VOICE Home Page: http://www.os2voice.org

October 2001 [Newsletter Index] [Previous Page] [Next Page] [Feature Index] editor@os2voice.org

What's going on!

An editorial view from Christian Hennecke, editor of the VOICE Newsletter.

Working on this issue hasn't been easy. We all have been bewildered by the event of September 11 and it was hard to concentrate on the VOICE Newsletter. We feel especially with those who have lost relatives or friends or had to endure hours of not knowing what happened to people. I don't want to go any further on this topic, especially since I feel that other have done this much better than I would be able to. Instead please see Pete Grubbs's article in the September issue of OS/2 eZine - http://www.os2ezine.com/20010916/page_2.html.

Only lately have I found out that an OS/2 event took place in last year's September in Southern Europe: Warpstock Mediteranee. According to the web site of Team OS/2 Spain, it went over two days and offered a number of presentations regarding OS/2 related topics. Back then, Mark Dodel asked for a review, but no one ever followed through on it. All in all I wonder why there wasn't much more "advertising". Probably many more people would have travelled to Spain.

Having been invited by the OS/2 User Group Belgium I attended the Warp-O-Que on September 8, 2001 in Brussels. The Warp-O-Que is the group's yearly meeting where you can chat with other users, watch and listen to presentations and - as the name already suggests :-) - eat something. Apart from the members of the OS/2 User Group Belgium other OS/2 users and developers from the Netherlands and Germany attended. It is good to see that people from different countries are not fiddling around on their own.

There I was able to get to know some interesting news. Achim Hasenmüller brought with him a new version of Opera fresh from the latest code tree. The new features include drag and drop of URL objects as we know them from Netscape. This eliminates the strongest point of criticism against programs used with Odin: the lack of WPS integration.

There was also a hint that the Odin project is working on fullscreen support using Scitech's MGL.

According to Oliver Stein from IBM and Markus Montkowski the situation of USB support is going to improve further. Markus Montkowski is currently working on porting the Linux USB library, which could make creating support for - even more exotic - USB devices much easier by enabling the use of Linux driver code.

Joachim Benjamins from Mensys told me that the shipping date for the German version of eComStation had been delayed because they are actually translating more components than initially planned. This will hopefully make waiting more endurable.

Speaking of eComStation: Connectix, Innotek and Serenity Systems have signed contracts for creating a virtual machine for OS/2 (Virtual PC for OS/2), which makes running other operating systems like Windows and Linux under OS/2 possible. The approach is completely different from Odin's, as the virtual machine emulates a complete PC. (Moreover, they want to offer an additional product that is able to run OS/2 programs on the Windows platform.) It would be nice to be able to run a Linux application in the virtual machine and have its interface displayed by HOBLink X11 or XFree86/OS2. For more information please see Innotek's homepage at http://www.innotek.de.

It seems as if eComStation does induce some exciting developments.

Warpstock events: VOICE has decided to have a presence at both Warpstock events this year. We will have a booth at both Warpstock 2001 in Toronto on October 6-8, Canada and Warpstock Europe at 'KH Limburg' College in Diepenbeek, Belgium on November 2-4. We need some help covering the booth in Belgium, so if you are going to the event, please volunteer to help. You would sit at the booth, greeting interested people and handing out a brochure with a membership form to anyone interested in joining VOICE. This is a critical investment for VOICE and the OS/2-eCS community. VOICE has supported Warpstock for years now, and we have been rewarded with at least enough new members to cover most of our expenses. So please help.

It is also imperative that if you have any desire to attend Warpstock, you register now. This will show your own personal support for these events. Like VOICE, these are non-profit and put on by volunteers.These people need to know that their efforts are appreciated.

Warpstock Europe almost didn't happen this year, and Warpstock 2002 is looking questionable at this point, since no bids have been submitted yet. Please show you care by attending these shows and meeting with other OS/2 users. The experience is incredible. For those of you who still can't justify the travel because of distance, then consider having next years Warpstock in your area. For information on submitting bids, see the website for each event - Warpstock - http://www.warpstock.org/news/press/052501a.html and for Warpstock Europe contact the organizers of the previous events: http://warpstock.os2.org/en/impressum.

VOICE Newsletter Update: We are making more progress with our attempt to automate a lot of the newsletter assembly process using Dennis Bareis's PPWizard pre-processor software. Though the transition has had a few kinks in it, it has already helped in making the translation of the header/footer as well as the info-boxes of each page easier and more reliable. For more on PPWizard see Dennis's web site at http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~dbareis/ppwizard.htm .

We are also planning on adding a new page to the VOICE Newsletter to allow small Freeware and OS/2 User advertisements. This would allow developers of freeware apps to advertise their products by having a free banner ad on this page. Also OS/2-eCS users and OS/2 user groups could place text ads seeking other OS/2-eCS users in their geographical area to start/promote a user group or maybe just find someone to help them with a support problem or have coffee with. If anyone is interested in this concept please send me an email at ads@os2voice.org. If anyone would like to help with editing this page for the newsletter, please contact me at editor@os2voice.org. As much as we try, a handful of people just can't do everything. We need everyone's help. We are also revising our sponsorship levels to make it more affordable to sponsor VOICE, and have banner ads on some pages of the Newsletter for shareware and commercial OS/2 developers. You can view the status of that on our Sponsorship page - http://www.os2voice.org/sponsorinfo.html.

We are always interested in your thoughts and views on subjects related to OS/2, and would like to see opinion/editorial pieces as well as hardware/software reviews and HowTo articles. If you can help by writing an article please contact me at editor@os2voice.org. The Guidelines for Article Submissions to the VOICE Newsletter page has been updated with the addition of some ideas for articles. Please take a look and see if you can help us with an article for an upcoming issue. Some folks find they enjoy telling about their OS/2 experiences. :-)

The Warp Doctor site: Have an idea for Warp Doctor? You can send your comments directly to the Warp Doctor web guy Jeremy at rs@fyrelizard.com or better yet attend one of our Warp Doctor Team meetings, weekly on IRC.

Please note that since September 2, the team now meets every Sunday at 2PM EDT (18:00 GMT), on IRC in the #warpdoctor channel on the WEBBnet IRC network. For more information on attending online Warp Doctor IRC meetings please see the VOICE Meeting Information page - http://www.os2voice.org/meetinginfo.html.

VOICE Online Update: On September 13 there was a Speakup with the organizers of Warpstock 2001. You can read the transcript at http://www.os2voice.org/logs/V091301.LOG.html. There were also general membership meetings on September 3 and 17. You can review the transcripts of these and other VOICE IRC events at http://www.os2voice.org/transcripts.html. This month we have general member meetings on October 1 and 15 at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT, 02:00 Berlin). Everyone interested in OS/2 or eComstation is invited to attend either or both of these sessions. For more information on attending online VOICE IRC meetings please see the VOICE Meeting Information page - http://www.os2voice.org/meetinginfo.html.

If you have an idea for a Speakup event, please submit it to liaison@os2voice.org, and we will try to schedule something. As always, please be sure to check out the updated VOICE Future events Calendar in this newsletter or on the VOICE website at http://www.os2voice.org/calendar.html for more details on future VOICE events.

This month we start with the first of two articles on Partitioning harddrives under OS/2. Eric Baerwaldt has a close look at DriveImage and Partition Magic (both versions 3.04 and 6) by PowerQuest. Be aware that in this article, Eric doesn't take into consideration the use of the LVM with these products. If you used LVM for the partitioning, be sure to also read Eirik Overby's article LVM, FDISK and Partition Magic as well as A Short Introduction to LVM and JFS by Michal Necasek. This article originally was intended for the magazine OS/2 Only!. Many thanks to Eric for donating and updating his article. And it looks as if we will "hear" more from him in the future.

After that Heiko Korsawe gives us an Introducton to Perl. He leads us through installation and shows us a number of possibilies for string output. Heiko also wrote this article for OS/2 Only!.

Next follows Michal Necasek with the third part of his OS/2 History Lesson: The Beginnings of OS/2, which deals with version 1.0. In Removing Red-eye from Pictures using Embellish Mark Dodel shows us how to get rid of this effect. Most people know how to avoid it, but every now and then we tend to forget to turn on the pre-flash.

Herwig Bauernfeind again has some useful hints in the second part of Installing Win32 Applications under Odin. He doesn't start on actual installation by hand yet, but shows how you can reach your aims relatively automatically by working around some obstacles.

In the last article of this month, File Sharing on the Gnutella Network using LimeWire - Part 2, Timothy Sipples continues on Frank Berke's topic from the July edition and provides us with some hints on how to best install LimeWire, which are also helpful for other applications. Frank is still working on his background article, but it has turned out much more complex than he first thought.

Finally we have the VOICE Newsletter OS/2 Tips page and the Letters, Addenda, Errata page. If you have any OS/2 or eCS tips you've uncovered, please send them to tips@os2voice.org. If you have any comments or suggestions about the newsletter or articles in it, please send them to editor@os2voice.org.

That's it for this month. In November we have the second part of Eric Baerwaldt's article on harddisk partitioning and the third part of Herwig Bauernfeinds series on installing Win32 applications. Michal Necasek will return with an article on OS/2 2.0 in his series on OS/2 History. Some more articles are in the works, e.g. on installation and setup of the OpenWatcom compiler by Michal Necasek, a detailed review of Xact 7.x by Stefan A. Deutscher and a review of Artem Wireless LAN-card by Karlheinz Schmidthaus. The date of publishing hasn't been determined yet.

Mark Dodel and Christian Hennecke
Editors, VOICE Newsletter