Warpstock EU 2020 Summery and Report

By OS2user

Day 1
The annual Warpstock kicked off yesterday in a new and different format. Due to everything related to Covid-19 the meeting was held virtually on YouTube with pre-recorded presentations by the speakers and Q&A via video conference afterwards.

Thanks to Roderick Klein pulling all the strings despite having suffered from mild Covid symptoms.

The line-up included Alex Taylor who talked about the UEFI bios update to boot ArcaOS on UEFI only systems. This has come a long way since last year. Alex was even able to demonstrate the successful installation of ArcaOS on a UEFI system as part of the presentation. Development of the UEFI support continues at pace and will be made available to all in the next release of ArcaOS. Hopefully there will be more on this on Sunday, as part of Lewis Rosenthal’s presentation.

There was a very informative presentation by Jan van Wijk on his DFsee software. It was fascinating to see the development time-line over the life of the product and why he started developing this in the first place. And let’s not forget the guitars in the background which caused some discussion at the end.

Alex Taylor gave an overview of all the extremely useful software he has released over the last year with a hands-on demonstration.

The first day was moderated and chaired by Roderick Klein who as always has put a huge amount of time and effort into Warpstock EU.

One of Roderick’s points and favorite quotes is “software do not grow on trees” so please consider any donation you are able to give. Be that big or small donations. See the various OS/2 related sites such as BWW, ArcaNoae, OS/2 Voice etc. to give what you can.

Today we are looking forward to the superstar of the OS/2World and the ArcaOS' oracle Lewis Rosenthal for an update on the roadmap to 5.1 and beyond. There are further presentations by Bitwise Works (Dmitriy Kuminov) for an update, Martin Iturbide on resources for OS/2 collaboration and finally Alex Taylor updating on the Arca Noae Package Manager in 2020. This will wrap up the line-up for Warpstock EU in 2020.

Day 2
The ArcaOS' oracle, Lewis Rosenthal, spoke and we all listened, very intently, because the sound was very bad. But all the bits we were able to understand sound amazing. The ArcaOS roadmap will be an exciting road to travel over the next 12 months. ArcaOS version 5.0.5 is due for release this month (May 2020) with some significant improvements. Keep an eye on the Arca Noae website for more info over the next weeks.

This followed an update by Alex Taylor on the ANPM and developments for 2020. The ANPM will be able to handle WarpIN files in future. It was unclear when this will be widely available. I suspect it might only be rolled out with the major update ArcaOS is due in 9-12 months time when version 5.1 is released.

Martin Iturbide talked and demonstrated some of the amazing work he continues to do on the OS2World wiki page to collect and catalogue anything OS/2. There are hardware compatibility lists from old to new hardware. There are resources from IBM, such as training manuals and software catalogues listing from BBS, games to WPS utilities. Martin further talked about continuing to update EDM/2 this remains a valuable resource for anybody interested in programming and developing for OS/2.

Following a virtual lunch break Dmitriy Kuminov gave a full account of what Bitwise Works (BWW) did, does and is doing. BWW consist of three core members who maintain and update hundreds of dependencies to keep ArcaOS working and enable the porting of modern software. There main focus has been, as anybody will know who has been around the OS/2 world for more than five minutes, is the porting of Qt5 and ultimately a new browser to replace the ailing pre Rust Firefox versions currently available. This will be a massive leap forward for the future and future-proof ArcaOS. This is a massive project which has taken up time and resources not least of all by Roderick Klein who has been driving the funding by the innovative use and sale of OS/2 memorabilia on eBay etc. Thanks to everybody for there hard work to bring the Falcon browser to ArcaOS.

I talked a little about donations in day 1. Now I know it can be a little tedious and vulgar to keep talking about money. So I will keep it short.

In this author's opinion the future viability of this OS may rise and fall on the success of a modern web browser. Over-dramatic? Maybe? But consider this. The current OS/2 & ArcaOS user base will be fine with the status quo, but if there is to be any future proofing, this development will be vital.

Give what you can to BWW to made it happen.