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. ALthough ArcaOS is a 32-bit operating system, it has limited
PAE support that 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. technology, which employs
FreeBSD driver code, or a selection of GenMAC drivers. Support for wireless networking is somewhat limited, though MultiMac support for additional chipsets is planned for future releases of ArcaOS. generic audio driver, now maintained by Arca Noae. Uniaud is based on the
ALSA framework from the
Linux kernel. In addition, a selection of device-specific drivers are included with ArcaOS. A new audio driver is planned for future releases of ArcaOS, based on
FreeBSD audio drivers. • Video support is provided by Panorama generic unaccelerated
VESA driver, or SNAP 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. • Support for printers is provided by the eCups project, which is based on the open-source
Common Unix Printing System.
Software included with ArcaOS - Firefox, Lucide, 4OS2, PMDCalc Plus In addition to the software bundled with OS/2 Warp 4, ArcaOS includes some additional software, such as: ArcaOS features some improvements to these subsystems that are not found in OS/2, such as the ability to access volumes greater than 2GB from Windows and DOS, as well as supporting 16-bit Windows and DOS software on UEFI systems that do not have a traditional BIOS. • ArcaOS includes
Odin, based on
Wine, which provides a subset of the
Win32 API. • ArcaOS provides a Unix compatibility layer named kLIBC that facilitates the porting of open source Linux applications to ArcaOS. A variety of Linux tools ship with ArcaOS such as the
Bash shell and the
GNU coreutils, • A port of
OpenJDK is included, which allows ArcaOS to run
Java applications that 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 includes support for
optical disc filesystems such as
ISO 9660 and
UDF. 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. The ArcaOS distribution includes a limited license version of NetDrive but the fully licensed version is capable of mounting a number of other local, native, and foreign file systems.
Installation and updates ArcaOS features a new graphical installer that 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. Software is provided through a mixture of freely available, and subscription only RPM repositories.
Hardware requirements The minimum hardware requirements for ArcaOS 5.1 are as follows: ==History==