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First post, by ynari

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I've been wasting far too much time recently getting my secondary system working with Arca Noae, the new OS/2 distribution.

Full review at some point, but basically it's exactly what you'd expect if a reasonably determined team took OS/2 but did not have access to the source code, and spent some time polishing, licensing, and improving OS/2 so that it works reasonably well and less painlessly on modern hardware.

It's not going to convert or interest many people who aren't already dedicated to OS/2 or have a business need for it.

The install, boot manager, control alt delete exception handler, and disk management are vastly improved.

I've got multiple monitors working, but it's a bit buggy with respect to resolutions on my system..

Four cores, and 8GB RAM, all recognised! Networking is ok, and Firefox (an old v49, doesn't have all the up to date patches) does work.

Soundcards are the sticking point. This 'just worked' in the days of ISA. A series of circumstances are preventing me from getting this working :

UNIAUD based soundcards. UNIAUD is just hanging or not loading. It failed with a Soundblaster Live! (but see below), and also with a Trident 4DWave NX.
Tried with dedicated SB Live drivers - that failed too, but OpenBSD is also hanging so I'm suspecting either the soundcard is bad, or it's incompatible with the motherboard.
So, I tried with a CMedia 8738 card, and the system hung with an NMI. I smelt a rat and tried a reboot. It hung again. I tried again, and the system failed with an NMI error *whilst still in the BIOS*. This is where I learnt that more modern motherboards (this is an S3210/X38 derivative) have stopped supporting NMI..
Going to try on another X38 motherboard that has an inbuilt Analog Devices based soundcard, and have a Crystal discrete soundcard on order.
May try another SB Live if I get around to trying this on an older motherboard and it fails on there too.

I had installation issues trying it with straight qemu (on OpenBSD), and on my modern dual CPU E5-2690 system.

Reply 1 of 1, by WolverineDK

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Actually if I am not mistaken, the name of the operating system is Arca OS, and not Arca Noae, and Bryan Lunduke made two videos about the system.

An interview with Bryan Lunduke and the man behind the OS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oXKMZ56R2o

Here is the review he made of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PZE_swqO5U

I must point out, I am not in anyway being rude to you. In fact I think Arca OS, is probably one of the most interesting system in quite a while 😀