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August 2003

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News Page 5

July 29

Events: Call for Warpstock 2004 bids

So far we have not received any comments after my post a month ago so I'm sending this again to see if I can generate some early interest and if it is possible, we would like to announce the 2004 location at this years event in San Francisco.

Warpstock 2003 is now less then 3 months away (Have you made your reservations and registration yet?), and the Warpstock, Inc. board would like to know if there is any group interested in submitting a bid for the 2004 event. Things are progressing really well for 2003. The BayWarp group has things well under control and the Warpstock board would like to take the opportunity to get things rolling for next year.

Every year some people complain that the location is too far or too expensive for them to attend. Here is your chance to determine the location and the cost. So if you are interested in making a bid please send a letter outlining your ideas to madodel@ptdprolog.net See the Bid Proposal page http://www.warpstock.o rg/about/bid_proposal.html for more information.

Warpstock 1997 - Diamond Bar, California
Warpstock 1998 - Chicago, Illinois
Warpstock 1999 - Atlanta, Georgia
Warpstock 2000 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Warpstock 2001 - Toronto, Canada
Warpstock 2002 - Austin, Texas
Warpstock 2003 - San Francisco, California
Warpstock 2004 - That's up to you. :-)

Warpstock 2003 will be at the Doubletree Airport Hotel in San Francisco, California. You can place your reservation via the web : Online hotel reservation - https://secure.hilton.com/en/dt/res/choose_dates.jhtml?&hotel=SFOAODT&spec_plan_desc=Warpstock&spec_plan=CDTWRS

This link will give you our special rate plan of $85 a night(single or double), which will available for 3 days prior and after Warpstock, so make your plans to visit San Francisco, the City by the Bay. Register for Warpstock 2003 online at http://www.bamart.com/warpstockinc. While you are there you might want to consider buying one of the Warpstock 2002 golf shirts we have on sale. We have a few in various sizes in both white and red (for the first time available for sale to the public).

Also there has been some confusion about parking. Originally we briefly posted on the web site that parking was free for people staying at the hotel. That was incorrect and the site was updated a couple weeks ago with the correct information. "Parking is only $3 per day (a significant discount from the regular $13/day) for registered Warpstock attendees ("commuters" as well as hotel guests)."

Warpstock, Inc., is a North Carolina corporation. The Warpstock annual conference is a gathering of OS/2 users, developers, and vendors from around the world for the purpose of education and advocacy. More information is available at the Warpstock web site : http://www.warpstock.org


July 29

OS/2 Kit for Acrobat Reader 4.05 available!

InnoTek has made general release of its OS/2 Kit for Acrobat Reader 4.05 product available. It can be downloaded for free individual use at http://www.innotek.de/product s/acrobatos2.

InnoTek OS/2 Kit for Acrobat Reader 4.05 allows OS/2 customers to deploy the original Adobe Systems Acrobat Reader 4.05 for Windows on their OS/2 platform and benefit from current PDF technology. OS/2 Kit for Acrobat Reader provides the complete functionality of the popular Acrobat Reader 4.05 product on the OS/2 platform including streaming PDF support for Netscape and Mozilla browsers and is optimized for excellent performance even on low end systems.

For more information on InnoTek OS/2 Kit for Acrobat Reader 4.05, please contact InnoTek at acroba@innotek.de


July 29

Great OS/2 LAN card!

I changed the motherboard in one of my systems a few days ago, and for some reason the NIC I was using no longer worked. So I was forced to start hunting for another one. I found a great deal that I want to pass on to the rest of the OS/2-eCS community.

The NIC I found is a Belkin Desktop Network PCI Card #F5D5000. You can buy this card from Staples online for $19.99 Canadian. (I don't know what the Staples U.S. price is. However the factory price from Belkin is $19.99 U.S.) Although, you can get cheaper NIC's, but it would be extremely hard to get a card for less than this with all these features:
Full 10/100 Base-T Ethernet Full-Duplex Support Wakeup-On-Lan support w/ cable ***Staples claims it supports **OS/2** in the online catalog!*** Belkin offers lifetime warranty and free technical support; The driver is on the eCS 1.1 cdrom and is on the Installer menu, so you can forget about those pesky driver diskettes/CD's;

Installation is a snap. I just inserted it into an arbitrary PCI slot on my ASUS A7V133-C motherboard, attached the LAN cable, and never looked at it again. It works like a charm!

If I had the cash, I'd buy 6 of them, install one in each of my workstations, and never have to worry about NIC's again.


July 29

NICPAK update

NICPAK has been updated to correct a "should not occur" error that has shown up.

Recent changes:

2003.07.29
Corrected "should not occur" error in nicpak.cmd

2003.07.20
Updated Davicom driver
Updated National Semiconductor (NSC) driver

2003.07.11
Added description for Belkin (Realtek) driver

http://pws.prserv.net/mckinnis/nicpak/index.html


July 28

Want to meet other OS/2 users in your area?

A friend of mine turned me on to meetup.com, which is a fairly nice site with a decent premise: you pick the topics that interest you, and when there are 5-or-more people in the area who share the same interest, they help you choose a coffee-shop type of place to get together. My friend Jeff said he met 5 other Delphi guys in Colorado Springs, and had a good time.

The site does a remarkably good job of protecting your privacy, particularly because it collects very little data about you. Just name, e-mail ID and location, all of which would be necessary to match up people with venues and interests.

They have a gadzillion topic areas, from Linux to quilting to folk music to Wicca. They didn't have an OS/2 group, so I wrote in and they've just started one: http://os2.meetup.com/

They do have a premium membership (which would let us set up a venue of our choice in, say, Phoenix) but the advantages aren't quite compelling enough to get me to fork over the $20. You might feel differently.

In any case, I think it's a great idea, particularly for people who use eCS, OS/2 or whatever, and live in areas without a "known" group of compatriots. ( Feel free to post this around to OS/2 discussion groups. The more the merrier!)

Esther


July 28

Innotek Font Engine 1.00

InnoTek Font Engine for OS/2 http://www.innotek.de/products/ft2lib/

The InnoTek Font Engine for OS/2 (powered by Freetype 2) is a port of the Freetype 2 font engine to the OS/2 Warp platform which provides a tight integration with the OS/2 graphics subsystem. It is designed to be able to replace the OS/2 font rendering subsystem for selected (tested) applications.

The benefits of the Freetype library compared to the default OS/2 font engine can be summarized as follows:

* greatly improved font rendering quality for both TrueType and Adobe Type 1 outline fonts

* 8-bit (256 color) anti-aliasing for smoother font display

* subpixel rendering for LCD screens

* better support for displaying Unicode font data

* more accurate character spacing

* enhanced APIs going beyond the capabilities of the OS/2 graphics subsystem (such as glyph outline query support)

Currently, InnoTek supports the use of the InnoTek Font Engine for OS/2 with the Mozilla and IBM Web Browser for OS/2 products. The font rendering quality improvements achieved by using InnoTek's font engine with the Mozilla are so remarkable that every user will immediately enjoy the benefits of using the product.

2003-07-28

InnoTek Font Engine for OS/2 available.

To download, click on the following link: InnoTek_FT2LIB_100.zip (350KB),
http://download.innotek.de/ft2lib/InnoTek_FT2LIB_100.zip


July 28

Website for eComStation for Linux

I've found a site which talks about eComSation for Linux. [Moderator note: This is the website of NetSys GmbH which is the company which developed twoOStwo which allows running OS/2-eCS on FreeBSD. ]

Url: http://www.warpvirtual.net/index_eng.htm


July 27

JPhotoBrush Pro 1.1 released this week

hi all,
JPhotoBrush Pro 1.1 , the new version of the Photo Editing program has been released this week. Among some new features it contains a batch processing tool called JPhotoBatch and tube(stamp) tool.

check it out at its new domain : http://www.jphotobrushpro.com


July 27

Apache for OS/2 Update - Denial of Service Vulnerabilty

from the Oxygen newsletter of Panda Antivirus Software:
- New version 1.3.28 of the Apache HTTP server - Oxygen3 24h-365d, by Panda Software http://www.pandasoftware.com

Madrid, July 23 2003 - The Apache Software Foundation has released(*) the new version 1.3.28 of its HTTP server which, among other improvements, fixes three new vulnerabilities detected in previous versions.

These security problems are:

- A possible denial of service (DoS) affecting Apache logs when receiving the characters "0x1A", when using the "rotatelogs" option. This problem has only been reproduced in Apache version 1.3.27 on Microsoft Windows and IBM OS/2 platforms.

----------

rest of the text available at http://www.PandaSoftware.com/


July 27

Mozilla 1.5a for OS/2 is available
The Mozilla 1.5a for OS/2 release is (hopefully) available at http://ftp25moz.newaol.com/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.5a/mozilla-os2-1.5a.zip.

This is just a ZIP with mailnews, chat, and spellchecker. We will not be making an installer build for this release.

Before you download, there are several things you should know. First, this is an alpha release of Mozilla, so it will have bugs. Second, this release was built with an alpha release of GCC 3.2.2. While this release should be more stable than the GCC nightlies (which are still being build with GCC 3.2.1), there may be some bugs as a result of this new compiler.

Also, this build contains support for plugins, including the Java OJI plugins (IBM Java 1.3.1 and Innotek's 1.4.2!). Try it out. Let us know what you think.
So, since this build is doubly alpha, post your bugs (particularly crashes) here in the newsgroups. news://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.public.mozilla.os2 Have fun...

Since this release is built with a new GCC, you need new C runtime DLLs. You can get those at http://download.innotek.de/gccos2/libc01.zip. Just put the DLLs in the same directory as mozilla.exe, or somewhere in your path. The final release that could be built with VACPP was 1.4.

The current roadmap for Mozilla points to a concurrent release of Mozilla Suite 1.5 alongside Firebird 0.7, after which there will be a shift towards the single application structure.

Javier Pedemonte
IBM


July 27

DFSee version 5.24 released

Some nice enhancements to the DFSee disk tool ...

Based on some discussion on eCS 1.1 installation trouble and my own testing with LVM, I decided to restrict the length of all LVM-names to 19 instead of the architectured 20 positions. There seem to be too many buggy parts in LVM.EXE that cause problems with this ... The DFSee LVM command will even fix the 'too long' ones for you automatically (see DFSHOWTO.TXT item 55).

To aid in better problem reporting on DFSee but on things like eCS installation as well, I have added a simple to use QUERY option to DFSee (a bit like "FDISK /query or LVM /query") The output is optimized for use in email and newsgroup postings by restricting the line-length to 67 characters.
Just try "DFSOS2 query" with 5.24 to see this new format. (and check out DFSHOWTO.TXT item 56 for other options)

Then Mike O'Conner did a rigorous review to all DFS*.TXT documentation files, making many style/typo corrections. Thanks for that Mike!

DFSee is the SWISS-ARMY-KNIFE for disk and filesystem problems. With FDISK-like displays, analysis and recovery, FIX commands, UNDELETE for HPFS/NTFS, imaging and cloning. More details at:

http://www.dfsee.com/dfsee.htm

Direct download links:

http://www.dfsee.com/dfsee/dfsee524.zip
http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/util/disk/dfsee524.zip
http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/incoming/dfsee524.zip

Most important functional changes:

- QUERY With no parameters, show compact partition list
- DIRFIND, FILEFIND added proper -? style help text
- DFSee -B- switch to surpress banner logo with copyright
- PART -S Use double-line spacing with -s or -C format
- PART -C Compact (space) separated list for email/newsgroups
- LVM Allow -n without -d or with -d:* (to set name on all)
- LVM Restrict to 19 char names, shorten too long ones
- PART Warnings on LVM 20-char names and consistency issues
- FIXEXT Added -all option, better confirmation message
- PART/MAP Show bootsector read-errors but continue reading
- MAP Fixed trap on 0 cylinder geo or narrow screen
- PTE Fixed trap on "dfsos2 pte -d:2", no info read yet
- PART/MAP Show INT13 details if -p (pedantic) switch is used
- PTE Indicate changes and refresh info on the screen
- BMP -d -? help; Fixed display for other disk, disk param
- TxWin Fixed window-paint bug with large usage text (DFSWIN)
- PART/MAP Minor update to geo displays, allow 3-digit S:255=
- W2KBM Refresh DFSee-cache after fix, removes the warning
- STORE Fixed text for virtuals (used in CLONE/IMAGE etc)
- DISK/MAP OS/2 2.xx and Windows-NT-4 MBR code recognized now

Check DFS*.TXT files for details, all changes listed in DFSHIST.TXT

Registering DFSee will give you the right to use all 5.xx versions and get support plus a reasonable amount of assistance by email. Existing 4.xx registrations can be upgraded to 5.xx as well.

But even more important, it enables further development of DFSee!

Regards, Jan van Wijk

========================================================================
DFSee Home: http://www.dfsee.com; Jan van Wijk; Author of DFSee -
dfsee@fsys.nl


July 27

Golden Code(R) J2SE(TM) 1.4.1 for OS/2(R) Generally Available

Golden Code Development today announced the general availability of its native port to OS/2 of Sun Microsystems' J2SE(TM) 1.4.1_03 platform. Licenses are free for personal and commercial use. Fee-based support contracts are available through Golden Code Development and IBM Global Services.

Please visit the Golden Code Development website for additional information.

Url: http://www.goldencode.com



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