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Holiday greetings to all, and best wishes for a healthy, happy and prosperous new Year 2000. May we all live to celebrate many more.
Another year is now coming to an end, along with the end (by commonly accepted misconceptions) of both the century and the millennium.
I'm pleased to report that our Philadelphia OS/2 SIG has managed to survive another year in reasonably good shape. All the more remarkable in spite of a lack of any perception of enthusiastic OS/2 product support from IBM, the disappearance of several OS/2 software developers and the continual negative carping of many well-known computer journalists. Our membership list has declined only very slightly, and we have had good meeting attendance.
We're also most grateful to the administration and faculty of The Episcopal Academy for their support, and the use of their facilities for our monthly meetings.
Most recently, spurred on by various federal, state and private anti-trust lawsuits against Microsoft, there has been a renewed interest in alternate operating system platforms. This has been reinforced by steadily increasing advances in multi-platform Java technology and more Java based applications reaching the marketplace. The Java software for OS/2, provided by IBM, has thus far been one of the very best performing packages.
The renewed progress of Project Odin (aka Win32-OS/2) under the sponsorship of NetLabs may also play a key role in the future of OS/2, especially if an Aurora kernel becomes available to overcome the 512MB-per-process memory limitation in the current OS/2 client. More on this below.
It remains to be seen whether these factors, plus several other related issues, may exert a positive influence on the OS/2 market in the future year 2000 and beyond.
On the minus side, IBM has no stated plan to release a fat Warp 5 client, as far as we can now determine. Some sources report that IBM is working on this very quietly. So we can still entertain hopes. IBM has also not indicated any change in its plans to discontinue Software Choice freebies for OS/2 after the end of 1999, Netscape browsers and Java updates being the most significant products affected. This has had a very serious negative impact on the OS/2 user community.
Please note that a holiday and 12th OS/2 birthday event is scheduled in lieu of a regular meeting this month, on December 15th, the third Wednesday of the month to avoid holiday week conflicts. Happy 12th, OS/2!
NOVEMBER MEETING HIGHLIGHTS
The November meeting started off with the customary announcements by Larry Lavins of news of interest to OS/2 users, new products, updates, etc. New software and update releases will also be periodically listed in POSEIDON announcement messages.
Member How-To Presentation
Immediately following Larry's announcements, John Davey, our SIG Webmaster demonstrated the use of Workplace Shell URL objects to organize web sites instead of using lists of bookmarks. Well before Microsoft "discovered" the concept, OS/2 integrated Internet access within the basic operating system. URL objects and URL Folders allow a user to save, organize and access Internet destinations in a seamless fashion with the rest of the Workplace Shell. Templates for each of these tools are located in the Templates for Internet folder. URL addresses may be readily dragged onto these templates.
John preceded his how-to presentation with a brief talk on his work with Metricom, Inc. (http://www.metricom.com), securing right of way access for the company's Ricochet wireless Internet service. The system is expected to be deployed in the Philadelphia area in the second half of 2000.
Q&A Session
The November Q&A session was conducted by David Gentzler. A brief summary of questions and answers is as follows:
| Q: | Is there any OS/2 HPFS support for ZIP drives? |
| A: | Yes, for SCSI and IDE ZIP drives only. No parallel. Warp 4 FixPak-7 (or higher) is needed. |
| Q: | What is the correct order for applying FixPaks to Warp Server? |
| A: | Refer to the Indelible Blue update site. |
| Q: | What is the purpose or function of file: MONITOR.DIF? |
| A: | Possibly to monitor features. |
Webmaster's Note:
After this article was posted, a reader informed us that on his system, the dataset c:\os2\monitor.dif contains information concerning monitor refresh rates for his GRADD video driver (Cirrus Logic built-in in an IBM PC300GL). It's where one can insert monitor specs if the list to choose from on the first page of system setup doesn't contain the monitor in use or DDC doesn't work.
Thanks to Phil for providing that information.
| Q: | A SYS3175 error message pops up when trying to make a utility disk. |
| A: | Use BOOTOS2 instead. |
| Q: | PM123 locks up on Warp Server (WSEB). |
| A: | There may be an updated DLL file for PM123 (name not recalled). |
| Q: | Are there any Win 3.1 network games for OS/2? |
| A: | Offhand, there are two such which can be recalled: The original QUAKE and DOOM II. There may be others. |
| Q: | Printing from WINOS/2 is inoperable. |
| A: | Set the port to LPT1.OS2, and turn off Windows print manager. |
End of Q&A
Time out was taken for a brief intermission, with refreshments, the customary 50/50 raffle, and an opportunity for members to chat informally with one another. Dave Gentzler won the 50/50, and generously donated his winnings for a birthday cake for the December party.
No software was available for raffle again this month. It's very difficult to obtain free software products from IBM and other OS/2 ISV's. But efforts will continue.
The main feature at the November meeting was a presentation and demonstration of the full-featured ProNews/2 OS/2 news reader program by SIG member Jim Nuytens.
Pronews/2 is a top notch OS/2 News client with many features that are lacking in other OS/2 news readers. This unique newsreader's key features include a process manager that gives the user complete control over queued tasks (such as downloading articles), true message threading and fully customizable toolbars. It also has an advanced filtering and thread-watching mechanism that can work on a group-by-group or global basis. The user interface for ProNews/2 is based on the familiar and intuitive notebook format, with tabs for quickly accessing subscribed groups, new groups, all groups, queued processes and connections.
ProNews 1.5b is shareware. The original author is no longer in business, but the product is widely used, and may be downloaded from BMT Micro or the OS/2 SuperSite at: http://www.os2ss.com/select/internet/news/pronews.html. The shareware is fully functional. But registration of $30 is suggested if you decide to continue using the product. It's most impressive.
OS/2 NEWS
Shortly after last month's Data Bus article was submitted, the new Warpstock Board released the invitation for bids for Warpstock 2000. There appear to be many substantial changes from the bid sets of the previous years, and due date for bid submissions was indicated to be December 15th.
Because long lead times for reservations of facilities together with substantial deposits are required by all major hotels in this area, it was impossible for the Philadelphia OS/2 SIG to consider preparation and submission of a bid at this time to host the Warpstock 2000 event.
In late November, Paul Van Keep advised all JStreet Mailer users that as of the next release, Rev. 13, JStreet will be officially renamed as The Polarbar Mailer. Paul and his team of programmers are continuing to do a great job to update and improve upon this popular 100% pure Java application which never reached its full potential intended by the original developer due to severe financial constraints.
Paul stated, "Although we still acknowledge the mailer's roots as coming from Innoval's JStreet product, we think we are progressing way beyond what the old product could do and think that this change also calls for a new name. There will also be a new website which will open to coincide with the release of the next version and we will rename the list, although it will not affect anybody, the current name will continue to work. Lets make The Polarbar Mailer into a really cool product (pun intended)."
And subsequently, on November 30th, the Polarbar development, support and test team announced the official opening of a new Polarbar website at www.polarbar.org.
Also available at the new site, from three different download locations, the new version 13.
The official name for the former JStreet mailing list has also been changed to mailer@polarbar.org. It also has the alias of jstreet@vanKeep.com. All subscriber names on the old list were automatically transferred over to the new mailing list.
Most recently, on December 4th, a new v.13a bugfix release was posted. It corrects the following problems:
Here's what was new in Version 13:
Report wishes and bugs to the JStreet wishlist at http://www.polarbar.org. If you wish to discuss Polarbar, use the mailing list. You can join via the URL above. Thanks for your continued support to make the Polarbar Mailer a GREAT mail application!
All OS/2 users are urged to join the mailing list, install the new Polarbar Mailer and give it a try.
Source: Adrian Gschwend (ktk@netlabs.org)
Some days ago the Odin Team at OS/2 Netlabs released the first public Alpha version of Odin since the code is open source.
For those of you who still don't know it, Odin and Odin32 is an approach to get Win32 support in OS/2 (it is no emulator!). The homepage of the project is located at http://www.netlabs.org/odin/. (You can download the new v.0.05 Alpha from the download page.)
We are very proud to say that the project made great progress, a lot more applications are running with Odin actually, especially slim programs. A lot of Odin users reported applications, which are running on OS/2 without problems, for example:
One of the very promising applications is Lotus Notes R5, we are already able to start the application, you can find a screenshot of it at the Odin page (it's mentioned in the "News" section). As you may know we also working on a port of the Opera webbrowser to OS/2. With Odin32 we can actually compile the whole V4.0 Win32-Sourcecode without significant changes in the code.
If you are interested in our progress, check the Odin application database at http://www.netlabs.org/odin/MiscApplications.phtml. You are also welcome to add your application to the database!
For impatient users we have daily builds available, note that we don't support any of the Odin versions actually because progress is changing almost every day. We are not that much interested in bug reports because of this reason.
But we still need more skilled developers, the more support we get the faster we are! If you think that you can support our project, get more information about how to join at the Odin page.
That's it for the moment, thanks for all the support so far!
Adrian Gschwend and the whole Odin Team at OS/2 Netlabs
Symantec posted a new virus signature update AV30EY.ZIP (for the IBM AntiVirus program) on December 3rd. Download from:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/download.html
Then click on "Next" and scroll to the very bottom of the page to download AV30EY.ZIP, dated 12-03-99.
Symantec has continued to live up to its obligations to support the discontinued IBM AntiVirus program. It's anticipated that this support will cease at the end of 1999.
Users requiring fresh antivirus signature updates will probably have to switch to the Norton or other antivirus program at that time. A review of Symantec's most recent Norton Antivirus v.5.02 for OS/2 hasn't yet been seen. OS/2 user reports are solicited from anyone who has installed and used this program.
LAS VEGAS, Nev. - COMDEX/Fall '99 - November 17, 1999 - Sun Microsystems, Inc., announced today its first course offerings in a comprehensive training curriculum for its StarOffice suite of office productivity software.
The new training program advances Sun's plan to provide a fully supported, integrated set of powerful applications to run natively on all major operating environments and platforms. And on January 30, 2000, Sun will offer two web-based courses free of charge: StarOffice Overview and Transition to StarOffice from Microsoft Office.
More than one million copies of StarOffice 5.1 software have been downloaded during the nine weeks since Sun introduced this product line to the market and announced the purchase of privately held Star Division. The commercial success of StarOffice software is matched by the praise it has received in recent years.
On January 30, 2000, Sun will introduce its free web-based courses: StarOffice Overview--a four-hour self-paced course that will get you jump-started to effectively use the StarOffice software productivity suite; and Transition to StarOffice from MS Office--which teaches users to convert and transfer files from MS Office software to StarOffice software. These two courses will also be available on CD-ROM.
Other StarOffice 5.1 software courses accessible via the web, CD-ROM and instructor-led training will be available by the end of February 2000 for end users and for enterprise and service providers. For end users, these will include StarOffice Writer (word processing), StarOffice Calc (spreadsheets), and StarOffice Impress/StarOffice Draw (presentations). Enterprise and service provider courses will include StarOffice Deployment and Help Desk Training.
A Java Business Conference is scheduled for December 7-9, 1999, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. The Java technology-based software industry, as well as enterprise customers of these vendors, will showcase their end-to-end enterprise solutions built on the Java Platform. This three-day event is an intense educational conference that will enable attendees to make better informed decisions on their web business strategies, including how to leverage XML with the Java platform. The conference will also highlight both proven and new industry products that build upon the power of the Java platform.
Philadelphia OS/2 SIG member David Moskowitz will be conducting two seminar sessions at this event:
HINTS & TIPS
In recent months, it has become necessary for me to purchase and install a scanner, principally for use by my artist wife who is taking a course in digital imaging. It was also necessary to install Windows 98, the graphics program used in her course and an inkjet color printer.
The principal concern was to identify a scanner and supporting hardware and software which would provide satisfactory operation under OS/2 as well as the Windows operating system.
After some rather lengthy investigations and questions put to users of OS/2 systems who also have scanners operating under OS/2, the choice was made to purchase and install a UMAX Astra 1220S scanner and an Adaptec PCI-to-UltraSCSI Host Adapter AHA-2940UW, a combination which was reported to operate very reliably in an OS/2 environment. Although the scanner interfaces only at the 8-bit SCSI mode, the greater capabilities of the SCSI card will be useful for subsequent purchases of full UW SCSI devices.
A 2-foot 50-conductor ribbon cable was used to connect the male 50-pin 8-bit SCSI card connector to the internal male 50-pin connector of a 50/25 bulkhead adapter. The external connector of this adapter is a female DB25, same as the scanner connector. The external cable which comes with the scanner has male DB25 connectors on each end. The 50/25 SCSI bulkhead adapter was a bit difficult to find. I found one from a vendor at a local area computer show for $11.00.
No problem installing the Adaptec card, using OS/2 selective install. Then replaced the original IBM driver AIC7870.ADD of 1996 vintage with a very recent update which can be downloaded from Adaptec's web site.
There were two choices for scanner drivers: SANE or TWAIN.
Others have reported success with the CFM TWAIN driver, a commercial product (about $50 from BMT Micro), but I wasn't able to get the free demo version to work. TWAIN was consequently scrapped in favor of the free SANE drivers.
Latest SANE drivers located on hobbes and other sites are SANE v.101B1 and PMSANE v.0.52. SANE is non-PM, necessitating command-line execution which didn't particularly appeal to me. One might also set up a series of objects for the various choices normally used, but this also didn't seem too attractive to me.
So the only choice left was PMSANE v.0.52. Unfortunately, the SANE drivers included in this PM version are older than SANE v.101B1, and didn't work with the UMAX Astra 1220S. Next step was to replace 3 of the older files with more recent ones from SANE v.101B1: scanimage.exe, libsane.dll and umax.conf. That did it. It's now working.
PM SANE has a nice graphical presentation. Fairly simple and straightforward. However, this version of PMSANE is still a beta, and several features are inoperative: specifically, gamma, brightness, contrast, etc. But if you use PMVIEW as the default viewer in conjunction with PMSANE, it doesn't matter because PMVIEW includes all these setting features, thus permitting corrections/adjustments to be made at the viewer level.
In summary, with a bit of practice, the scanner performance seems to be quite satisfactory. It works well with a wide variety of input materials, including letters, color photographs, printed matter from publications, etc. Trick is to specify a scanner resolution consistent with the material being scanned and the ultimate purpose of the operation.
FAX transmission of scanned material was also successfully performed directly from PMVIEW to the FAXPrint function of FaxWorks.
USEFUL WEB SITES
Each month, a few new and/or updated web pages are listed which may be of benefit and interest to OS/2 users. This month's selections include a couple of internet shopping sites which seem to have a good selection of computer systems, components and accessories at bargain prices.
FUTURE MEETING PLANS
In lieu of a regular meeting in December, a social event has been scheduled for 6:30pm on the same date, December 15th, as a regular meeting would normally be held, coupled with the celebration of OS/2's 12th birthday.
At the end of 1997, we had a great 10th birthday party, and again last year for the 11th birthday. This year, we're planning something a bit different: A social event at Canton House Restaurant, 7645 Haverford Avenue, Philadelphia, just off City Line, and close by our usual meeting location in Merion. Family members and guests are also invited. Let's try for a good turnout, especially some of the folks who don't normally come to meetings.
Reservations were solicited at the November meeting and via follow-up Poseidon messages. Folks who didn't make a reservation and payment in advance are still welcome. Cost will be $15.00 per person (including tip) payable at the door for soup, egg roll, and a variety of popular Chinese entrees, etc. Please call me (215-878-9609) if you do decide to join us so the restaurant can be notified about the additional folks.
Remember the time and date: 6:30pm on Wednesday, December 15th at the Canton House Restaurant, 7645 Haverford Avenue, Philadelphia. Come a bit early if you wish, like about 6:00pm, to socialize before we start the dinner.
Members without cars can take SEPTA's R-5 (Paoli Local) from Philadelphia's Suburban or 30th Street Stations to Overbrook. Please contact me ahead of time to make arrangements to be picked up at the RR Station.
Everybody should keep up to date by logging in to our OS/2 SIG web site at frequent intervals: www.pasug.org/
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