Messages

31

Applications / Re: WarpIn 1.0.23 - Where is it?

« on: May 18, 2020, 04:10:40 pm »

Indeed, 1.0.23 is an "in-test" build which we are currently using in ArcaOS. The new wic functionality specifically deals with creating and parsing WPI repository files. Paul refreshed the 1.0.23 build for us last year, and the newer 1.0.23 should be the public release when he gets around to releasing it.

So, while WarpIN is surely GPL and both source and binaries freely downloadable and usable by all, I would still caution against posting the 1.0.23 build anywhere (for those who have access to it). Paul may want to update documentation or add some more fixes to the final package (I have no idea; we haven't really discussed it).

HTH

Oh, and for the curious:

Make Repository (-m): wic -m <mask> [-H<host path>]
    Writes all package versions for all archives in <mask>.
New Updates (-n): wic -n <filename>
    Writes archive names for out of date packages listed in <filename>.

We do some further massaging of the repository file after running wic -m to add MD5 sums and sizes for the packages in the list. The additional fields were confusing the parser when run from ANPM, where we use the -n option to find updated packages. This was the fix in the refresh from last fall.

Other than that, 1.0.23 should perform just like 1.0.22. When ANPM 1.1.0 is released, the WIS in it will specify 1.0.23 as the minimum WarpIN version, so we'll want to get to a public release of 1.0.23 (or later) before then.

32

Applications / Re: PmMail 3.24 bug

« on: May 18, 2020, 03:44:26 pm »

Hi, Doug.

Your login should be working. I sent you an email yesterday with your temporary password. Please let me know if for some reason you didn't get that.

I swear I am going to look at what is failing in the Mantis install for PMMail as soon as humanly possible (tentatively scheduled for next week).

Cheers, and apologies again for the frustration with the new account setup.

33

General Discussion / Re: Arca Noae and 2rosenthals.com web and mail services status

« on: December 17, 2019, 06:59:52 pm »

Public-facing services should be back up and running, with the caveat that much public FTP content still needs to be restored and updated. The Arca Noae bugtracker is back up, and we are able to build new ISOs and sign driver downloads, so subscription content should be available. YUM repositories should be back up as they were last week, as well.

Still more to do, but we're making steady progress, finally.

34

General Discussion / Re: Arca Noae and 2rosenthals.com web and mail services status

« on: December 16, 2019, 07:18:53 am »

Thanks for all the good wishes and positive thoughts.

Mail services are back online as of 1:00am EST, though anyone retrieving mail from the server will need to accept the new self-signed cert (yes, I should have added a real cert to the box, but there has been so much other stuff to do).

Recovery of prior data continues.

Web services are next, and we should have ArcaOS ISOs spinning in the next day or so.

As for standby servers, let's just say that that was not an option in this case.

35

General Discussion / Re: Arca Noae and 2rosenthals.com web and mail services status

« on: December 13, 2019, 05:39:09 pm »

Thanks, my friend. Work continues. As you know, it's a process.

36

General Discussion / Arca Noae and 2rosenthals.com web and mail services status

« on: December 13, 2019, 07:17:27 am »

Hi, all...

I just wanted to give everyone a quick update on where we stand after a catastrophic RAID failure on Tuesday night (December 10).

The main Arca Noae website remains up, and the store is accessible, as is all wiki content, and most downloads from the customer portal. New ArcaOS ISOs are not being spun, and subscription driver downloads are not available. Downloads from the Resources | Downloadables pages are not available (ANPM, eCo Runtimes, etc.).

Email remains offline, as does Mantis. This includes the ecs-isp, os2-wireless_users, os2-netware_users, virtualized_ecs_users, and usb-dev mailing lists. In addition, all VOICE mailing lists are offline. All posts sent to those lists since we went offline are queued at the firewall, waiting for the server to come back online, so they should be delivered in time.

As a result of email being offline, the Arca Noae store is unable to send order confirmations and renewal reminders. If anyone has a subscription renewal coming due, be assured that we will extend the due date for you (though you may certainly renew without a reminder email by logging into your account and selecting the subscription order itself).

Web sites other than Arca Noae remain offline, including Rosenthal & Rosenthal, my personal blog, VOICE, PMMail wiki, etc.

FTP is unavailable, as well, as are the Arca Noae YUM repositories and the US mirrors of the Netlabs YUM repositories hosted at 2rosenthals.com.

For those using Subversion, including the PMMail devs, this, too, is offline.

We are working hard to bring things back up again, and hope to have mail and other websites running at least in some rudimentary fashion in the near future. As you can imagine, it's been a rather stressful few days around here. Let's just say that the chain of events which led to this array failure was beyond my wildest expectations, and while I really did plan for disaster, it seems that there's always the one set of circumstances which gets left out of the equation, and this was it.

37

Setup & Installation / Re: ArcaOS5 and VMPlayer12 the fastest Virtual OS/2 I have ever seen!

« on: May 23, 2017, 11:59:39 pm »

Bravo, Sigurd!

Nice work, and thanks for the compliments about the hardware support. 

I did an installation yesterday in VMware Workstation Pro 12.5.6 on Linux, and it felt pretty good (though not as good as on native hardware on the same box, which is a ThinkPad T520 dual core i5-2520M with 8GB; on bare metal, ArcaOS is truly amazing).

38

Applications / Re: Share your ArcaOS screenshots

« on: May 23, 2017, 11:48:10 pm »

I noticed the screenshots that Arca Noae posted and there is 2 that I haven't figured out how to do.

Sorry about that, Kevin. I guess we should add some stuff to our wiki on how to do cool stuff on the ArcaOS desktop!

The 5th one says "Open a drive or folder object in a split view as a mini-file manager." I've messed with folder view settings and can't seem to recreate the split view.

Xview is a new folder view available from the folder context menu. Find your Drives object in the Computer folder. Right-click it to open the context menu. Select Open as > Xview.

To set that as the default "Open as" action, hold down either shift key while selecting Xview.

Now, once you have XView open, you may do a few more things to tweak the layout. Go to the View menu, and select Options. Hopefully, the four sections of that menu will be self-explanatory. Also, to switch from icon view (on the right) to details view, just use View | Icon view (the default) or View | Details view. The options you set will be used for whichever view you choose here.

If you have a folder open in Xview and the folder has a background configured, it may be less distracting to view the contents without the custom background. In the view options, there is a toggle in the "This folder" section for "Backgrounds" - just click it to toggle.

Also the 6th one shows thumbnails. I haven't figured out how to do that as well.

That folder is a light table, not a regular folder. there are a couple light tables which come pre-installed, namely, \sys\icons (if you opted to allow the installation of Dynamic Icons) and \MMOS2\IMAGES and its subfolders.

A light table object is a special Workplace Shell class which displays thumbnails of recognized image formats. One method to create a new light table is to open the Multimedia Templates subfolder of the Templates folder in Computer. Once you have Multimedia Templates open, simply drag (right mouse button; this is OS/2!) the Light table template onto the desktop, right-click to open the new object's context menu, and give it a name. Drag it wherever you like from there (if you have a directory open in Xview, just drag it there, for example), and fill it with whatever images you'd like to present as a light table.

When the light table is open, select View | Display to change the thumbnail size from Normal to Small or Dynamic, the latter of which opens a submenu which allows you to select a size in px. You may also change the arrangement of the "slides" in the light table from the same Display submenu.

HTH, and thanks for your business and for contributing to the community discussion here! Enjoy your new OS/2!

PS - I just got done doing an hour-long interview with Bryan Lunduke (of Network World fame) for his Lunduke Hour YouTube show. It should be up in a few hours. No neat usage tips, but some background as to why we did this crazy thing (release ArcaOS) and the fun we had with licensing and dealing with IBM!

39

Article Discussions / Re: App Store Ranting

« on: July 30, 2016, 01:41:27 am »

a web browser can't launch ANPM for such a yum/rpm-link.

It probably can, if you add something to the Options-> Applications list, but ANPM would need to watch for parameters, and decide what to do with them.

I really thought we had this in the RFE list, and I distinctly recall submitting it myself (ability to accept command line arguments to install/remove/etc.), but I just spent a few moments looking and could not find it.

On openSUSE, there is the "one-click install" option for packages. A ymp file comes down, which is essentially xml. This is associated with the YaST installer, and the ymp includes the type of package to be installed, the source repository, etc. At the time of install, the user is queried as to whether he or she wants to permanently add the repository to the system or just use it for the given installation.

More on one-click install may be found here.

This would be my vote as to how to handle these things as an RFE for ANPM, so we would then parse the xml (which could be downloaded and saved or used to open the default application, supposedly configured as ANPM) and perform the requested actions.

I am sure that ArcaOS will include enough smarts to get all of that done. Meanwhile, any browser, on any OS, should be able to get the ANPM installer, put it on a USB stick, and that will get RPM/YUM set up, and allow the user to work with it. Once FF is included with RPM/YUM, that should get things going. Until FF gets included in RPM/YUM, the user may need to download FF (either ZIP or WPI), and use that. Of course, they may also need WarpIn, or/or UNZIP.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Doug. 

Indeed, we are planning to ship FF, TB, and SM in the distro, all (or none) available as installation choices (FF may be pushed by default; decisions, decisions...).

As for catalogs (or for those of you who prefer the King's English, "catalogues"), the new functionality in wic.exe allows for creating repositories of WarpIN archives, and theoretically, it should be possible for site maintainers to automate building their own WarpIN repo files, making installation/maintenance of WPI-packaged software as easy as RPM-managed software (via ANPM).

Zip/7z/xz/gzip/tar/etc. will always be difficult to manage, and I know of no package manager which handles such "loose" formats.

Of course, none of these things results in a true "app store" in the sense of a desktop application which pulls down package metadata, allows purchasing and installation, and essentially functions as a single-purpose web browser. I did some searching today while waiting for my lunch appointment to arrive, and could not come up with a single hit pertaining to the "rise of the app store on desktop operating systems," but my gut tells me that this all came about from M$' push to make everything a mobile device. Let's face it, managing software and comfortably browsing the web on a phone or a tablet is frustrating. Having an all-in-one "app" (because it's all about the apps!) to do all of that makes sense in that context. I just don't believe it makes the same sense on the desktop, but to each his own.

The Arca Noae store is getting bigger, a little at a time. If anyone knows of some good apps which we should add, please let us know, and we'll see about getting them added. We're also looking at ways to improve the shopping experience (no, I am not trying to hijack this thread - really!).

40

Article Discussions / Re: Writing bug reports

« on: July 25, 2016, 07:16:23 pm »

Hi, Ian...

I surely didn't mean to imply that you were inhospitable! 

I'll remember to point to the index file from now on.

Cheers, buddy, and BTW, long-overdue thanks for mentioning Arca Noae on your homepage.

41

Article Discussions / Re: App Store Ranting

« on: July 25, 2016, 06:59:18 pm »

Sorry I missed this, Martin...

I think the concept you were originally trying to convey and the concept of an app store are slightly different.

If you'd like an app store on OS/2, you should stick with eCo Market from eCo Soft.

Now, what ANPM will become over time is a single point of entry for software management and updates. By integrating WarpIN support and support for local and remote caches of WarpIN archives, ANPM becomes the referee between RPM-deployed software and WarpIN-deployed software, minimizing conflicts and duplication.

So, even if you were to go "shopping" for an app in an app store on OS/2, you'd still need a method to install your download and ensure that it did not conflict with something else already installed, as well as a way to handle updates to that software just "purchased." This is ANPM's role.

An app store, OTOH, fills a different kind of niche, providing a more browser-like experience, allowing the shopper to see screenshots, read reviews, handle checkout, and ultimately, download purchased goods. Some of these cross boundaries and blur the lines, because they will maintain databases of purchased software, advise of available updates, and perhaps even handle the install, but they are always (or should always be) limited to the offerings in the store, and not meant to replace a system software manager.

42

Article Discussions / Re: Writing bug reports

« on: July 25, 2016, 06:44:09 pm »

Hi, again...

An excellent reference, and a link I keep handy (also a good thing to review before posting the bug reports as discussed in this thread) is Sjoerd Visser's article in the VOICE Newsletter, from July, 2008, Virtual memory Problems under OS/2. In that, Sjoerd also points to Jan's handy shmemmon utllity for monitoring and recording shared memory usage over time, which is available on Ian's os2site.com (search for shmem or look in /sw/util/memory/ - not posting a direct link, as I know that Ian does not like his site scraped).

At first blush, I would agree your assessment, Neil. This is likely either exhaustion or fragmentation. Theseus is your friend, here, Roberto, but review Sjoerd's article.

43

Article Discussions / Re: Writing bug reports

« on: July 12, 2016, 10:48:32 pm »

Silvan's article is spot-on, of course, and Dave, your comments are quite right.

User-to-user forums serve an important role in the support cycle.

Where forums fall short is when people expect that they are some sort of direct support channel to the company and the developers, which they are not. We (bww, Arca Noae, independent devs, etc.) cannot possibly monitor every forum (I try to keep an eye out here and on os2.org - yes, I lurk, I admit it! - if only to take the pulse of what's going on from time to time), let alone provide one-on-one support for various issues being discussed. This fundamental misconception then leads to accusations of disinterest among the developers and companies, rumors of poor support and poor quality, etc., and all because the people in a position to address the problem have not been properly informed that a problem actually exists.

Joop, are you using ANPM, and if so, do you have the Dutch language pack installed for it? You would probably find managing packages much easier than yum or rpm at the command line. This system is working well for many, many people, now, and continues to improve. If you have an issue installing, removing, or updating a package with ANPM, I invite you to open a ticket (or more than one ticket) at https://mantis.arcanoae.com and let us know what is not working right for you. We're there to help.

44

Article Discussions / Re: [Arca Noae] Checked your disk lately?

« on: December 06, 2015, 10:53:43 pm »

Another thought: How many modern OS's have to be booted from CD/DVD/USB/Whatever/Floppy(?) in order to run a chkdsk? Sounds a bit 1980s to me... especially as OS/2 systems seem to have had this capability a long time.

When there is a serious error, many OSes need to be booted from alternative media, actually. The fact that the OSes generally do not state the requirement doesn't mean that they should not be handled in this fashion. I've dealt with more than my share of broken Windows systems where NTFS needed to be checked from something other than the boot partition because, well, they wouldn't boot. I've also had *nix systems (running JFS, Reiser, XFS, and EXT4, though not BTRFS - yet) need to get up and running fully and then have to go back and run a manual check against the disk. The difference is that *nix systems don't normally put so much data on the boot partition and what is there doesn't change as often as on other systems.

I tend to suspect the possibility that JFS 1.09.06 does not get shutdown properly sometimes during system shutdown or reboot although all seems to work properly. I base this idea on the recurring "lost volume" plus the fact that when I have needed to perform chkdsk at boot the system had been shutdown successfully on both occasions. Worth noting is that all volumes, G: through to L: inclusive were "Dirty marked Clean" on both occasions.  Maybe this is the "underlying problem"...

This is certainly possible, and if so, we'll want to get some low level data to see what's happening so we can do something about it (assuming it's not something specific to only one machine, of course; resources are spread thin as it is, so time tracking down elusive errors should be spent wisely).

This renders the idea of booting from a "Maintenance" volume or another system volume un-workable as all volumes have the same problem.

Understood.

I keep my maintenance partition running 16-bit HPFS just for that reason (it gives me something else which is JFS-aware but not JFS-dependent to use for recovery).

My " dodgy filesystem driver" comment was an attempt at mild humour rather than a full scale "dig" at Arca Noae - Sorry if it was misunderstood; my following comment was genuine  :-)

Apologies if I came on too strong with my reply, Pete; it was unintentional. I know you better than that, and the irony isn't lost on me, considering your lack of success with the updated JFS driver!

Let's see what we can do to address your issues. Forced chkdsk functionality aside, we certainly shouldn't be creating errors, and we want to make sure that's not the case.

Cheers

45

Article Discussions / Re: [Arca Noae] Checked your disk lately?

« on: December 06, 2015, 07:24:56 pm »

How do things get so taken out of context?

Let me see if I may set the record straight on a number of issues:

It is a great milestone for DFSee to support GPT, but I'm still thinking how useful will be that for OS2-eCS-BlueLion installation.

Well, we are planning GPT support in Blue Lion, and are working on that very issue right now.

I'm guessing that it should be useful for someone to boot from USB/CD and with DFSee try to repartition and already partitioned HDD (by Windows or Linux) and resize partition to fit OS2-eCS-BlueLion. (and of course use all the great features of DFSee on a GPT drive) But once you boot the Installer will it recognize the installation partition on GPT or after installing the OS, will it boot?

That's the plan. It's a tall order, and requires a number of things to be updated, but we are working on it (really).

I was told that what we are missing is to create some GPT driver like a FLT (Filter Device Driver). Will a  GPT.FLT driver will work without having UEFI support?

I don't know who told you that.

We at Arca Noae would like to thank ...., and OS/2 VOICE for its ongoing community support.

I really do not know the formal relationship between Arca Noae and OS2VOICE, I'm getting jealous about it 

Martin, you know the relationship which Arca Noae has with OS/2 VOICE. Let me run it down once again:

• OS/2 VOICE is the single largest OS/2 community group in the world
• Arca Noae handles donations for OS/2 VOICE, as OS/2 VOICE (unlike Warpstock Corporation) has no mechanism to accept online payments
• OS/2 VOICE is a valuable resource to Arca Noae as a means of communication with the community, at large

...super special thanks to the developers that shares their software and don't hide their source code to the public.

Is this meant as some sort of a dig at those of us who are bound by copyright and existing license not to release everything as open source?

I really get concerned about ArcaNoae's new attitude. Instead of working on their own roadmap (https://www.arcanoae.com/roadmap/), they announce a new version OS/2.

I'm sorry that our "new attitude" concerns you, Michael. Our overall roadmap does need some updating (admittedly, we spend more time developing than updating the roadmap, and often progress isn't reflected there in as timely a fashion as we'd like). However, work on Blue Lion complements our overall goal of bringing new drivers and support for current hardware to the platform; these two concepts are not at all at odds with one another.

My drivers and software package license expires soon, nearly nothing from roadmap was realized (except of pre-beta network drivers).

Do you somehow feel like you have not received a good value for your investment? Updates to ACPI, Multimac, and USB have not been useful to you? A roadmap is just that: a plan. It's not a promise. We have made progress toward many of the goals we set before us, though not all have been realized.

If you don't feel that you have received a good value for your investment, then you should feel free not to renew your subscription. Subscriptions were never intended as "support" contributions to further our own goals, but rather reasonable fees set for the products released. We have issued several updates to various components of the subscription during the year. If you have not benefited from them, then perhaps you shouldn't renew your subscription.

Important software repositories went away from netlabs (like USB-drivers, we no have two different repos, AHCI and ACPI).

Really? How about:

http://trac.netlabs.org/acpi
http://trac.netlabs.org/ahci
http://trac.netlabs.org/usb

Lars posts his USB builds to that Netlabs project as well as to Hobbes. It has been the case for some time that we have had two different branches of the USB dev tree. The only difference now is that they are maintained in two different places.

There is nobody stopping anyone from contributing to the AHCI and ACPI projects at Netlabs. Those projects are not going away. It's just so happens that the sole maintainer of them happens to be a principal in Arca Noae, so development has moved "in-house."

So if ArcaNoae suddenly decides to drop any OS/2 Activity, we have nothing in our hands.

Hmmm... An OS/2-only company dropping OS/2 activity. That doesn't sound very realistic, now does it? Again, the maintainer of these driver projects is a human, and if you look closely at the license strings contained in your drivers, you will see that David claims copyright and Arca Noae simply licenses his work. If Arca Noae were to close up shop tomorrow (which is not very likely, especially considering the considerable sum of money we recently paid to IBM), in all likelihood, David would still continue to maintain those drivers; they're not going away.

This reminds me very much of Mensys, many announcements, no substantial progress, no transparency.

Excuse me?

We are a privately-owned company. We are not required to be transparent. That said, do you not read our blog posts? Did you not see the several Warpstock and Warpstock Europe presentations which we have given? David has often shared his progress on driver development. Steven Levine has discussed at length our plans for SNAP and the immense hurdle he has before him getting the code checked into the repository (code for which Arca Noae paid a tidy sum to license). I have discussed the Package Manager (due for release this month, free for everyone to use) and Blue Lion (which, BTW, now has a bootable image in alpha stage, with functional networking to provide across-the-LAN or across-the-WAN installation).

No substantial progress?

We have full time developers working on code - RIGHT NOW.

Bitwise is doing a much better job here, you can follow each development step easily (see Mozilla @github or vbox @ netlabs).

Do you know who provides the bulk of the financial support for Bitwise's Firefox work? Arca Noae does. The difference is that Bitwise has a current focus on Firefox, which is fully open source, and we are working with much of IBM's code, which is not. Portions of the drivers we maintain are not open source. This isn't our fault; we're just playing within the rules set before us.

I really doubt if I still want to continue to invest money in the products of ArcaNoae.

Again, if you feel that you haven't received a good value for your investment, you shouldn't renew your subscription. It's not charity. We believe in a fair price for a reasonable service. If our service has somehow fallen short in your experience, then please accept my apologies on behalf of the entire Company, and feel free not to renew your subscription.

How about you actually let them have a chance first of all - and a deal with Big Blue is no small deal.

And you're right they're about the last devoplers, so again how about a little support first.

Thanks, Greggory, for recognizing what an herculean task this is.

Unlike Michael I am reasonably happy with my recent Arca Noae subscription - at the moment.

I have downloaded and installed updates to ACPI, AHCI, Multimac, USB, Uniaud and JFS from the driver pack and am happy with most of these updates.

Glad to hear that, Pete.

1] The JFS /AUTOCHECK:+* switch is no longer honoured. This means that it is impossible to *force* chkdsk on drives that are Dirty but marked as Clean. This had been reported by someone else and the result is *unsatisfactory* with the bug marked as Resolved:-

Resolution:  won't fix
Comment:  Regardless of whether you consider it a defect fix, an enhancement, or just a change in operation, this is how it works now.

I have opened a new bug about this problem and hope that Arca Noae rethink and resolve this problem. It is silly to need to boot from another device, ie CD/DVD, in order to chkdsk a Dirty but marked Clean drive.

David and I have differing views on this, but David is thoughtful and reasonable. It had not been his experience that forcing a check on an otherwise-clean-appearing volume has had any positive result. Several of us have made the case that our experience has been different.

I'm going to go out on a limb here. We have weekly staff meetings (except for this past week, due to my own inability to make the meeting). I will add this to our next meeting agenda, and we'll discuss it.

2] Since installing this JFS release  my system often "loses" a drive volume at boot. I have JFS formatted volumes G: through L: with H: and L: being bootable. About 1 in 3 boots I notice that G: is not mentioned at all during the JFS chkdsk display.
Once booted I can get G: to display in the Drives folder by running LVM and then exiting using Save and Exit - with no changes made and - Voila! drive G: appears in the Drives folder.

This sounds like there is some corruption possibly fixable with a full chkdsk run after boot or a forced chkdsk as described above. I'll have a look at the ticket for this one, and see if there's anything constructive which I might be able to add.

This is clearly undesirable behaviour by the JFS driver and needs fixing.

How do I know this is related to JFS 1.09.06?

Simple: It does not happen with any earlier release of JFS.


I have reverted to the jfs installed by eCS2.2beta2 - JFS 1.09.05 - and suggest that anyone else having any form of hard drive problems with JFS 1.09.06 - whether local or usb attached - reverts to any earlier build to see if the problem(s) go away.

JFS 1.09.05 (and prior) has/have a serious and known defect which can cause complete loss of a JFS volume. While it may address the issue you are seeing above, it's a poor long-term solution, IMO.

Plugging DFSee as a disk fixer when you are supplying what in my view is a dodgy filesystem driver is a bit rich   ;-)

Hmmm... Dodgy filesystem driver? That's a bit "rich," now isn't it? DFSee doesn't address the issues here, and DFSee is a third-party tool. It's not like we developed DFSee at the expense of "fixing" our own software. DFSee is a multi-purpose, multi-platform tool; the only relationship between the two is that DFSee recognizes and can address certain JFS issues. 

Depending on how Arca Noae resolve these problems will affect whether I stay happy with Arca Noae.

Fair enough! Let me see what we can do.

My technical opinion: Note that with '+*' you can't force anymore any clean-marked volume being checked at all, regardless if it's dirty or not.

When a dirty boot volume is marked clean, it's time to boot from another volume and perform the chkdsk from there. If that would happen for other volumes, you have now also to boot to another volume for that. Is that really that important? How many times happened that for you?

This is an excellent point, worth making, Andreas; thanks for stating it so succinctly.

Forcing a check on a clean volume is really a shortcut to deal with the underlying problem. There is no substitute for a good maintenance partition or rescue system (we are planning a robust rescue & recovery environment for Blue Lion, BTW, with a reasonable set of tools, networking support, and the ability to really fix things on the live system, so that even if a serious problem makes it impossible to boot from a maintenance partition, the user has a decent chance of getting up and running again, just from a CD or USB boot).

2] Since installing this JFS release  my system often "loses" a drive volume at boot. I have JFS formatted volumes G: through L: with H: and L: being bootable. About 1 in 3 boots I notice that G: is not mentioned at all during the JFS chkdsk display.
Once booted I can get G: to display in the Drives folder by running LVM and then exiting using Save and Exit - with no changes made and - Voila! drive G: appears in the Drives folder.

I would give David at least a few weeks time to investigate this and to react to your recently posted bug.

I agree with you that this needs fixing and if it's somehow reproducible, chances are not bad to fix it.

Indeed.