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Article Discussions / Re: Adding an extra thing to the ArcaOS strategy ?
« Last post by Dave Yeo on March 22, 2026, 05:43:59 pm »
No access to the closed code. They do have permission to do binary patches, which is how they've patched the kernel and such.
Note that the patched binaries have to be distributed with ArcaOS, not separately.
Personally, I wonder if IBM still knows where the latest source is. Rumor also says the PowerPC OS/2 source is lost, which is a shame as that would have been the best to open source, pure C code.
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General Discussion / Re: Hobbesarchive gone
« Last post by Kim on March 22, 2026, 11:33:13 am »
Must be a lot of mirroring going on if it runs up 8TB traffic per month - if we assume that the entire site is around 30GB that would be around 8-9 full site mirrors per day.
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Applications / Re: ArcaOS 5.1.2 First Impressions !!
« Last post by David Kiley on March 22, 2026, 08:14:00 am »
I'm still debating if i'm going to upgrade. I probably will once I have a pint too many some night lol.
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Article Discussions / Re: Adding an extra thing to the ArcaOS strategy ?
« Last post by David Kiley on March 22, 2026, 07:59:36 am »
Just curious, does AN have any access to the os/2 closed source code that they use to produce their new versions of os/2? Or they just have to develop "around" code they don't have access to?

My programming experience is very "basic" as in Microsoft basic :).
But how would open source utilities or binaries help if the main closed source core isn't being touched either way?

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Hardware / Re: Serial Port Shenanigans - ArcaOS 5.1.1 on a Lenovo M920t
« Last post by Dave Yeo on March 22, 2026, 07:52:22 am »
If you can find a copy of Theseus4, it should tell you the device names. System-->General System-->Device Drivers.
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General Discussion / Hobbesarchive gone
« Last post by Dave Yeo on March 22, 2026, 07:49:32 am »
Well, going to HobbesArchive today, it seems due to costs, it is no more. See https://hobbesarchive.com/
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Hardware / Re: Serial Port Shenanigans - ArcaOS 5.1.1 on a Lenovo M920t
« Last post by AmbulatoryCorpse on March 22, 2026, 06:40:32 am »
It's been a little while, time for an update..

I picked up a couple of serial cards as experimentation fodder -
2 port Oxford based startech (16c950 uart)
4 port Axis based startech (161050 uart)

Both cards appear to work - pcom.sys finds them just fine up at 0x30x0, with irqs.
I can get sio2k to find them by explicitly listing the addresses in the sio2k.cfg file - but sio fails to figure out irqs; same for motherboard serial. Does anyone know how to feed uart.sys explicit irq information?

Alternatively I can give sio a driver name to try hooking ports from.. The uart.sys and vmodem.sys from sio are easy guessing - pcom.sys is less obvious.  Does anyone know how pcom.sys registers in driver space?

Another possible thing could be to update sio2k's pci id data to enable identification. Once I figure out that file.

Are there any old hands with experience or knowledgeable developers interested in helping out?
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Article Discussions / Re: Adding an extra thing to the ArcaOS strategy ?
« Last post by Dave Yeo on March 22, 2026, 02:52:55 am »
Hi Martin, while your idea is a good one and I agree more open source components in our OS is a good goal, I don't think Arca Noae really has the resources to implement it. Binaries need to be checked for compatibility and bugs.
Something like bldlevel isn't critical and a buggy or incomplete version wouldn't be too bad, many other components are more critical. Plus there is likely a subset of users who expect the core system to be as it always has been.
One idea is to develop a parallel system. Perhaps under something like \OS5\ all these tools can be installed in bin, dll and such and users who are interested can install the system. With the right PATH, LIBPATH etc the open source binaries will have priority so you'd start with x:\OS5\bldlevel  with x:\OS5\ at the front of the PATH, or at least forward of x:\OS2. Same with x:\OS5\DLL, x:\OS5\help and such.
I picked OS5 to align with ArcaOS 5.x and avoid OS4 which is already taken.
Another addition could be FreeDOS or other open source DOS under x:\OS5\MDOS or such.
Once a few utilities and other binaries are working in the parrallel sysem it would be easier to suggest Arca Noae considering them.
As for worries about open source projects moving in weird directions such a using Rust, they can always be forked, so not a problem. Of course with our shortage of active developers...
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Web applications / Re: Need memcached module for php7!
« Last post by Paul Smedley on March 22, 2026, 12:31:54 am »
I've never had luck regenerating configure for PECL modules, I've been hand building them with a build.cmd script. Unfortunately, the examples I have are on a virtualbox drive, and virtualbox isn't running for me right now, as I'm running a beta Ubunut 26.04 with a lnux kernel 7, and seems virtualbox can't handle that yet.
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Article Discussions / Re: Adding an extra thing to the ArcaOS strategy ?
« Last post by Martin Iturbide on March 21, 2026, 08:05:08 pm »
Hello

First of all, thanks for the feedback, and sorry I don't reply that fast, since I had been busy with the server DDoS attacks and it slows me down on forum replies (like I guess is happening to all of us interacting with OS2World)

My idea is for "replacing (when possible) IBM OS/2 close source components (binaries, .exe) with open-source alternatives" is to be added to the strategy when possible and not becoming their main strategy.

I want to put a little example.
- Let's replace bldlevel.exe with the OSFree bldlevel.
-- https://github.com/osfree-project/osfree/tree/master/OS2/CMD/bldlevel
- It uses the The 3-Clause BSD License

ArcaOS could embrace the apple strategy when they created OS/X of using an open source base system (in their case Darwin) with thier own commercial propriety system on top of it (keeping the OS/2 UI for example like the workplace shell/WPS). And, they had created the "classic" mode to allow old os 9 apps to still work. Would require them embracing a totally new direction though.
Even that I may like that strategy, It is basically grabbing a new operating system (maybe Linux) and create a VM that runs OS/2 on it, and move forward to migrate to Linux. I personally don't like that.

Or creating a 64bit based OS/2 OS from scratch, but we don't have the resources to do that.

I like a lot the idea of grabbing a different kernel (Zircon, ReactOS kernel or Linux Kernel) and create an interpreter for OS/2 over it, but I guess this is a different subject of what I try to discuss here.

I think it's time to relegate the old IBM license to a virtualized session inside a totally new OS, while keeping WPS on top of it, which is where the user has always spent 99% of their time anyways.
I will prefer to construct a "OS/2 like WINE" interpreter under a new kernel to keep running the OS/2 experience on real hardware, like it was discuss on this forum thread, but again it is not the subject I want to discuss here and we don't have the resource to move on that way.

...BUT.. besides all the porting work, this will kill the OS one day.

Reason why? - Imagine you have replaced a good chunk of tools and maybe even main components. Next day the open source community decides ProjectX (or some dependencies) move on to Rust or some other compiler, that we are not able to compile for OS/2 with. Now you're operating system is busted, if you can't move back to the old closed source components. (maybe due to dependencies)

Here I think we have different perception of open source. Open source does not mean using an specific dependencies libraries, some open source software evolved on that way, yes. But the idea is to ask Arca Noae and to the community to re-use open source and also to create little replacements for IBM OS/2 close source binaries, not necessary using a Linux project to get ported.

I think the warning you post is good. "Killing" the software by using a library that eventually evolves to Rust, I feel it is the better than using a close source software that can not evolve anymore (like all IBM OS/2 binaries). In the case of IBM's close source we don't have a way to continue it, in the case of open source software we can fork it. 

Regards
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