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FOCUS ON OS/2
Our feature article this week is:
'MICROSOFT IS A HARMFUL MONOPOLY.'
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson has declared that Microsoft is a harmful monopoly.
What does that mean and what happens now?
http://os2.about.com/compute/os/os2/aa111199.htm
The site now contains 1053 selected links and is located at http://os2.about.com.
Symantec has released new files for IBM AntiVirus (10.11.1999). See:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/download.html
or directly
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/antivirus_definitions/ibmav/av30es.zip
An updated version of SMARTWIN.DLL is available from hobbes:
ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/incoming/smw1002.zip
ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/new/smw1002.zip
ghostbbs:
ftp://ftp.ghostbbs.cx/pub/os2/os2team/alcant/smw1002.zip
or tin:
http://space.tin.it/scienza/acantato/files/smw1002.zip
A small executable allows users to update a Styler/2 version 1.0 installation.
This release features just a few fixes. You do not need to download it if you
do not experience any problems with the current one.
Styler/2 is an OS/2 application which enhances OS/2 Warp 3 and 4 PM window aesthetics
and functionality. Titlebars can use shades and bitmaps as backgrounds with 3D effect
text. Any bitmap can be used for the standard window controls. Other features include
window rolling, titlebar hiding, sliding focus, mouse pointer hiding, mouse double
click emulation, etc.
Please check my home page for more details:
http://acsoft.ghostbbs.cx/
http://space.tin.it/scienza/acantato/
The Board of Directors of Warpstock, Inc. is pleased to announce that bids are
now being accepted to host Warpstock 2000.
The challenge for the Warpstock Board is to be able to announce the location
of Warpstock 2000 on January 1, 2000. The Board has released the Bid Proposal Form
for all interested parties. The Bid Proposal Form is available immediately at:
http://www.warpstock.org/2000/bid_form.html
and may be downloaded as an ASCII, Rich Text Format (RTF), DeScribe, StarWriter,
or Lotus WordPro document.
Teams wishing to bid on hosting Warpstock 2000 must declare their intention to
do so by November 30, 1999. This may be accomplished by sending electronic mail
to bids2k@warpstock.org. Unlike previous years, Teams wishing to host Warpstock
2000 should include more than one alternative for the hosting site.
The Board of Directors will remain in close contact with the Teams throughout
the entire bid process, including final site selection. Final bids are due on December
15, 1999. When all bids have been received, the Board will review all proposals
and announce the winning Team on January 1, 2000.
Now is the time to start! Warpstock 2000 will be the best Warpstock yet!
Warpstock, Inc. (http://www.warpstock.org),
a non-profit corporation incorporated in the State of North Carolina, is the legal
entity sponsoring the annual Warpstock conference. The Warpstock annual conference
is a gathering of OS/2 users and vendors from around the world, for the purpose
of education and advocacy.
An OS/2 port of Timidity++ 2.7.0 is available from Darwin O'Connor's Timidity
for OS/2 page:
http://www.reamined.on.ca/doconnor/timidity.html
The slang interface that was disabled in my previous Timidity++ ports is now
working.
Timidity++ is an extended version of Timidity, a software MIDI synth.
I just saw the announcement about Real.com and Take 5 (http://www.os2ss.com/warpcast/wc4406.html).
It is suggested that this makes it possible to port RealAudio to OS/2. This is unfortunately
not true. I had a look at real.com and Take 5, this Software has nothing to do with
the RealAudio codec and because of this it does not support an OS/2 port of RA.
The best chance I see to get full RealAudio working on OS/2 is Odin, the Win32
implementation for OS/2. As you may know the project is doing very well but there
is still a lot of stuff to do until we can run applications like RealAudio.
We are still looking for some developers which are able to port DirectSound to
OS/2, I think there is more than 50% of DirectSound functionality missing at the
moment. And MIDI is not working at all.
So if you are skilled in MMPM and DART (and probably Win32) programming, let
us know, we need your help!
If you want to get more informations about Project Odin check:
Those who are interested in the latest versions of ConfigEdit/2 or ServerConfig/2
can now download the beta versions from the web site:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~dm898/soft.html
Latest ConfigEdit/2 beta fixes a problem with multiple editors and the Save function.
Also code has been implimented to include support for the ConfigMaint data base.
Suggestions and comments are appreciated.
ServerConfig/2 is a PM configuration util for Apache webserver, the InetPowerServer/2
and the IBM TCP/IP Firewall with an easy to use PM interface that allows you to
do things by simple mouse clicks.
ConfigEdit/2 is a config.sys database manager which can auto-generate config.sys
files from a database which can be either imported or created by hand. It can be
used to hold multiple config.sys files and generate new ones. Also manages OS/2's
recovery choices!
RAR has been updated to 2.60, it is now a DOS-OS/2 application. Both versions
are blended into one using EMX. However, this does not have the text based GUI anymore.
I guess that will be later implemented. Anyway, it is now a command line application
like PkZip or Info-Zip. http://www.rarsoft.com
The link that the website gave in order to download was broken when I tried it.
You can use their ftp site: ftp://rarsoft.ti.sk/pub/rarx260.exe
[WarpCast Editor's Note: I tried the above ftp address and was not able to connect.
I'm not sure if that's because the traffic was too high on the site, or if the link
itself was incorrect.]
I have just uploaded beta 3 of MAMERun to the /pub/incoming directory of Hobbes:
http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/incoming/
Final expected placement is:
http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/apps/emulator/
You can also find it at the MAMERun Homepage:
http://home1.gte.net/stefanj/mamerun.htm
Whats New Beta 3:
What:
MAMERun is a FREEWARE PM front end for the DOS version of MAME (Multi. Arcade
Machine Emulator). A front end is a program that makes it easier for the user to
interface with his application, which usually has a command line interface. MAME
is a very popular emulator that allows you to run thousands of classic arcade games
on your PC (if you own the ROMs). You can find the MAME homepage at:
The Official (and very good) OS/2 PM port of MAME was done by Marty Amodeo and
is at:
http://emuos2.vintagegaming.com/
Requirements:
OS/2
MAME for DOS (I used version .36 beta 8)
DOS Support installed
RexxUtil
joystick device driver ( for joystick support, download from hobbes or DDPAK)
ROMs (DO NOT ASK ME FOR, OR WHERE TO GET ROMS!!)
I'm not sure this is the appropriate place to post this but, in the course of
trying to figure out why OS/2 didn't recognize all the RAM installed on my Gigabyte
GA-7IX motherboard, I learned something I think is relatively important to the OS/2
community. The answer, straight from the horse's mouth at Phoenix Tech is as follows:
OS/2 and Windows NT/9x use different BIOS calls to determine how much memory is available. OS/2 uses INT 15h,AX=E801h while Windows uses INT 15h,AX=E820h.
Look here, http://www.ctyme.com/intr/int.htm to see the details.
Award has had support for the E801 call since late in 1995. Recently, though, this support was made conditional on ACPI in order to pass an Intel "Component Validation Test". In other words a BIOS with ACPI support could not have E801 support. Very recently (October), this code was refined to allow the E801 support to be included even if ACPI is supported.
Thus, the GA-7IX (and many other new motherboards as well, I have learned) are
essentially incompatible with an emerging hardware standard. I think that we may
need to find a way to "suggest" to IBM that they change the OS/2 boot
memory detection algorithm soon to at least accomodate this emerging standard.
[WarpCast Editor's Note: Does anyone have any more/definate information on this
problem?]
The November issue of OS/2 e-Zine! is now online:
In this issue:
Christopher B. Wright (wrightc@dtcweb.com)
Interim Editor In Chief, OS/2 e-Zine!
Ok - so it's been a few weeks since my site got an update - sorry about that.
What I was looking at took me a long time to research.
However, it has been updated now with information about how to keep all your
printer drivers at the same level on all your OS/2 PCs on OS/2, NT or peer networks.
Automatically.
You can see it at:
http://www.haynes97.freeserve.co.uk/
Thanks for all the positive comments.
RealNetworks announced today (Nov 8) that it will publish the source code to
Real.com Take5. See:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19991108S0005
Now if someone or some group out there is willing to take on the task of compiling
the source for OS/2, OS/2 users may finally be able to listen to and watch streaming
RealAudio AV using their favourite Operating System.
This is a first preliminary announcement about a business OS/2-conference in
Mexico.
All OS/2-related presentations/contributions are welcome.
We hope the conference will help promoting OS/2 in Mexico. The focus of the conference
will be on specific business solutions where OS/2 is absolutely the superior platform.
In particular, the Managed Client Solutions will be a cornerstone topic of the
conference.
We are very happy to announce that Serenity Systems is willing to participate
as both exhibitors and presentators, and to support us in all important aspects
of the event!
The conference will take place in Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, a beautiful resort on Mexican
Pacific Coast, during approx one week of the next spring or autumn (say May/June
or September 2000). We would like to avoid the high tourist season.
We plan to publish the proceedings of the conference. We also plan to organize
some OS/2 mini-sessions in Mexico City, after the main conference.
If you feel enthusiastic about coming to Mexico and participating in this warped
event (any way you like) please feel free to tell us! We would like to make a preliminary
estimate of how many people would come.
We are in the process of negotiating the best pricings with the hotels (if everything
goes fine, do not expect to pay more than 90USD per day in an excellent hotel, food
included).
For any questions, you can write either to me (micho@matem.unam.mx)
or Carlos de Luna (charly@mati.net.mx) from
Mati (http://www.mati.net.mx/) a Mexican ISP
organization.
Micho Durdevich
Institute of Mathematics, UNAM,
Mexico
http://www.matem.unam.mx/~micho/
A new "Special Report" at OS/2 Headquarters:
details the specific Antitrust Law statutes involved in the Microsoft case, how
it could affect OS/2 and also analyzes possible remedies and punishments that Judge
Jackson might hand out in the next round.
This past week, two well-known audio hardware vendors, Creative Labs and Aureal,
made announcements that they will release the source code to some of their device
drivers. Several in the OS/2 community suggested that these events would finally
allow independent OS/2 driver developers to create audio device drivers for the
hardware from these two vendors.
As many of you know, Theta Band Software (http://www.thetaband.com/) has been
actively developing support for OS/2 multimedia. We recently released the MM PACK,
a collection of OS/2 software which includes an audio device driver.
Theta Band Software would like to announce that we are investigating the development
of OS/2 device drivers based on the source code provided by Creative Labs and Aureal.
Several issues need to be clarified before we can commit to development of these
drivers, not the least of which is the license and other legal restrictions under
which the source code is released. There may also be technical reasons. We will
make another announcement when we have enough information.
In the meantime, there are two issues that need to be stressed.
First, Theta Band Software will not "port" the drivers to OS/2. If
we do look at the source code from CL and/or Aureal, it will only be to determine
how the hardware works. Any drivers we release for CL or Aureal hardware will be
written entirely from scratch, and therefore we will retain all the copyrights to
the code.
Second, Theta Band Software strongly feels that competing against other OS/2
vendors is a losing proposition. The OS/2 marketplace is too small for vendors to
compete with similar applications. If we learn that another individual is developing
OS/2 drivers based on the source code from Creative Labs or Aureal, we will cease
development of our drivers. There is no point in having two competing OS/2 device
drivers for a sound card. If you think that you can write a better audio device
driver, then by all means let us know and we won't waste our time.
Theta Band Software has made this announcement to inform the OS/2 community of
our intentions, and we hope that this announcement is greeted with enthusiam and
hopeful expectations. However, at this time we have nothing more to say on this
topic, so please don't email us asking for more information.
On Sunday, November 7th someone announced that the first binary releases of Odin
were available. This is correct but we wanted to wait with the announcement because
the web page and the documentation are still out of date.
So *please* do not yet start downloading Odin. We will announce it officialy
the next few days and the web page will be up to date too.
BTW: The OS/2 Netlabs update (Server) went well. Unfortunately CVS seems not
to work anymore on TCP/IP Stack 4.1 or higher. Because of this CVS is not working
at the moment. For sure we are working on the problem and hope that CVS will be
back online very soon.
Again, please wait with the Odin download.
The Project Odin web page is:
Odin is the name of the project and software that allows users to run Win32 (Windows
95 and Windows NT) applications in OS/2 Warp natively, as if they were intended
to be OS/2 applications in the first place.
The famous, free and well-known plotting program, Gnuplot is available in the
new version 3.71 for all platforms. This means OS/2 also.
Point your browser to:
ftp://ftp.ucc.ie/pub/gnuplot/gp371os2.zip
Symantec has updated the Signature Files for IBMAV to av30er.
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/download.html
IBMAV is IBM AntiVirus.
Rick Papo has updated the beta of Memsize 4.0:
http://www.msen.com/~rpapo/beta.html
Changes this time:
Added uninstall script in English, UNINSTAL.CMD.
Memsize provides a digital clock (with date), the elapsed time since your system's
last restart, the amount of free virtual memory, the current swap-file size, the
maximum amount the swap-file can still grow, the current CPU load (%), the number
of active tasks and the amount of disk space free on each of your hard disks.
Good news for people who listen to Module music:
1. I have created a new version of MikModPM, an OS/2 GUI Module player that uses
the MikMod library.
2. I have ported the XMP Module player to OS/2 and there is a preview version
available that seems to be fairly stable on my machine. XMP plays 47 different module
types so now you can play nearly all the module files that were ever created!
3. The MikMod Library has been updated and an OS/2 build has been created. If
you are creating an OS/2 program that needs sound and music then you should take
a look at the MikMod Library.
These packages can be downloaded at:
For more information about MikMod or XMP go to the MikMod Home page at:
XMP Home page at:
For more info about modules check out the MOD FAQ at:
http://www.castlex.com/modfaq/
WarpNote v1.87 has been released. See the developer's web site at:
http://www.geocities.com/rodeodrive/2048/warpnote.html
Product Description:
Tired of those yellow sticky notes that won't stick on your monitor? Here come
the sticky notes that remain where you put them: On your OS/2 desktop. WarpNote
gives you easy access to little yellow windows where you can note down everything
you want. The program is simple and easy to use and consumes as little memory as
possible. Each and any feature can be configured and adjusted to the user's needs.
Extensive scripting capabilities give you unlimited possibilities (a birthday-reminder
is included as an example script). A Blowfish encryption interface ensures that
private data is stored in a secure way.
WarpNote is an ideal desktop companion, a fire-and-forget solution to keep all
sorts of information - e.g. your shopping list or even confidential information
like banking data, passwords or PIN numbers.
New in this Release:
PMStripper v1.23 has been released:
http://www2.southwind.net/~dwhawk/
This PM utility strips HTML codes from Web pages, leaving only the text and optionally
the URLs. While the layout of tables and lists is lost during stripping, data is
sorted to separate lines for legibility.
Install PMStripper as the HTML source viewer in WebX instead of the OS/2 system
editor E, and you can use the Ctrl+V keystroke combination to load the web page
source directectly into PMStripper. This will make it easier to cut and paste information
or URLs from web pages. It can also be installed as the document source viewer in
Netscape. There are instructions for using PMStripper with Netscape 4.04 on my web
page and included in the shareware distribution zip file.
Registered users of PMStripper will have access to two additional executable
files that were compiled with the 486 and 586 compiler options. These versions will
offer some performance improvement for users with 468 , Pentium, or equivalent CPUs.
New in PMStripper 1.23
Added 'Hard code word wrap' menu item under "File" on the menubar.
This option adds CR-LF pairs to each line in the display window to make the current
word wrap permanent. This should make it easier to print the stripped text.
PMStripper is shareware and costs $9.95 (US).
Registration covers all 1.xx releases of PMStripper. If you have registered PMStripper
and have not received an email notice of this update, I need to update your email
address in my mailing list. Send me a message with the email address used with your
original registration and your new email address and I will update my mailing list.
Another FileStar/2 CSD is available at:
http://www.filestar.com/pages/notices.html
This CSD fixes a nasty bug for those users that start the program minimized.
Be sure and read the text file for the CSD to see if you should download the CSD
file.
Also note that you may now purchase a combination package of UniMaint and FileStar/2.
FileStar/2 is a premium quality, versatile PM file manager for OS/2.
IBM asks the users of VisualAge for Java to request new features and to vote
for their favorite ones.
Go to the following URL, then click Continue:
http://www7.software.ibm.com/vad.nsf/Data/Document3522?OpenDocument&SubMast=1
Once you have accepted the licence, click on "View requests" on the
left to view and vote.
I've posted the #237 request to ask IBM to give us the same functionalities of
VA Java on OS/2 as on NT.
Currently there is no support for JSP and EJP in VA Java OS/2 and there is no
plan for supporting Java 2.
If you are interested in developping Java programs on OS/2, please vote for my
request.
Note: you must register to Visual Age Developer Domain to access the pages. It's
free, but very valuable!
Partition Magic v5.0 is now supposedly available.
I contacted PowerQuest and have gotten verification that v5.0 again (as with
v4.0) does not have an OS/2 executable, though it continues to support HPFS partitions.
You will need to have DOS or WinXX installed to use this.
You can contact PowerQuest at magic@powerquest.com or at:
Theta Band Software's Multimedia Pack for OS/2 is now available for ordering
through Mensys at http://www.mensys.nl.
MMPack is a collection of utilities to enhance OS/2 multimedia, and contains
the following programs :
MMCheck
This is a utility that checks your MMPM/2 installation (i.e. MMPM2.INI) for errors
or suspicious settings. If it finds any, it will tell you what they are, so that
you can fix them.
MPU-401 Driver
This is a replacement for IBM's MPU-401 driver, which is used to MIDI support for
a number of sound cards, including sound cards that use the Crystal Semiconductor
drivers. Enhancements over IBM's driver include :
NPDSMI 2.0
This is a plug-in for Netscape Navigator and Communicator for OS/2. The function
of the DSMI plug-in is to play music module files embedded on web pages. Module
files are 32 channel digital music and are of tremendously high quality. This new
version 2.0 of the DSMI Netscape plug-in supports compressed zip module files.
More information about MMPack is available on our web site at:
Smack! version 2.0 development on hold.
Perfect Niche Software, Inc., was eager to provide Smack! 2.0 beta for demonstration
at Warpstock 99, but due to the serious bugs discovered in IBM's development environment,
was unable to meet this goal.
Development of Smack! v. 2.0 for OS/2 has been put on hold until these bugs in
IBM's development environment have been fixed.
Several of our current Smack! customers have expressed that they are "looking
forward to v. 2.0 with great anticipation". We regret that we have had to take
this step in the final development stage, but in order to maintain our high standard
of quality software, Smack! v. 2.0 will not be released until these standards are
met.
Smack! has been described as a "must have" software tool. Visit http://www.perfectniche.com/html/smindex.html
for complete details.
Smack! v. 2.0 will be a FREE upgrade for current users of Smack! v. 1.0 and above.