OS/2 Tips

We scan the Web, Usenet and the OS/2 mail lists looking for these gems. Have you run across an interesting bit of information about OS/2 recently? Please share it with all our readers. Send your tips to editor@os2voice.org. If you are interested in joining a particular OS/2 Mailing List, check out the VOICE Mailing List page for subscribing instructions for a large variety of existing Lists - http://www.os2voice.org/mailinglists.html.

Editor's note: these tips are from OS/2 users and in some cases can not be verified by myself. Please heed this as a warning that if you are not sure about something, don't do it.

February 15, 2000 - If you have a hung WPS, and the machine is connected via a NETBIOS LAN, then the following tip from Trevor Hemsley on comp.os.os2.apps may be of help. You would also need some sort of processkiller on the hung machine as well. TOP which is available on hobbes has a process killer that can take a command line parameter. You would ne to know the process ID (pid) to kill a process.:

use NET ADMIN \\machinename /C processkiller.exe /pid=123 on machines that you don't want to run the telnet daemon on but do have Peer installed.

February 15, 2000 - On hardware@os2ss.com, Gerry Chilibeck, offered this tip on how to improve your system cooling:

I just did some minor modification to my case, an InWin500 with 250w PS (17" high case). Since I bought, one by one, all bays (3 HDD's, 2 CD's, tape) and slots are now full on an ATX mb w/ a PPro 200. Two scsi cards added 2 cables that just get in the way of good air flow. The thingy was getting "warm' but I did not know how warm.

I managed to get a quality glass thermometer inside and it was running at 40c (105F) in a 20C (70F) room. This was with the PS fan blowing in (a la ATX) in the upper rear of the box and an auxillary 3" fan blowing out of the case in the lower front (BTW, this was the Mgf. recommendations.) While 105 F is not extreme, we all know that cooler is better.

Well, a philips screwdriver and 20 minutes, I reversed the airflow of both fans. Now, ambient 'cool' air IN the front and exhaust 'hot' air OUT the PS at the back. The case temp is now at 30C (88F), which is one half of the temp delta before.

So, if you have added the card here and the NIC there and that 20gb archive HDD, maybe this one's for you.

Call it a "cheap trick" with good results.

February 15, 2000 - If you are having problems trying to install the now free for download Embellish http://www.dadaware.com here is a possible solution from Britton Turnbull on comp.os.os2.apps:

this worked for me,
1) download zip file from dadaware
http://www.dadaware.com/ftp/embos2.zip
2) download zip file from hobbes
ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/apps/graphics/imagepro/embo202.zip
3) unzip both files in SEPERATE directories
4) copy inifile.cm_
install.exe
install.in_
from hobbes zip over files in dadaware zip
5) copy EPFIPII.DLL from somewher (I used PMView origional) into dadaware directory
6) verify LIBPATH=.: Is start of libpath string If not add and reboot to take effect
7) execute install from dadaware directory

February 18, 2000 - Mark McClelland on aurora-beta@voice.os2ss.com offered the following caution about the newly available UDFS on Software Choice for Warp Server eBusiness subscribers:

By the way, if you have the UDF IFS installed, do not be tempted out of curiousity to format a hard disk partition or non-DVD removable disk with it. It will very likely corrupt the partition table of a hard disk. It will also thoroughly corrupt a removable disk that has the superfloppy (no partition table) format, rendering it useless until you do a low-level format of it.

I have tried this myself with horrific results. Not only did I lose my partition table (ehich I ended up rewriting by hand), but I now have a Zipdisk that OS/2 can no longer format. I suppose a low-level format will fix it, but I can't be sure.

I consider this a bug, since it should not even attempt to format anything besides a DVD or CDR. You might want to report it to IBM as such. Either that, or IBM should support its use on hard drives or removables, since UDF is a good cross-platform filesystem (I believe Linux supports this.)

February 20, 2000 - On the POSSI list Judy Russell offered the following suggestions for making HTML tables:

For large tables, if there is not too much data in each cell, it can be handy to use Mesa/2 and export as html. Then copy and paste into the page. The html Mesa/2 generates is pretty clean.

If you need a calendar-style page for anything, LotusWordPro will make that nicely and save as html with little in extraneous tags.

February 21, 2000 - If you are tired of the ads at Deja.com, here is a possibly better option to access usenet archives according to Peter Moylan on comp.os.os2.networking.tcp-ip:

It's slow for everyone, because of all those ads they give you. The way to access Deja without the ads is to go to <http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/deja.html>. Another possibility might be to install Junkbuster.

February 23, 2000 - If you are experiencing a lot of "Skipping" running an MP3 player under OS/2, Lee Pearson offers the following:

Does your MP3 player have a 'buffer size' option? If so, try increasing it. This procedure banished the skips on an ESS card here.

February 28, 2000 - Keith Marjerison suggests trying the following if you are having problems getting RSJ CD Writer to run. The following was posted on rsj.de.support.cdwriter.os2 which is a news group on RSJ's own news server news://news.rsj.de

Your problem could be with the location of the RSJ drivers in your config.sys file. I have an Adaptec 2920c scsi card and the old Adaptec drivers when installed with RSJ caused a system Trap. Remming out either device statement allowed the system to boot. It turned out to be a loading problem, I only found this out by moving the Adaptec driver around in config.sys. The scsi basedev statement needs to be the 1st Basedev statement and RSJ's
REM *** RSJ CD-Writer File System ***
IFS=E:\CDWFS\CDWFS.IFS
RUN=E:\CDWFS\CDWFSD.EXE -p "F:/TMP" -c20000 -b4096 -t2 -i3 -s0
needs to be near the beginning with the other IFS statements.

March 2, 2000 - Recently the topic of how to change the default boot partition in boot manager popped up on the VOICE Help list (help@os2voice.org). Here are a couple of responses first from Maynard Riley:

I expect that you'll find this setting under BootManager Options in FDISK.

You might be able to change it without rebooting by using FDISKPM; highlight the BootManager partition, and select Options.

Then Vincent Jamar added:

Exactly,at "options" under inicialization values, there should be NO system choosen, but a blank line. This way, you are always by default boot the last OS you were using !

March 3, 2000 - Here's another tip sent in to the VOICE Help list (help@os2voice.org) by Trevor Clarke :

I have an answer to a question you may/may not have been asked before.

I chose the AT Mainboard Bx Pro M/B partly because I knew it would support OS/2. The driver CD for the Motherboard (shipped with it) contained drivers for the onbard video (SIS 6326 AGP 8MB).

I run Warp 3 FP40. When I upgraded to Netscacpe 4.04, Netscape reported an excpetion which could not be dispatched, insufficient stack space, and named IBMDEV32.DLL as the culprit. I tried Netscape 4.61 and the same happened.

I tried everything from meditation to loud screaming. Then I acquired the latest version of the video driver from SIS. I applied the driver in the directory SBCS.30. This cured the problem.

I can't imagine I am the only person who has had this happen, and thought I'd let you guys know given that the error message is pretty misleading.

March 3, 2000 - I use Norman Data Defense Antivirus (http://www.norman.com), which not only supports OS/2 natively with both a batch and PM native version, but they have an RSU (Remote Service Update) version of their virus definition file updates for OS/2. Unfortunately I have never been able to get this to work consistently almost always getting the error "command failed CHDIR /ftp/pub until I read this tip from Ronald Klein on the POSSI discussion list:

You can edit the norman.rsu file.
Edit the NAME statements to remove the path before the file name. i.e.

NAME=rsuinst.zip
NAME=os2_upd.zip

Editor note: Once you make the above changes to a local copy of the norman.rsu, you can then drag the norman.rsu file to netscape and it will proceed to download and update your Norman Antivirus the same process as used to apply fixpaks online for OS/2 itself.

March 5, 2000 - Ever read a URL and wonder what the ending abbreviation meant? Sure we all know the standard ones like .com (that means a lot of money on Wall Street doesn't it?), .org, .net, and some you can make a good guess at (.ca = Canada, .mx = Mexico), but did you know .sa was for Saudi Arabia, not South Africa (that's .za)? If you are curious about more of these, here is a tip from Reb James on the TeamOS/2 List on how to find a list of all of the country codes:

Did some searching of my bookmarks, after a few jumps found the following listing all the top-level domains suffix.

http://www.iana.org/cctld.htm

March 6, 2000 - If you had installed the Scitech Display Doctor beta ( http://www.scitechsoft.com ), without a registration, it times out after 29 days. So if you then install the latest SDD Special Edition from IBM's DDPakOnline ( http://service.software.ibm.com/os2ddpak/html/displayc/index.htm ), you will still see the time out. Here is the sccop from Kendall Bennett of Scitech:

Basically if you have the professional version installed and the SDD/se version installed, then the SDD/se version will actually run as the professional version (ie: with all the Pro features). Normally when the pro version times out, it will disable itself. However if the SDD/se version is installed, it will go back to the SDD/se feature set.

March 8, 2000 - On Scitech's support news server, Eirik Overby had the following tip for those who may have installed the SDD/se version, the docs seem to be misisng the following information on changing font and icon size.

Check the readme file that comes with SDD (the SDD Pro beta version) - you will find config.sys settings to do this...
SET SDDFONTSIZE=small
SET SDDFONTDPI=96
SET SDDICONS=small
should do the trick

March 14, 2000 - Why anyone would do so is beyond me, but some folks have discovered that installing windows2000 on an OS/2 machine which has boot manager installed, will kill boot manager on every boot to windoze. Here is a tip from R.M. Klippstein on a way around the problem:

The Boot manager problem (Boot manager is destroyed by W2000!) can be resolved by installing Powerquest's Boot magic. This boot manager is included in Partition Magic Pro ver 5.0'. It is a little more versitile than the IBM boot manager but has a rather disgusting background image. The big plus, is that you now have the use of a fourth Primary partition, as Boot Magic does not require its own partition.

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