January 1998

We had another record turnout at the December meeting: close to 50 members and guests, including several new individuals. Hope we continue to see them at future meetings. Erasmus Tapera, our IBM representative, was planning to join the party, but he sent word that he had to be out of town on the meeting night. Happily, Jim Geueke of IBM was able to be with us.

We were also confronted with a crisis several days prior to the meeting when IBM notified us that none of the large meeting rooms in the new office building would be ready for use prior to the end of the month.

It was therefore necessary, on very short notice, to find an acceptable alternate location for the December meeting for what should be only a one-time occurrence due to construction delays. We expect to meet in the new IBM building in January.

Through the good offices and assistance of Dot Price, a former PACS member, the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in King of Prussia most generously offered their Fellowship Hall meeting room facilities to us. We're most appreciative. The large meeting room and other facilities there were exceptionally well suited to our needs. Dot also spent the evening with us and graciously provided hostess services for us at the refreshment table.

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.

The possibility of sponsorship of Warpstock '98 by our Philadelphia OS/2 SIG was also briefly discussed. As per the membership consensus at the November meeting, a committee of several of our members was formed to look into the feasibility of our sponsorship of Warpstock '98 in this area, but no progress was yet reported by the committee. They should try to start work on this project just as soon as possible.

Continuing on, Tom MacKnight and Dave Gentzler conducted a demonstration of some of the principal features of IBM Works: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Database and PIM.

Immediately afterwards, we began the celebration of the 10th birthday of OS/2 by singing "Happy Birthday" to OS/2. Luckily, everything arrived on time this month, including another huge birthday cake from Scandia Pastries in Havertown, courtesy of IBM. Along with ice cream, pretzels, chips and soda, we had a feast. Everyone present also received an OS/2 T-shirt donated by IBM, plus pins, pens and other assorted giveaways.

While everyone was enjoying the refreshments, a 50/50 raffle was held, followed by raffles of approximately 30 software items donated by Stardock and Indelible Blue. Larry also brought in several software items for the raffle, including a copy of Warp 4 which was raffled off to a group restricted to those few users who haven't yet upgraded from Warp 3.

Jim Geueke of IBM, true to his promise at the November meeting, presented IBM software items chosen by the winners of the November raffle. A couple of these items had not yet arrived, and will be shipped directly to these winners. Jim also donated a copy of IBM's NetFinity Manager v.3.0. This will be raffled of at the January meeting.

Before adjourning, we expressed our unanimous thanks to Dot Price and the Good Shepherd Church for their generous assistance.

A reminder: We'll return to our regular 4th Wednesday meeting schedule in January. This will be Wednesday, January 28th.

Barring any unforseen problems, everyone is also reminded that we will begin meeting in January at the new IBM office building. The address of the new IBM office building is:

One Glenloch Corporate Campus 1475 Phoenixville Pike West Chester, PA 19380-1437

The new office building is located in the Glenloch area, approximately mid-way between Fraser and Exton, on Phoenixville Pike (Route 29),just a short distance south of Route 30.

This section of Phoenixville Pike begins on Route 30, heading south, about a half mile east of Route 202, directly across the Route 30 highway from Stevens Antiques which is located on the north side of Route 30. There is a traffic light at this intersection, but no signs for Phoenixville Pike or Route 29 were observed on Route 30.

Proceed south on Phoenixville Pike for 0.8 mile, passing under 2 railroad bridges. Look for a stone monument on the left which marks the entrance drive to Westin's One Glenloch Corporate Campus. Turn in here to the left, and go all the way up the drive to the new office building.

The easiest and quickest ways to get here seem to be north on Route 202 from West Chester or south on Route 202 from King of Prussia, exiting Route 202 at Route 30, and proceeding east on Route 30. Alternatively, go east on Route 30 from Downingtown or west on Route 30 from Main Line areas.

Please refer to our web site www.pasug.org/ for additional information, including a detailed map.

For the last couple of weeks, our principal guru, David Moskowitz, has been preparing for a trip to Japan to work with IBM at the Winter Olympics in Nagano. He will depart for Japan on January 8th, and return home sometime in early March.

David will be working in the Surf Shack located in the Olympic Village. The Surf Shack holds 30 to 40 PC's for the athletes to use to surf the web, respond to fan mail (http://www.olympics.ibm.com and then select the FanMail link), and also create and publish their own home pages.

David's primary function will be to make sure the Surf Shack LAN stays up and running. He'll also provide help to anyone who needs it in the Surf Shack.

He's not sure how he'll be able to get e-mail while he's there. However, you can try davidm2@usa.net if you want to communicate with him.

IBM designed the world wide network to handle between 120,000,000 and 130,000,000 hits per day using 25 nodes on 8 SP2's around the world.

David plans to give us a full report of his activities and many of the other interesting Winter Olympics happenings at our March meeting.

In last month's article, it was reported that a new OS/2 Warp 4 handbook is available worldwide at a cost of $59.95 plus sales tax and S&H, from the IBM Direct Publications Catalog on the internet located at: http://www.elink.ibmlink.ibm.com/pbl/pbl.

The new Warp 4 Handbook can also be ordered in the U.S. and Canada from Indelible Blue at 1-800-776-8284 or Sylvan Prometric at 1-800-959-3926. Cost at IB is $51.00 plus S&H. No tax.

This is the BEST handbook for all who use OS/2 Warp. It has almost 1200 pages packed with useful information. I ordered one from IB, and brought it to the December meeting to show to interested individuals. I recommend it highly as a reference manual for all serious OS/2 users.

In early December, Lotus announced the release of Beta 2 of Smartsuite for OS/2 Warp. It was posted on hobbes and several other internet ftp sites. Additionally, Indelible Blue and J3 Technologies offered it on CDROM for $10 + S&H. Many OS/2 users saturated the ftp sites, all trying to download this 129 MByte monster at the same time over a period of several days. I personally ordered a CDROM as a matter of convenience.

This new Beta 2 release provides increased application stability and enhanced functionality - such as ODBC drivers for external database access from within Lotus Approach, a native OS/2-based Dialog Editor in Word Pro and 1-2-3, and a 'Data Query Assistant' (DQA) database access feature in 1-2-3. In addition, this new release is designed to run on FixPak 5; and if you don't have FixPak 5 installed, an easy to apply 'one-button install' edition of FixPak 5 is provided with the Beta release.

I installed WordPro, Freelance Graphics, 1-2-3 and Approach. Organizer was not installed. WordPro and Freelance Graphics were successfully launched, and look good. But unfortunately, neither 1-2-3 nor Approach launched on my system. Attempts to launch these two applications resulted in SYS3175 error. Feedback messages are being prepared and will be sent to Lotus, as per their reporting instructions.

Although many users report successful launch of all applications, many others are also reporting problems with 1-2-3 and Approach.

At the very least, the new WordPro and Freelance Graphics will be demonstrated at the January meeting.

A version of Netscape 2.02, dated December 19, 1997, was posted on the IBM Testcase ftp site. This build turned out to be a disaster for most users who installed it, including me. IBM removed it from Testcase within a day or two of its posting date.

Fortunately, I was able to restore the previous version without too much difficulty.

As of this time, the best bet for campatibility with Java 1.1.4 is the so-called "leaked" version of Netscape of November 11, 1997. This too may exhibit some bugginess on many systems, but its performance and reliability is marginally ok.

In our November DataBus article, it was reported that Opera Software had initiated Project Magic to look for a show of interest from OS/2 users (and also users of other platforms) to persuade them to do a native OS/2 (or other platform) code version of their web browser.

Quoting from the recent Project Magic update: "You may be pleased to hear that we have just signed contracts with the OS/2 developers, and expect coding to commence any time now."

OS/2 users can still pledge support for this project. See Opera's web site at http://www.operasoftware.com

A few weeks ago, I purchased a WD Caviar 6.4GB Ultra-DMA EIDE hard drive at a local computer show, Then a couple of weeks later, I found a good buy on a 20X IDE CDROM drive at CompUSA.

They sat in their boxes until the last week in December when I had some time to devote to installation.

I had previously determined that the motherboard BIOS and chipset provide full support for bus mastering, EIDE and Ultra-DMA. Then had some correspondence with Sam Detweiler, IBM's device driver guru, to confirm that the IDE device drivers IBM1S506.ADD and IBMIDECD.FLT included in FixPak-5 are the most recent versions and provide support for all the latest IDE performance features.

Prior to installation, there were two physical drives, a 1.6 GB master and a 400 MB slave connected to the primary onboard IDE. The master HD incorporated a boot manager plus two primary C: partitions, one of which is always hidden, and an extended partition with logical partitions D: through I:. The slave drive had one logical partition J:.

Since there are many interrelationships across these partitions, it seemed best to preserve an identical partitioning scheme with the new 6.4 GB drive, but all on the one single drive.

Some amount of effort was also expended in an attempt to use PowerQuest's Drive Copy utility, but was subsequently abandoned. Drive Copy is rather inflexible. It duplicates a partitioning structure from one drive to another (usually of a larger size), but expands the sizes of all partitions in some proportional manner. If there is no unassigned free space on the original source drive, all partitions will be expanded on the target drive, leaving no free space. Partition Magic must then be used to reallocate all sizes, as desired by the user. This gets complicated and may be prone to mistakes along the way. Drive Copy is best described as a "no brainer" and I don't recommend its use except for real simple situations, like one single C: partition, for example.

PowerQuest's Drive Image has more flexibility and many more features than Drive Copy. But this wasn't available to me at the time.

What I ultimately did was to partition the new drive into a Boot Manager, primary drives C:, C: (hidden), and logical partitions D: to J: all in the desired sizes. Then formatted each as FAT or HPFS, as per my plan.

Next, SYSINSTX.COM was used to install an OS/2 boot block on each OS/2 bootable partition. The MSDOS.SYS command was used to install a DOS system on the one bootable MSDOS C: partition.

And finally, all partitions were copied over from the original drives to the appropriate partitions on the new drive using XCOPY with option switches /H /O /T /S /E /R /V.

A few troublesome complications did arise along the way, but they were all successfully dealt with in one way or another.

One thing that must be done immediately after this type of operation is to make fresh backups. I had neglected to do this, and then had to pay a price to reconstruct part of my desktop a couple of days later. We live and learn.

Benchmark tests with Trevor Hemsley's SysBench 0.9.3 produced the following ranges of values:

Average access time ..... 15.600 - 15.700 Millisec.
Cache/Bus transfer rate.... 23.200 - 23.300 Megabytes per sec.
Avge transfer rate .... 8.050 - 8.110 Megabytes per sec.
Disk use CPU load ..... 7.450 - 7.500 Percent

Simultaneous I/O ...... 9.790 - 9.800 Megabytes per sec.

A couple of days later, I also installed the new 20X IDE CDROM drive. No real problems here. This drive replaced a Sony 2.4X SCSI drive connected directly to the SCSI port on a ProAudio Studio 16 sound card. The new CDROM drive was connected to the motherboard's secondary IDE. Several changes had to be made in the CONFIG.SYS file. Most importantly, to turn on bus mastering for the CDROM drive. The new IBM1S506.ADD driver supports bus mastering by default for hard disk drives, but not for IDE CDROM drives. In my case, I chose to add a separate CONFIG.SYS line for the CDROM drive:
BASEDEV=IBM1S506.ADD /A:1 /U:0 /BM.

Benchmark tests on the CDROM drive with Trevor Hemsley's SysBench 0.9.3 produced the following ranges of values:

Avge access time.... Varied from 73 to 215 Millisec. for assorted sample CDROM's.
Avge transfer rate.... 1465 Megabytes/sec (9.8X) for most samples; 590 Megabytes/sec (3.9X) for a few others.
CDROM use CPU load.... 75.2 % for some; 30.4 % for others

Dan Porter of InnoVal recently announced his preliminary plans for a beta release of the forthcoming Post Road Mailer for Java. Dan's proposed plan has stirred up lots of controversy within the OS/2 user community, both pro and con, but mostly in support of Dan's continuing efforts to serve the OS/2 user community. Here's his message:

Here are a couple of real simple tips, almost no-brainers, but they do come in handy sometimes.

1. Delete Title Bars from COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE These title bars tend to irritate many users. To remove them, simply delete the "$i" from PROMPT statements in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.

2. Shutdown without a mouse If your mouse becomes disabled for some reason, and you nedd to shut down the system, you can do either one of two things:

   1. If you are in an OS/2 window or full-screen session, just type "SHUTDOWN" and press the ENTER key.

   2. From your WPS, press [SHIFT]+[F10] keys to bring up the WPS menu. Then enter "D" and the system will go into shutdown.