Messages

1

Events / Re: Warpstock 2024: Coming? Not Coming? Why?

« on: September 11, 2024, 08:29:59 pm »

Thanks to everyone who has already posted.

My initial question - and the one which is still not fully answered - is why are people coming or not coming to Warpstock?

I get that Arca Noae still has work to do, that there is currently no latest-Chrome-equivalent browser for the platform (and that many think that it is Arca Noae's responsibility to "grow one"), that there are 64-bit platforms which can virtualize the OS, that our only modern office suite is OpenOffice and not LibreOffice...

However, if all these things existed, would you come to Warpstock this year? If not, would sessions on browser functionality make the difference? Would sessions on how to use the platform for daily computing make the difference?

This thread is specific to coming to Warpstock or not. If people here aren't using the platform, and Warpstock content is irrelevant, I get that. But people here are (still) using OS/2 in one form or another for one thing or another. So, what would make the trip worthwhile vs watching a live stream? What topics aren't getting covered which would pique interest? What locations (other than "in my home town," please - we get that one all the time) or venues (other than hotels) would be better suited to attracting attendees?

I haven't heard yet that the registration fee is out of reason or that - for those who have attended in the past - the experience wasn't worthwhile, so I'm curious as to why some still hold back. I get that travel is a hassle, particularly from Europe, but we used to get a whole "European contingent" (as I was wont to call them). Perhaps they came because IBM picked up the tab for most of them.

We can have a different thread regarding Arca Noae's priorities and why Arca Noae can't bring every application to the platform (including a browser), and why NLVs for ArcaOS have taken so long to get to market, and yes, there still is a list, and yes, we are still working our way down that list. (Unlike Alphabet, Microsoft, and the global Linux developer community, we do not have thousands of coders at our beckon call; we prioritize driver development and maintenance to at least get the OS booting on newer hardware.) All of that having been said, this thread is about the Warpstock event, its location, its content, its cost, and the experience.

I'll have some more specific responses in the coming days. (Gordon: Swag is coming; I need to find another hour or two to update the shop. It's truly a pain to make that happen, as it's not just swapping one logo for another, but resizing for the best fit for every single product in the store, checking available colors against colors in the logo, and so forth.)

2

Events / Warpstock 2024: Coming? Not Coming? Why?

« on: September 08, 2024, 04:54:42 pm »

Rather than try to discuss this in the Warpstock forums, which are lightly trafficked, I thought I'd ask this here.

The event in Pittsburgh is earlier this year than in recent years, to try to give people a better weather experience. Also, the holiday calendar makes October a bit difficult, and November is potentially chilly (see my first point).

Some may not be familiar with Pittsburgh, or have misconceptions about its charm. I suggest a quick trip to Wikipedia for a refresher. Pittsburgh is rich with history and culture, and there is an excellent technology museum there (we're working on a potential evening outing there during the event - no promises, but we can always do something impromptu).

Another thing is the hotel group rate. (The hotel has extended our cutoff date to September 9, so for today, at least, it's still possible to book at our group rate of $145/night, which is considerably less than the normal rate for the end of September.) In recent years, I've found that our hotel group rate seemed great when we negotiated the contract, but then, as compared to the regular rate for the time of year of the event, it may have actually been a few $$ more than the regular rate. That annoyed me no end. That's apparently not the case this year.

Warpstock is picking up the tab on lunches for the event, too. Students with valid high school or college ID get FREE admission to all sessions and free food.

We have historically had difficulty "breaking into" the college IT departments to get the publicity we'd like. Let's face it: we're not getting any younger, and getting new blood interested in the platform is priority 1 for us these days (I got the same speech at my car club convention in July and at an Antique Automobile Club of America National Meet last month - encourage new, younger people to join). If anyone has contacts at any of the local (within reasonable driving distance, certainly) colleges or universities - or even high schools - please let us know or make the introduction on our behalf. A wider audience is good for all users of the platform, and who knows? Perhaps the next star developer will attend a Warpstock event - this Warpstock event.

We believe that we provide a good value for the cost of attendance. Watching the stream is a good second choice, but it never matches the in-person experience.

So, if you are coming to Warpstock this year, please mention why. If not, please go into some detail as to your reasons for not making the trip (travel cost, hassle of getting there, registration cost, bad timing, lack of enthusiasm for the location, etc.). We want to know.

Thanks!

3

Applications / Re: ANPM database error

« on: August 17, 2024, 04:45:50 pm »

I should probably put a finer point on this. 

The recent problem at Netlabs has generally not been one of "up" or "down" in terms of accessibility vs no accessibility of content, but rather the integrity of the repository metadata. YUM (and thus, ANPM, which is only a front end for YUM and WarpIN) reads the metadata (catalog) of the repository and presents a list of packages based on that metadata. Errors parsing the metadata are presented in various ways likely as discussed earlier in this thread (I haven't fully read it), including "cannot find xyz...primary.sqlite" and so forth.

Under normal circumstances, the 2rosenthals.com mirrors simply include the Netlabs metadata when mirroring the repositories, cleaning out any prior mirrored metadata files in the process. When the issue(s) surfaced at Netlabs, it became necessary for us to generate/update/maintain our own metadata unique to the 2rosenthals.com mirrors.

It is entirely possible to have metadata downloaded from the 2rosenthals.com mirrors, select a package for installation, and have that package pulled from either rpm.netlabs.org or www.2rosenthals.com (if you have the yum fastestmirror plugin installed and enabled, whichever server provides the best response will be chosen for the download). As long as the checksum of the downloaded file matches the one in the metadata for that package, the rpm is accepted as valid for installation. The current "problem," then, only manifests itself when refreshing metadata for the Netlabs repos, because if the metadata is refreshed from rpm.netlabs.org and is broken, errors will occur (the download of a given metadata file will be successful, but the original on the server will likely be corrupt). The rpms themselves change very little, and the current issue at Netlabs seems to be with new files created by the server, not files copied to it or downloaded from it.

So, in summary, note that it may be necessary to remove/comment rpm.netlabs.org from the netlabs-???.repo file in order to have the metadata refresh from the mirror, and then add/uncomment rpm.netlabs.org again for "normal" operation. It is, of course, possible to extend the life of the metadata (i.e., not have it expire as quickly, so it needs refreshing less often). To do this, simply edit yum.conf and look for (or add):

metadata_expire  Time (in seconds)

where Time is the number of seconds to keep the metadata before refreshing again. The default is 6 hours (see the yum.conf man page). "never" is a valid value, which means that the metadata must be manually refreshed (and may be a reasonable setting for the time being, until we can be assured that the Netlabs issues have been fully resolved).

4

Applications / Re: ANPM database error

« on: August 16, 2024, 10:10:18 pm »

Sorry for the bumpy ride with the (temporary) transition to maintaining our own metadata at the 2rosenthals.com mirror.s I managed to fat-finger my edit to the update script which caused us to bypass the actual download of new packages (D'Oh!).

Anyway, all fixed now. The last metadata update on the 2rosenthals.com mirrors of netlabs-rel and netlabs-exp was timestamped at around 5:30am EDT, which corresponds with the timing of the cron job. We also managed to pick up some more recent files.

A word of caution:

The 2rosenthals.com mirror of netlabs-rel and netlabs-exp have nothing whatsoever to do with arcanoae-rel, arcanoae-exp, and arcanoae-sub. The Arca Noae content is unique to the arcanoae-* repos. None of the arcanoae-* repos are mirrors of anything else, nor are there any mirrors of their content anywhere.

Also, one might note that there are a handful of qt5 5.15.2 packages available from arcanoae-rel which are not available from netlabs-rel (or, obviously, the 2rosenthals.com mirror thereof). These packages were necessary to allow qt5 to upgrade cleanly on ArcaOS, as bww did not provide them (e.g., the qt5 metapackage for 5.15.2). It is not possible to upgrade qt5 with *just* the packages at arcanoae-rel, nor was that ever the intent of Arca Noae.

Hopefully, the Netlabs repos will be back up and available soon.

5

General Discussion / Re: "request ISO build" not working

« on: July 19, 2024, 05:48:04 am »

"Request ISO build" is working. Email response sent to reporter.

Please do not assume that the problem is on our end when a notification email is not received in a timely fashion. as these emails contain download links, it is entirely possible that they may be blocked or trapped by your ISP or mail provider, and we would have no way to know that. Only you can check this with your ISP or mail provider.

Everything is working as designed, the system is up, building ISOs, and sending notifications.

Thanks, everyone, for your support.

6

Programming / Re: Bigicons

« on: December 25, 2023, 06:48:05 am »

The difference between the two is that "SET BIGICONSPATH=" is correct (i.e. that's what the code looks for) while "SET BIGICONS=" is incorrect (i.e. the code doesn't look for this). The fact that AN has been putting the wrong entry in config.sys for the last 6 years doesn't change things. My only question is why it took someone 6 years to notice the error.

FWIW... I was the one who transformed "Sunny Icons" into "Dynamic Icons", so maybe I was the one who gave them the wrong info. If so, I apologize for the error.

LOL...

I guess it took 6 years as nobody has felt the need to actually relocate the icons. 

As for who is responsible for the error, I lifted the code section from the eCoSoft icon package verbatim, without validating it. Thus, the problem exists in Sunny Icons and its icon package, as well (so longer than 6 years, there). I should have looked at the code, where it is fairly obvious what the variable should be. Oh, well.

7

General Discussion / Re: Arca Noae services offline

« on: June 22, 2023, 07:33:24 pm »

I am relieved to report that as of 1:25 EDT today, all hosted services are back up and online. The fiber cut has been repaired, and things should return to normal as soon as we get through processing all of the "are your servers down?" email messages. 

8

General Discussion / Arca Noae services offline

« on: June 22, 2023, 01:54:25 pm »

Hi, everyone.

Unfortunately, we had a fiber cut yesterday around 3:00pm EDT. We are currently awaiting a truck roll to splice it and get us reconnected to the rest of the world. Rest assured, Arca Noae is still hard at work, and we should be back online before the middle of the day tomorrow (Friday, June 23).

At present all Arca Noae services are inaccessible (email, main website, bug tracker, FTP, SVN).

9

Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Re: Antivirus and ArcaOS

« on: March 08, 2023, 03:23:23 pm »

Absolutely, Ramon.

As a server admin, I often need to rely on reports from others as to whether we've ended up on some wacky blacklist or some such. Sometimes, a mail account we host may be compromised, and as we allow authenticated relay, the server will start relaying junk. I might not be aware of the problem until I go looking for something else, and then find that the log file has grown to gigantic proportions. So, I'd much prefer if people would speak up when they get odd-sounding results, so I can look into things more fully.

So, thanks for saying something. I'm relieved to see that it was (and likely still is) just a false alarm, and we don't appear to be on any (other) widely available reputation blacklists. Glad, too, that you were able to fetch your updates.

Cheers

10

Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Re: Antivirus and ArcaOS

« on: March 07, 2023, 05:29:12 am »

Sometimes I wonder how these "domain reputation" scores actually work. Sometimes, it seems that any domain which hosts downloadable files is automatically classified as some level of risk. It's very odd that Bitdefender seems to consider our domain suspect. Of course, you can remove our YUM mirror from your netlabs-rel.repo file (and/or netlabs-exp).

Unfortunately, you can't really do that with any of the Arca Noae repo files, as Arca Noae currently has no other mirrors, but a lookup of repos.arcanoae.com will come back to one of our registered IP addresses (but not the same address as www.2rosenthals.com).

IAC, Ramon, I can assure you that the Netlabs YUM mirror hosted at 2rosenthals.com is clean. We sync every 12 hours with netlabs.org, and the web space is not world-writeable, so it should be free of any extraneous files. The YUM metadata would have to be built on the server if any files were changed or added, and we don't do that. Instead, we sync the entire Netlabs repo content, including the metadata (faster and less CPU-intensive than rebuilding it locally). Thus, only the files which would be accessible from the master copies of the Netlabs repos should be available from our mirrors.

11

Hardware / Re: USB32 USBMSD problem of re-read diskette

« on: January 23, 2023, 03:08:46 pm »

Hi, Lars...

I happen to have an IBM FRU 02P5223 right here, and it works perfectly well attached to the same T560 USB3 port in the dock as my Teac, with or without media inserted at time of connection. This information from the DDK is considerably outdated, and of little to no relevance to the 32-bit AN driver..

David completed extensive reworking of USBMSD.ADD in the 12.04 release of the AN stack (March, 2020) when he converted it (USBMSD.ADD) to 32-bit. There was a lot of broken stuff in the IBM code (including at least one null pointer). Frankly, it's rather amazing that the IBM code worked as well as it did.

12

Hardware / Re: USB32 USBMSD problem of re-read diskette

« on: January 22, 2023, 06:38:34 pm »

Lars, I mean no disrespect, and do not mean to imply that one driver performs more or better checking than the other, but perhaps *different* checking.

I'll have to look at Igor's testlog output again, but all I can say right now is that we have what should be the same hardware, and yet, mine works and his does not. I'm confident that your stack would work for my drive, as well. So, I'm only positing that there may be other factors at play instead of an actual software defect.

Thanks for all you do, my friend.

13

Hardware / Re: USB32 USBMSD problem of re-read diskette

« on: January 22, 2023, 04:11:48 pm »

Igor: You and I seem to have the same floppy drive (Teac USB ID 0644:0000). David also has one of these. Considering that David's and my drive work and yours does not, I would have to say that this is likely not something related to the USB stack (yes, I get that Lars' USBMSD driver works), but rather something unique to these systems where the drives are not working (and/or where the AN stack performs additional error checking which perhaps Lars' driver does not - and that is just a WAG on my part).

Michael: Have you opened a ticket with Arca Noae and provided a testlog for one of your drives which does not work? Are you also saying that the ports in your dock do not work? This could point to a number of other issues beyond software.

14

Hardware / Re: USB32 USBMSD problem of re-read diskette

« on: January 21, 2023, 09:06:48 pm »

Hi, guys...

Test system here:

ThinkPad T560
Lenovo Docking Station (17EF:1010 (HS hub with single TT) Lenovo ThinkPad Ultra Dock Hub)
ArcaOS 5.0.7
USB stack 12.14 / USBMSD.ADD /FLOPPIES:1
Teac FD-05PUW (0644:0000 (MSD)-(UFI)-(CBI-I) FS TEAC Corp. Floppy)

Device hot plugs. Insert media; able to read, able to write; eject media; insert different media; able to read, able to write.

Same system, but swap out the Teac drive with:

IBM USB portable FDD (057B:0000 (MSD)-(UFI)-(CBI-I) FS Y-E Data, Inc. FlashBuster-)

Same result. Disks insert, readable, writable, eject, replace with different disks, reading/writing still possible.

The only thing I didn't test was formatting. Okay, testing... Formatting works as expected (in the IBM drive, at least).

I fail to see what is wrong, sorry.

15

Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Re: ArcaOS 5.0 on xxxxxx.com

« on: January 17, 2023, 09:21:20 pm »

Thanks, Martin.

This appears to be the same ISO which was previously leaked to archive.org a few months ago (through no fault of the licensee - or Arca Noae). I've sent Juliano a takedown request.

As always, we are extremely grateful for everyone keeping a watchful eye out for leaks.