into UNIAUD and ALSA.  8)