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## Let's Chat

An editorial view from Mark Dodel.

Almost no one shows up at VOICE IRC meetings anymore. Perhaps its our ever shrinking community of users. Its also true that announcements are sporadic if any, but the meetings have been on the same schedule for years - first and third Monday of the month at 8PM, U.S. Eastern time. I will grant you this is not the most convenient of times for Europeans and others on the other side of the world, but no one has complained about the meeting times in ages either. And when we had weekend meetings early in the day, still almost no one came.

People use to complain how difficult it was to use IRC. You had to get an IRC client, fill in some cryptic parameters, and figure out how to logon and navigate on IRC. This is no longer an issue with the coming of age of Warpzilla (Mozilla for OS/2) which has a builtin IRC client - Chatzilla.

Here are some simple instructions for using Chatzilla to connect to the VOICE chat room on WEBBnet:

- Go to http://irc.fyrelizard.com/
- Click on one of the IRC servers listed on the page.
- If this is the first time you have used Chatzilla, change the nickname from "IRCMonkey" to something more descriptive in the popup window. (limit is 9 characters)
- Chatzilla will open.
- Wait until the logon to the server completes. (Generally you will see a bunch of introductory text ending in "End of /MOTD command".)
- Type /join #voice at the prompt at the bottom of the window.
- Type something like hello everyone or just lurk for a bit to see what's going on if anything.

That's pretty much it. And this will work on other IRC networks besides the one that VOICE uses, but I don't know of web pages where you can just click to connect. Chatzilla has links to some of these IRC networks built in. You will see them listed on the opening screen if you start the IRC Chat window from within Warpzilla. For some reason sometimes these don't work for me, but perhaps they will work for you.

So now that we have an easy way to get on IRC I hope to see more folks at VOICE and Warp Doctor meetings or to just stop by #voice and say hello.

And speaking of meetings, I'd like to see as many members of VOICE attend this years Warpstock 2003, to be held the weekend of October 18-19 in the San Francisco, California area. For more details please check the Warpstock web site - http://www.warpstock.org.

VOICE Newsletter Update: Our Newsletter translation team is still in dire need of backup. If the situation does not improve, we won't be able to translate all articles any more and maybe even have to shut down the German issue. To be able to help you don't have to be a very good translator or HTML programmer. If you have profound knowledge of English or German spelling and grammar, you can also help with editing the articles. Some hints on translation activities are also available in the FAQ. If you can help please contact christian.hennecke@os2voice.org

Please note our new Disclaimer page regarding warranty and copyrights, and the respective terms for submitted articles in our Guidelines for submissions to the VOICE Newsletter.

We are always interested in your thoughts and views on subjects related to OS/2, and would like to see opinion/editorial pieces as well as hardware/software reviews and HowTo articles. If you can help by writing an article please contact me at editor@os2voice.org.

Warp Doctor: Have an idea for Warp Doctor? You can send your comments directly to the Warp Doctor web guy Jeremy at rs@fyrelizard.com or better yet attend one of our Warp Doctor Team meetings, weekly on IRC.

Everyone's help is required to keep this project going. The team meets every Sunday at 3PM EST (20:00 GMT) now on IRC in the #warpdoctor channel on the WEBBnet IRC network. For more information on attending online IRC meetings please see the VOICE Meeting Information page - http://www.os2voice.org/meetinginfo.html.

VOICE Online Update: This month the general member meetings are scheduled on April 7 and 21 at 8PM EST (01:00 GMT). Everyone interested in OS/2 or eComStation is invited to attend either or both of these sessions in #VOICE on the Webbnet IRC network. For more information on attending online VOICE IRC meetings please see the VOICE Meeting Information page - http://www.os2voice.org/meetinginfo.html.

If you have an idea for a Speakup event, please submit it to liaison@os2voice.org, and we will try to schedule something. As always, please be sure to check out the updated VOICE Future events Calendar in this newsletter or on the VOICE website at http://www.os2voice.org/calendar.html for more details on future VOICE events.

This month Thomas Klein returns with part seven of DrDialog, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love REXX. He continues with his overview of development of REXX programs with GUI using the free development environment DrDialog by IBM. This should be interesting for anybody, especially for those who have always wanted to write their own OS/2 applications, but were afraid of the high learning curve of PM programming.

Next Mark B. Szkolnicki gives us his take on The IBM Thinkpad A30p - eCS Power on the Road. Need a new laptop? This one looks like a winner, even though IBM doesn't have the backbone to certify it as an OS/2 machine.

Sergey Posokhov is the developer of Nice-OS/2 Enhancer v 5.0. In his article he details all the functionality you can expect from his freeware utility suite for the WPS.

Looking at installing operating systems other then OS/2-eCS? Take a good look at Peter Hinckley's An Adventure with LVM, a Multi-boot System,and Cloning the Operating Partitions. We've covered this ground before, but Peter brings us an update with lots of detail on how to avoid pitfalls of dealing with LVM and large drives.

For XFree86 fans, Christian Hennecke brings us his XFree86/OS2 4.3.0 Installation Guide. A step by step guide for installing the new stable version 4.3.0 of XFree86 under OS/2. XFree86 is a freely redistributable open-source implementation of the X Window System.

Finally we have the VOICE Newsletter OS/2 Tips page and the Letters, Addenda, Errata page. If you have any OS/2 or eCS tips you've uncovered, please send them to tips@os2voice.org. If you have any comments or suggestions about the newsletter or articles in it, please send them to editor@os2voice.org.

That's it for this month. Upcoming articles include more on VPC/2, by Mark B. Szkolnicki; Installing the latest win32s as a hybred with the last supported version of win32s on OS/2, by Jeffrey Rice; A look at the Workplace Shell Toolkit by Christian Langanke; and the next articles in the series on DrDialog, by Thomas Klein. Later on in June we will have another review of WarpVision, this time by Mark B. Szkolnicki.

If you have an idea for an article, why not write one. It's one of the best ways, short of programming native OS/2 applications, that you can help the OS/2 Community. And anyone can do it. Few of our writers are professionals. They are just trying to help. Please send me your ideas or better yet a draft of an article to editor@os2voice.org.

Mark Dodel, Christian Hennecke and Jason R. Stefanovich
VOICE Newsletter editors

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