OS/2 WARP

Why yet another page citing OS/2? Scenic view with OS/2 logo

A good question ...
the only reasonable answer I can come up with is that I find the system easy and enjoyable to use. I acquired OS/2 Warp v3 to be slightly different from the crowd. I have stayed with it since despite the lack of others using it and the wide choice of software. However the operating system and native software that is available is very good. There is an application to cover all requirements.

System, marina

My original machine was a very nice 75 MHz Pentium with 40 MB of memory. The graphics card was an ATI Mach64 card, which one I never actually deduced. An Iomega Zip drive, 100 MB parallel port, was used for storing information off-line. The current operating system is OS/2 Warp v4 with fixpack 9. applied

The machine may have been low end compared to the current state-of-the-art but performed sterling service for all my requirements. In May 2000 it was too far behind the performance curve that an upgrade was decided upon.

System Upgrade, columbia

During early 2000 I felt I was getting too far behind the current machine technology with Pentium processors and Athlons operating at several hundred MHz as standard for the budget PC market. An upgrade was called for. The first choice faced was:

is an off-the-shelf processor box procured or
is a home-brew box configured and built.

Since many of the off-the-shelf boxes are not proven with OS/2 (though there should not necessarily be any problem) the roll-you-own approach was adopted. Besides I could, if necessary, reuse some of the components from the existing machine, CDROM drive for example.

Searching magazines and asking questions of the newsgroups (comp.os.os2.setup.*) the following principle component list was determined:

AMD Athlon 750 MHz CPU
Gigabyte GA-71XE motherboard running the Award BIOS, ATX form factor
128 MBytes 100 MHz memory
Quantum Fireball 10.2 GByte IDE hard disc drive
Matrox G400 AGP video card, 16 MBytes memory
Logitech Pilot Mouse

The floppy disc drive, CDROM drive, keyboard and modem would be cannibalised from the original PC.

You will note already one item missing from the list, a cooling fan for the processor. Ah well the best laid plans of mice and men :-)

The delivery of all the components was eagerly awaited so the machine can be built and run. It is at this point that the fun started when it would be found that many of the components will not work together or specific drivers and fixes need to be acquired. Details of the Build and Configuration are here

Following the ordering of the components, pointers to the following sites were received which may be of value to others:

These sites certainly make a fascinating read and are worth following up, they contain a wealth of information.

Software

I could provide links galore to pages and sites containing OS/2 related software, but they are provided much more skilfully and sites such as hobbes and musthave. If you would like some please e-mail me, but in the interim here are a couple of routines which I developed to assist me. Please feel free to acquire and use them, they are free.

File utilities

The following is a set of four command line routines to perform the following tasks:

u2d: UNIX to DOS text file conversion.
d2u: DOS to UNIX text file conversion.
hexdump: produce a hexadecimal listing of a file.
fsplit: split a large file into several smaller files.

File utilities can be acquired here ... fut_1_00.zip.

I am working on PM variants of these routines. A first pass has been achieved, but until I can sort out the correct binding of help information they are unlikely to appear.

PRBS class DLL

The following is a simple Pseudo Random Binary Sequence (PRBS) class which may be of some value ... prbsdll.zip.

Future ideas

Other ideas are:

a native OS/2 source code control system. I know RCS is available but I have yet to find a PM based system I like, therefore I should develop my own.
a checksum/CRC utility.

For those interested I use the IBM First Step compiler. This is a stripped down version of the C/SET++ compiler system. The latest series of compilers from IBM are the VisualAge series. The current release is Version 4. The VisualAge compiler series has the advantage of supporting cross-platform development if, for example, you also would like to deploy onto a Microsoft based platform.

I have a page of code snippets, or should that be snippet, as there is only one at the moment. It relates to RCS and NMAKE.

WarpUK

There is a fledgling, but growing, OS/2 user group in the UK. It is run for enthusiasts of all persuasions, whether these be end-users, developers or both. Full details can be found on the WarpUK set of pages.

A hard core of the group meets via IRC most Sunday evenings. I tend to dip in and out. An excellent facility of the group is the distribution every so often of a collection of downloadable files such as the Netscape installation, IBM fixpacks plus commonly used utilities. Hours of online download time is saved.

Take me home!

All comments and suggestions to John S Glover

Last modified 30 June, 2000.