The Hitchhiker's Guide To OS/2 - Issue 3
The Hitchhikers Guide To OS/2
- About The Guide
- Here and Now
- SoftViews
- TechnoWatch
- OS/2 Tips
- Trivia Question
- DESKTOP CONTEST!!!
- How to Submit
About The Guide
The Hitchhikers Guide To OS/2
Issue #3
Published On 3/25/94
This guide is meant to give a concise report on current OS/2 events. Any and all contents are solely my opinion. If you don't agree with them run around the net and delete every copy you can find. Otherwise sue me, but all I have is a 2400 baud modem and a bunch of credit card bills. Anyone is welcome to the latter :). Read on and I hope you enjoy another issue of the HitchHiker's Guide To OS/2.
Any Comments Regarding The Guide or monetary donations can be directed to:
sdudas@austin.onu.edu
Steve Dudas.
Special Thanks go to Dr. V. Phaniraj for letting me know that wp2ipf/2 exists.
In you haven't guessed that is what this is done with. Thanks to Kim Kruse Hansen for the great job he has done with this application.
Copies of the HHGOS2 will be available for anonymous ftp from ftp-os2.cdrom.com.
look in /pub/incoming/hhgos2_#.zip
every other Saturday for a new release or look in /pub/os2/2_x/info/newsltr/hhgos2_#.zip For back issues.
The .zip file will contain both a .txt and the .inf version of the HHGOS2.
Here and Now
Topic #1 More on The CSD.
More small problems seem to be cropping up from what I hear. One magazine reported that users of ET4000 video cards could not run their cards in anything but standard VGA mode. Shhh don't tell my ET4000 card, or it may slip out of 800x600x256.
Overall though, I have heard nothing that would stop any sane person from installing it. The speed increases still outweigh any minor bugs that have cropped up.
Topic #2 More on Chicago
(What can I say it gets better all the time)
Well the Chicago release was bumped up to "definitely" this year. But of course as they said last week "We won't release it until it's ready" If that were the case MS would be on DOS 3.1.
The prior version being .95 of course.
MS also announced that the "slimmed down" version of NT, code named "Daytona" has been delayed to the 3rd Quarter of this year. Supposedly this version will run in 12 megs. It seems that MS doesn't have any clue what they are doing here. NT should NOT be slimmed, its a server OS and from what I have seen a damn good one. It shouldn't have any Dos or W31 support. It should be the ultimate server OS. It should make connecting any computer, running any environment, to an NT server as easy as installing OS/2!
As a server OS, MS should NOT worry about resources it may use. Servers these days should have 16 megs RAM, and a gig drive standard. It's still fun to see MS screw things up, so Mr. Gates, Keep up the good work!
Topic #3 Stac Vs. MS
Well Stac won the big decision, and even countless appeals won't affect this decision much. Stac wins $120 million, MS wins $13.6 million, and MS must re-release DOS 6.2 without the Doublespace code.
IBM however continues to ship PC-DOS, which has on the fly compression. Seems that someone at IBM actually got Stac's permission before they used Stac's code.
Topic #4 OS/2 SMP
It's due out at the April Comdex, but I have looked into buying a SMP and no luck. They just don't sell them in the main channels yet. But that may soon be changing, Intel is apparently working on a set of SMP standards. Hopefully they will not botch this like PCI. Wonder if the SMP boards will only run at 33 Mhz like PCI?....
Topic #5 Gateway P5 Owners Listen UP!
There is a motherboard defect, courtesy of Intel. This also applies to those who own a Dell Dimension X P560. The bug lies in your serial controller and is known to cause a lockup in Win3.11. They have built a new serial.386 that flushes the buffers, which seems to fix it. If I owned one I would be on the phone and have a new chip and or motherboard on the way. I haven't heard anything about its effects on OS/2, but mail me your experiences and I'll put your comments in the next issue.
SoftViews
This issues review goes to PM DCopy.
This app is small but very handy, it basically rawreads or rawrites a disk onto or from an image file. Its pretty fast and fully multi-threaded. Thus you won't even notice it while it works its magic. The version I tested was 1.5, and the program was produced by Jason R. Shannon. The format it reads disks into is not a standard, but then again is there a standard for disk images? No matter, I find it most useful for making a quick copy of an entire disk that I won't need for awhile. Its great just to let the image sit on the hardisk till you get around to using it.
TechnoWatch
Intel has announced that a 90 and a 100 Mhz version of the Pentium are being released. They seem to have already made their way into the direct channel. It's a nice try but I wonder if they will be able to run them to 135 Mhz. 135 Mhz being the top clock speed that you can buy a PowerPC for this summer. :*) Motorola has announced 100 Mhz and 135 Mhz versions to be released this summer.
OS/2 Tips
Adding a Program Choice to the Pop-Up Menu
By: Juhoon Ahn
If you want another method of accessing a program, you can add the program as a new menu choice on the pop-up menu of any folder. For example, the desktop pop-up menu can be enhanced to add the "Reversi" item.
To add a program to a pop-up menu:
- point to an empty area on the desktop.
- Click mouse button 2. [Right button]
- Select the arrow to the right of Open.
- Select Settings.
- Select the Menu tab.
- Point to a program object (for example, the Reversi object in the Games folder.)
- Press and hold mouse button 2.
- Drag the program object to the Actions on Menu list box.
- Release mouse button 2.
- Point to the title-bar icon.
- Double-click.
The next time you display the desktop folder pop-up menu, "Reversi" will be one of the available menu choices. If you select this choice, the Reversi game is displayed.
Note [not mine]: When you open a program object from the pop-up menu of a folder object, the name of the object is passed to the program object. This may cause an error when the object is opened. To avoid errors, display the pop-up menu for the program object, select the arrow to the right of Open, and then select Settings. Type % in the Parameters field."
Well, now it's clear, right?! Actually "%" sometimes does need. Since it's of "Object," when I delete or make any change to the object settings, it is not updated. In order to the changes to be updated, you need to do "Drag-n-Drop" steps. If you find this to be not true, just let me know if you find any way to make transparent. I am kinda annoyed to do all the updates manually.
If you look at the Available menus list box, there are Primary Pop-up menu and ~Open. Simply "~" makes the next character as the keyboard selection character. So let's create another menu item. "~Xyz." Select "~Xyz," and add some objects. That's it! I guess this could bring the desktop to another ways to put together. I know this idea somehow conflicts with "object-oriented" environment. Yet, I think having all the app sat the tip of the finger makes easier to navigate through the desktop. BTW, I put "beaver" on the pop-up menu. At the Parameters, I put [Enter Filename to Edit]. So whenever I start "Beaver" from Pop-Up, I just type the filename to edit. Actually I didn't read this part from the manual until after I read an article from "Inside OS/2"[the free copy from the company].
Sections of article taken from OS/2 Manuals, but who reads manuals anyways? :*)
- Juhoon Ahn (jahn@mindvox.phantom.com, jahn at #OS/2)
Trivia Question
In 1985 and 1986 a computer named Therac 25 was built to send X-Rays into patients in order to kill cancerous tissues. Due to a software bug this machine ended up administering doses up to 100 times the safe level.
The question is: How many people died due to this software bug?
Answer to last Issues Trivia Question:
Niklaus Wirth helped develop NELIAC, a dialect of ALGOL 58, for the IBM 704 computer.
Yes I know these are hard... but stop by the library and look it up! Who knows, you may learn something.
DESKTOP CONTEST!!!
The Contest will continue for another two weeks due to a glaring error on my part. I failed to make it easy to send me your entries. I have gotten a number of entries but its only fair to make it easier to enter.
Well we all make mistakes and the best way around them is to fix them! So here goes, ftp all entries to moo.onu.edu login: anonymous and put them in /incoming/desktops.
Here again is my desktop to give some ideas to anyone who did not get the last issue.
FYI: one of the easiest ways to get a nice .bmp of your desktop is to use PmJpeg 1.5 and its desktop capture option.
P.S. My desktop won't be entered for obvious reasons. :*)
How To Submit an Article
Please Include the following Information in all submissions.
- Your full name( No nicks for you ircers)
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- A ONE sentence summary of the article.
- Articles must be in a zipped file. The text should be contained in a single ASCII text file. All graphics should be in the .bmp format and may be in 256 colors. About 300 x 300 is a good size.
** I am unable to return any copies of articles sent to me **
