ArcaOS is a proprietary operating system based on OS/2, developed and marketed by Arca Noae, LLC under license from IBM.[ Blue Lion Announcement at Warpstock 2015] It was first released in 2017 and builds on OS/2 Warp 4.52 by adding support for new hardware, fixing defects and limitations in the operating system, and by including new applications and tools,
Like OS/2 Warp, ArcaOS is a 32-bit
Features
Hardware compatibility
ArcaOS supports symmetric multiprocessing systems with up to 64 processor cores, although it is recommended to disable
hyperthreading.
As of version 5.0.8, ArcaOS is ACPI 6.1-compliant and includes the 20220331 release of
ACPICA.
While ArcaOS is a 32-bit operating system, it has limited PAE support which allows it to use RAM in excess of 4GB as a RAM disk.
ArcaOS supports being run as a virtual machine guest inside VirtualBox, VMware ESXi, VMWare Workstation and Microsoft Virtual PC.
In addition to the included with OS/2 Warp 4, ArcaOS includes a variety of drivers developed by Arca Noae, and various third parties:
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Network adapters are supported either with Arca Noae's MultiMac
[ Arca Noae wiki: MultiMac NIC Drivers] technology, which employs FreeBSD driver code, or a selection of GenMAC[ Project: Generic MAC Wrapper Driver (GenMac)] drivers. Support for wireless networking is somewhat limited, though MultiMac support for additional chipsets is planned for future releases of ArcaOS.
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ArcaOS replaces the 16-bit IBM OS/2 USB driver with a new 32-bit driver capable of supporting USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 controllers.
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Audio support utilizes the Uniaud
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Video support is provided by Panorama
[ Arca Noae wiki: Panorama Video Driver] generic unaccelerated VESA driver, or SNAP[ Arca Noae wiki: Arca Noae SNAP Graphics for OS/2] accelerated video driver. Features such as acceleration and multi-head are supported for a limited number of graphics chipsets. Support for these features in additional chipsets, such as the Intel HD series, is planned.
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Storage drivers are available for Parallel ATA, AHCI, NVMe and a number of SCSI adapters.
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Support for printers is provided by the eCups project, which is based on the open-source CUPS.
Software
In addition to the software bundled with OS/2 Warp 4, ArcaOS includes some additional software, such as:
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Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird 45
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Apache OpenOffice 4.1
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Lucide, an open source document viewer
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XWorkplace, a set of open source enhancements to the Workplace Shell
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4OS2
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OpenJDK 6
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Qt 4 and 5
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Samba 4
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Heimdal Kerberos
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VirtualBox
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Rexx and Object REXX interpreters
Cross-platform compatibility
ArcaOS includes a number of software components which allow it to directly run software developed for other operating systems, and to simplify the process of porting software to ArcaOS:
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ArcaOS includes OS/2's MVDM and WIN-OS/2, allowing ArcaOS to run 16-bit MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 applications natively.
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ArcaOS includes Odin, based on Wine, which provides a subset of the Win32 API.
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ArcaOS provides a Unix compatibility layer named kLIBC which facilitates the porting of open source Linux applications to ArcaOS.
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A port of OpenJDK is included, which allows ArcaOS to run Java applications which do not have platform-specific dependencies.
Filesystems
ArcaOS's default
filesystem is JFS, although HPFS is also supported for backwards compatibility.
ArcaOS may be installed to and booted from either filesystem.
FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 are also supported using either the OS/2 kernel's own FAT driver, or a new Arca Noae-developed FAT32 IFS driver, included in ArcaOS since version 5.0.3.
ArcaOS supports serving and accessing CIFS/SMB shares using the open source Samba project, and provides a graphical utility named ArcaMapper to manage configuration.
NetDrive for OS/2 provides access to a variety of additional filesystems such as NTFS and NFS via its own IFS driver.
Installation and updates
ArcaOS features a new graphical installer which replaces the IBM installer used in OS/2 Warp.
Unlike OS/2, the ArcaOS installation process does not require a boot floppy, and instead the installer can be booted directly from optical media, or from a USB flash drive.
The installer also provides an update facility, which allows ArcaOS to be updated to the latest release without reinstalling the entire operating system.
Installation and updates of individual software packages is provided through the Arca Noae Package Manager (ANPM), which consists of a native OS/2 graphical frontend on top of RPM and YUM.
Hardware requirements
The minimum hardware requirements for ArcaOS 5.1 are as follows:
History
Blue Lion
ArcaOS was formally announced on October 23, 2015, at the Warpstock 2015 event (an OS/2 user group event) under the code name "Blue Lion" by Arca Noae's Managing Member, Lewis Rosenthal.
Some of the planned features for Blue Lion announced at the time were:
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New Symmetric multiprocessing kernel.
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New pre-boot menu.
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New OS installer with support for installation from USB flash drive and across a network.
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Device drivers already produced by Arca Noae as part of their Drivers & Software Subscription.
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The latest Workplace Shell enhancements.
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Updated CUPS print subsystem.
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Updated PostScript printer driver pack.
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Localization in several languages besides English.
ArcaOS 5.0
The name "ArcaOS" was first published in a
TechRepublic article
on May 26, 2016, while the arcaos.com domain was registered December 20, 2015. In the same TechRepublic article, Lewis Rosenthal was quoted as saying that the first release of ArcaOS would be version 5.0, as it follows onto the last release of OS/2 Warp from IBM, which was 4.52 (also known as Merlin Convenience Pack 2, or MCP2).
ArcaOS 5.0 was released May 15, 2017.
ArcaOS 5.0 was followed by a number of maintenance releases between 2017 and 2023. In addition to bug fixes and driver updates, the maintenance releases added some significant features such as USB 3.0 support, support for NVMe drives, the ability to install from a USB drive, and the update facility.
ArcaOS 5.1
Prior to the release of ArcaOS 5.0, ArcaOS 5.1 was originally planned for release in 2017 with a focus on providing localized releases for languages other than English, referred to as National Language Versions (NLVs).
Following the release of ArcaOS 5.0, Arca Noae began discussing a 5.1 release in their roadmaps, along with additional proposed new features.
ArcaOS 5.1.0 was released on August 27, 2023, adding support for booting on UEFI Class 3 systems, and support for GUID partition tables — allowing for disks larger than OS/2's previous 2TB size limit.
This was followed by the 5.1.1 release in February 2025, which added the first NLVs for German, Spanish and Russian.
Other features which have been proposed for the 5.1.x releases include:
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Additional NLVs, including French, Italian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Dutch.
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A migration facility to allow in-place migration of OS/2 Warp 4 and eComStation systems to ArcaOS without removing the existing operating system installation first.
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Desktop search functionality based on the open-source Recoll project.
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Replacing the monolithic IBM Selective Install utility with a number of Arca Noae-developed utilities.
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Porting a modern WebKit based web browser to ArcaOS to replace Firefox.
Release history
| ArcaOS releases |
|
| First public release of ArcaOS |
| Installer fixes and driver updates |
| Added ability to boot from USB media |
| Updates to software and drivers |
| Update facility which allows ArcaOS to be updated without reinstalling |
| USB 3.0/xHCI support |
| Installer fixes and updates |
| NVMe driver |
| Support for NVMe drives in installer and preboot environment |
2023-08-27 | Support for UEFI Class 3 hardware, and GPT partitions |
2025-02-16 | NLV support for German, Spanish, and Russian |
External links
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Arca Noae – website of the developer of ArcaOS
