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Note: This website is using CSS and other modern web techniques. Just as you migrated from DOS to a more modern operating system, perhaps it is time to use a newer browser. Anyway, we have tested this site with a variety of old browsers (even a 1.0 browser) and all of them will display the site's content, but it may not be very pretty.
JANUARY MEETING REPORT
Notification was received from IBM less than two weeks prior to the January 28th meeting that we would not be able to continue meeting at any IBM facilities in this area due to cutbacks in security personnel during the evening hours. Only IBM employees will be permitted in the buildings during the evening hours.
This came as a great shock because we were originally led to believe that we would be able to meet at the new IBM office building at One Glenloch Corporate Campus in January, in the same manner as we had been meeting at the previous IBM office building in Wayne for almost the past two years.
Very fortunately, arrangements were made to hold the January meeting at the Episcopal Academy in Merion, just off City Line Avenue. Episcopal Academy is the preeminent prep school in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. The meeting facilities there were outstanding. We're very grateful to Episcopal Academy for allowing us the use of their meeting room.
The weather was rather bad on meeting night, and several members in upper Chester and Montgomery Counties stayed home due to icy roads. Nevertheless, thirty something members and guests showed up, including two new OS/2 users from the University of Delaware.
The meeting began with the usual list of announcements, news items of general interest, new software, forthcoming events, etc., which were briefly reviewed and discussed.
A group discussion was also held on the matter of a meeting location. The two best choices at this time seem to be the Church of the Good Shepherd in King of Prussia, where we met in December, and possibly Episcopal Academy. The Good Shepherd Church requires liability insurance coverage which might be rather costly. If the PACS liability policy is a general umbrella type, and not limited to the PACS main meeting location and date, this might suffice, and there would be no additional cost. A request to review the policy terms & conditions has been made to the PACS Treasurer who has custody of the policy.
Episcopal Academy has been thanked for allowing us to meet there in January. They have also agreed to consider our request for continuing these arrangements into future months. In return, we would offer to provide special seminars and/or classes from time to time in areas of our special computer expertise to their students and faculty. We're awaiting their response.
All things considered, meeting at the IBM building is still considered the most desirable meeting place for obvious reasons. To this end, a very low-key appeal to higher management at IBM is also being prepared to reconsider the security problem and try to find a satisfactory way to accomodate our mutual interests.
Prior to the main feature, our customary meeting break was taken during which a 50/50 raffle was held. Copies of Partition Magic 3.0 donated by Larry Lavins and NetFinity Manager 3.0 donated last month by Jim Geueke of IBM were also raffled off.
Jim Geueke had planned to be with us again to present the software items to winners of the November raffle, but he was out of town during that week and sent his regrets. He plans to come to the February meeting, provided that he's not required to be out of the area.
J Street Mailer Presentation
The feature attraction of the evening was a presentation and demonstration of the long-awaited first beta version of J Street Mailer by Dan Porter, President of Innoval Systems.
J Street Mailer is a comprehensive, full-featured Internet email client written completely in 100% pure java.
The originally planned meeting agenda was to be a demonstration of the Lotus SmartSuite for Warp 4 Beta-2 by Larry Lavins and a long-delayed and promised Q&A session. But just a few days prior to the meeting, Dan offered to come down from New York to demonstrate the
Dan's presentation held everyone's rapt attention. The capability of Java to be used to program a real full-scale cross-platform application is quite remarkable. And performance was equally awesome.
Some of the features include the ability to use multiple accounts and multiple personas, nested folders, virtual folders, three different kinds of filters, mail mapping, preview mail, message size limitations, and much more.
Many good questions were asked by the members, and Dan was able to provide equally good answers.
A substantial number of our members had already signed up as Charter Users for the J Street Mailer beta, and several others signed up during the meeting.
Many thanks to Dan and Marianne for driving down from New York, in spite of bad weather, to provide this presentation. We are most appreciative.
The formal release of the beta version was scheduled for January 30th. It was, in fact, made available for download from Innoval's web site by Charter Users during the early evening on that date.
Before the meeting broke up, Larry demonstrated some screen shots of the various Lotus SSW4 applications to several interested members.
At the time of submitting this article, the location of our February meeting has not yet been determined. Please log in on our SIG web site at www.pasug.org/ for the latest information.
A POSEIDON message will also be sent to all addressees with information about the February meeting location.
OS/2 NEWS
Donn Atkins, who has been the OS/2 General Manager, has been promoted. He will be working under John W. Thompson as General Manager of North American Software Sales and Marketing.
The new OS/2 General Manager will be Richard Seibt who was the executive in charge of OS/2 in Germany. Since OS/2 has been especially strong in the German market, perhaps we can expect some big things from Mr. Seibt here in the United States. Stay tuned.
The Java lobby is a group of people who share a common interest in Java software development and the advancement of Java standards and software. The main purpose of the Java Lobby is to represent the needs and concerns of the Java developer and user community to the companies and organizations who have influence in the evolution of Java. We encourage all people who care about Java to stand together with us.
Read the full basic statement of "who we are" and "what we stand for." Join us! It's free, it's easy, and your support makes all the difference!
Do it now: http://www.javalobby.org/
InnoVal has also announced that a free copy of its Hacksaw program will be given to all members of the Java Lobby.
Netscape Communications Corporation will be giving away the Netscape Navigator browser free, in an effort to place their browser on a more level playing field with the Internet Explorer.
Netscape will also be making the source code for Communicator 5.0 freely available on March 31. This could mean an OS/2 port of Communicator v.5.0 much more quickly than otherwise. Hopefully, some bright OS/2 programmer(s) will make the port in the very near future.
In last month's Data bus article, it was reported that SIG member David Moskowitz would be working with IBM at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. He'll be working in the Surf Shack, located in the Olympic Village. The Surf Shack holds 30 or 40 PC's for the athletes to use to surf the web, respond to fan mail, and create their own home pages. David's primary function is to make sure that the LAN stays up and running and to provide assistance to anyone who needs it.
David will be providing exclusive reports, at frequent intervals, to our web site during his stay at Nagano, about all the interesting happenings. Stay tuned to www.pasug.org/ to read David's reports.
Last month, I reported that there were problems with some of the SSW4 Beta-2 applications. Specifically, I was unable to successfully launch the 1-2-3 spreadsheet and Approach database.
The problems were reported to Lotus as per their specified reporting format, and acknowledgments were promptly received back from Lotus. Many other SSW4 Beta-2 users also reported similar problems.
It was determined that the problem was caused by a conflict with the PM Extensions feature in DevTech's DeskMan/2 program.
I'm happy to say: DevTech and Lotus provided a workaround fix very quickly, and the problem disappeared. Subsequently, all 5 Lotus SSW4 applications were reinstalled and all are now working quite well.
I'll try to get some experience with them in ordwer to provide a demo at the February meeting.
IBM Internet Connection Services (ibm.net, AKA Advantis) has announced a new internet connection policy that will affect many hardcore OS/2 internet surfers in the pocketbook and online. Effective April 1st, 1998, ICS will implement a new policy limiting ibm.net customers to just 100 hours of access per month. Hours beyond 100 will incur a fee of $1.95 per hour.
On January 29th, the IBM Software Choice site announced the availability via free download of the long-awaited GA release of Netscape Navigator 2.02 version which includes support for Java 1.1.4. The release of a new Netscape PluginPak GA was also announced at this same time, and made available for free download.
They could also be downloaded directly from the IBM Service site in Boulder, Colorado.
A day or so later, after being posted, both of these GA releases were withdrawn by IBM for unknown reasons. Sources indicated that they would be made available again in the very near future.
Fortunately, at present, the files are posted on Hobbes, and also perhaps on several other secondary ftp sites.
ns202.exe 4992729 bytes
plugin.exe 3438321 bytes
User feedback has been almost unanimously favorable regarding performance and stability of these new releases.
Just now, on February 5th, while I'm finalizing this article, they have been posted again. The byte sizes are identical, but the filenames have changed. The files appear to be identical to the earlier releases, but time doesn't permit detailed inspection right now. Hopefully, IBM won't pull these new postings like the previous ones. You can get them, if not pulled by the time this Data Bus is received, from:
ftp://service.boulder.software.ibm.com/software/asd/ns202/en_us/ nets202.exe
4992729 Feb 5 15:19:00ftp://service.boulder.software.ibm.com/software/asd/nspip102/en_us/ pluginpk.exe
3438321 Feb 5 14:59:00
About 2 weeks after installing a new 6.4 GB drive, my fingers got ahead of my head and most all files in the Warp 4 boot partition were instantly trashed. I thought I was deleting a few files from a TEMP directory, but the location was actually at the root directory when the DEL command was executed. Since the DELETE directory feature was REMmed in CONFIG.SYS, there was no way to recover some thousands of files. Only the directories and a few read-only files, etc. remained.
First, just absolute panic! Then, wonderment how I could do anything so dumb. Finally, I remembered .. the old 1.6 GB drive was resting in a box on the far side of the room, and its Warp 4 boot partition was still intact, lacking only some small number of updates that had been installed on the new drive during the past couple of weeks.
The old drive was installed into the computer as a master, with the new drive as a slave. Since most all partition designations were now changed, the system was booted from a floppy. All partitions were then carefully identified, and the trashed Warp 4 boot partition on the new 6.4 GB drive was reformatted for HPFS. A new boot block was installed on this partition with SYSINSTX.COM. And finally, all files from the Warp 4 boot partition on the old drive were copied over to the appropriate partition on the new drive using XCOPY with option switches /H /O /T /S /E /R /V, same as described in last month's article. It took XCOPY a while to transfer approximately 9,000 files, but it worked perfectly.
The old drive was then removed, the new drive reconfigured as the sole drive, and the system rebooted from the newly reconstituted boot partition without any difficulty.
Aside from the obvious lessons to be learned from the careless actions of too-fast fingers, there's another insight that was gained here. That is: Prices of large hard drives are now so low, and the transfer rates are so much higher than tape, that it's worth considering the exclusive use of a second hard drive for backup purposes.
USEFUL WEB SITES
Each month, we list a few web pages which may be of benefit and/or interest to OS/2 users. This month's selections include ...
NEW SOFTWARE RELEASES
Here's the list of all the latest TCP/IP 4.0x fixes and updates that are freely available, as of this date. They are all now installed on my system. Maybe it's just my imagination playing tricks, but all communications processes now "seem" to be somewhat faster and snappier.
Unfortunately, TCP/IP v.4.1 is available at this time only via software choice, and requires a password to download the basic installation files. Strangely, IBM has made all the TCP/IP 4.1 updates and fixes freely available. They're useless though without the original basic installation.
All these files are available at
ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/ps/products/tcpip/fixes/ ...
| TCP/IP AREA | FILE NAME | FILE SIZE | DATE POSTED |
| stack v.4.02s | v4rsu.zip | 729,939 | 2-03-98 (Corrected) |
| ddns | ddnszip.exe | 153,078 | 3-20-97 |
| dhcp | dhcpczip.exe | 159,216 | 1-09-98 |
| ftp | ftpfiles.exe | 302,377 | 12-17-97 |
| rexec | ic19029.exe | 60,939 | 10-20-97 |
| sendmail | sendmail.zip | 151,176 | 7-08-97 |
| telnet | telfiles.exe | 439,028 | 10-08-97 |
| dosbox | dosbox.exe | 137,710 | 10-20-97 |
| year2000 | v40y2k.exe | 528,415 | 12-17-97 |
| lprfiles.exe | 254,991 | 9-22-97 |
IBM AntiVirus Datafiles
AV30BA.ZIP 467194 1-22-98
Download from http://www.av.ibm.com/IBMAntiVirus/Updates/
OS/2 Boot System Create Utility v.9.02
BOOTOS2 ZIP 306310 1-24-98
Build bootable OS/2 partition or diskette.
Java v.1.1.4 Build of 1-21-98
JAVA0121 ZIP 10546969 1-21-98
Java Runtime/Samples/Toolkit update from Hursley
Here's a selection of several new releases which may be most useful for the majority of our members. These files can be downloaded from hobbes, BMT, OS/2 Supersite, and other of the usual Internet and BBS file distribution sources.
BBS SUPPORT
Larry Lavins' BBS, The Claim Board, is still online, going strong, even though the files haven't been updated for an embarrassing long time. The job of updating a wide variety of files for DOS, Windows, OS/2, etc. has proved to be too taxing. Serious consideration is being given to specializing in OS/2 related files, with only a smattering of other general DOS and Windows applications. Stay tuned ...
Most callers log in for the large selection of FidoNet echomail areas, including OS/2 International Conference, OS/2 Hardware, OS/2 DOS-Windows, OS/2 Internet and Team OS/2. Some popular genealogy areas are also available: National Genealogical Conference, Jewish Genealogy Conference and Genealogy Software.
There are hundreds of new messages received every day from all over the world on these OS/2 echomail areas.
Phone number is (215) 878-9611, 24-hours daily. All standard ITU bitrates are supported, up to 14400 (v.32bis). Everything is free.
PACS members who wish to have additional access privileges must send a message to the Sysop to request same. Be sure to include your PACS ID number, which will be verified.
Another very fine BBS, which supports OS/2 exclusively, is the OS/2 Source, operated by SIG Member Ben Bowers, located in Royersford, PA, (610) 948-4089, and also via a Philadelphia metro area phone number, in King of Prussia, (610) 337-9119.
The OS/2 Source BBS has the largest collection of current OS/2 files in this region. Message areas are devoted almost exclusively to the exchange of useful OS/2 information amongst the many callers and the Sysop. Ben has recently added a Java message area which has become quite active.
Another good OS/2 BBS is the RPS BBS in Philadelphia at (215) 624-8960, operated by SIG member Murray Weismer. RPS also has a good selection of very new and current OS/2 files.
SIG MEMBERSHIP
A continuing plea here for PACS members who wish to affiliate with the OS/2 SIG to check the OS/2 SIG box on their new member form or annual membership renewal form, as the case may be. The names of many active SIG participants are still not included as OS/2 SIG members on the PACS database. PACS members may call the PACS office at any time and ask for the OS/2 SIG affiliation to be added to their record in the PACS database. This is important. Interested PACS members are requested to do this ASAP. Please do it!
Please note that PACS membership cards are not mailed back to members who join and/or renew via mail. Cards are normally issued at the main PACS meeting. If you wish to receive your membership card via mail, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) with your membership or renewal application.
All OS/2 SIG members are also requested to fill in a newly revised OS/2 User Survey Form and submit same to Larry. Blank forms are made available at each monthly meeting, and will be given to all attendees as they enter.
The OS/2 SIG welcomes all PACS members, their guests and other non-members who use or have an interest in OS/2, regardless of their level of expertise.
FUTURE MEETING PLANS
Wednesday, February 25th, the 4th Wednesday of the month, at 7:00pm, is the date and time of the next monthly SIG meeting. At the time of writing this article, our meeting location hasn't yet been decided. Notice will be posted on the web site at www.pasug.org/ and transmitted via POSEIDON when the location is firmed up. Please log in on the web site at frequent intervals.
In the meantime, mark your calendars and plan to attend. And bring an interested friend or associate along to see what a real operating system can do. A system will be on hand for live demos of OS/2 Warp 4, a variety of OS/2 apps, Java, Internet, etc.
Planned February Agenda:
General SIG business session: Announcements, news of interest, new OS/2 products, future plans, etc.
Warpstock '98 Committee report
Demos and presentations by Larry Lavins:
Lotus Smartsuite for Warp 4 Beta 2, for WordPro, Freelance Graphics, 1-2-3, Approach and Organizer.
Other new applications, games and utilities of general interest.
Member requests for specific demos are solicited and will be done if the software is available. Try to call Larry prior to the meeting date to permit preparation.
Finally, in February, time *WILL* definitely be allocated for a good solid general Q&A session. I promise. Members keep asking for this, but we always seem to run out of time when outside guest speakers are on the agenda.
As usual, light refreshments will be available. We will also have our customary 50/50 raffle followed by a sotware raffle if available.
All our more experienced users are urged to attend the February meeting to share their knowledge and expertise with others.
See you all on February 25th. Mark your calendars. Bring your friends and associates to show them that OS/2 is really alive and well.
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