VOICE Home Page: http://www.os2voice.org | July 2001 [Newsletter Index] [Previous Page] [Next Page] [Features Index] editor@os2voice.org

##
OS/2 Tips

We scan the Web, Usenet and the OS/2 mail lists looking for these gems. Have you run across an interesting bit of information about OS/2-eComStation recently? Please share it with all our readers. Send your tips to tips@os2voice.org. If you are interested in joining a particular OS/2 Mailing List, check out the VOICE Mailing List page for subscribing instructions for a large variety of existing Lists - http://www.os2voice.org/mailinglists.html.

Editor's note: these tips are from OS/2-eComStation users and in some cases can not be verified by myself. Please heed this as a warning that if you are not sure about something, don't do it.

May 22, 2001 - Chuck McKinnis has the first tip of the month with this one on how to get a Xircom PCMCIA NIC running under OS/2. This post was on the TeamOS/2 Help list:

> I have one of these on my Thinkpad A21p. I found that I needed to do a couple of things. In the cardbus readme, you will find that the Xircom is point enabled and you need to modify IBM2SS14.SYS (`BASEDEV=IBM2SS14.SYS /IG0=1`) to keep card services from trying to mess with it.

> I also had to disable the resource checking for the card. That is one of the parameters you will see if you edit the card in MPTS. PROTOCOL.INI winds up looking like:

> > `[CE3OS2_nif]
> > `

> > `DriverName = XIRCOM$
> > IOADDRESS = 0x320
> > IRQ = 10
> > MODE = "IO"
> > NOCHECK
> > VERBOSE
> > `

> I brought it up first on the Win98SE side, locked the settings for address and irq, and transferred those settings to the OS/2 side.

May 22, 2001 - On news://news.scitechsoft.com/beta.scitech.display.doctor.os2 I found this tip from Erik Overby on how to perk up the video performance on an SMP system under OS/2-eCS. Since I have 4 SMP machines (three running WSeB and one running eCS Pro), this was of particular interest to me personally:

> I posted a message yesterday about poor graphics performance with SDD on SMP systems, DIVE in particular. I was talking a bit to Markus yesterday, and he said the problem is that one cannot set the MTRR's for both cpu's on a SMP system. In particular, what one would want to do is to enable write-combining for both/all CPU's. However I thought that hey, this has to be possible, because afaik they do on Linux.. And rightly enough; there is a utility on hobbes (p6k7mtrr_v006.zip) that lets you set the MTRR's for Pentium (I/II/III/Celeron etc.) and K7 (Athlon/Duron/etc) CPU's from Ring3, through a special device driver. The utility has in it's latest versions got a -m parameter, which makes it try to set the MTRR's for _all_ cpu's in a SMP system.

> And trust me on this: It works. DIVE performance is like quadrupled, and the system otherwise seems snappier aswell, especially Netscape. Not to mention that the problems I've had in the past with messed-up sound in FLASH animations are now gone (and FLASH performance is _much_ better).. This is like getting a new computer!

> So.. Have a look at this, all you SMP people.. And for you, Scitech, maybe this is a (not _the_) way to go?

> Best regards,
> Eirik Overby

> Btw, I noticed that in the WarpMedia FAQ/Readme they mention this too; but afaik they had no idea it would be so effective on SMP systems ;)

May 22, 2001 - From Roberto on the netscape.public.mozilla.os2 news group, here is a tip on how to have Netscape 6 (AKA Warpzilla, AKA The IBM Web Browser) report as something else:

> Find your PREFS.JS file and add the following line:

> > `user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.61 [en] (OS/2; U)");`

> This should trick most servers into believing you are using Netscape 4.61

May 22, 2001 - Roberto again has an answer, this time to someone having a problem running the TCP/Ip Configuration utility. This post was in comp.os.os2.networking.tcp-ip:

> Two possible things:

> 1 - TCP 4.3 uses TCPCFG2.CMD to start the Java configuration noteboot. Check you are not using Java 1.3 but Java 1.1.7 or 1.1.8.

> 2 - Your CONFIG.SYS file should have an empty line at the end, otherwise the TCP/IP configuration notebook will not start or will start with empty pages...

June 2, 2001 - Here's a tip from Lorne Sunley on comp.os.os2.setup.misc in response to someone asking for help getting a sound card with a Yamaha YMF744 chipset to work with the YMF724.SYS driver using Daniela's PATCHYMF (available on hobbes):

> I was having this problem today as well.

> Using the patchymf program to change the chipset recognition for the driver allowed the driver to see the YMF724 chip in my sound card but the load of the driver with the "/V" switch showed an attempt to allocate IRO x0F rather than the IRQ assigned by the PCI BIOS

> I moved the card to another slot and it worked. Check to make sure the PCI slot you are placing the card in is on PCI bus 0. Some machines (with more than 4 PCI slots) use PCI bus 0 and PCI bus 2 (bus 1 is the AGP slot) and the driver may have a problem with that(?). This was not the case with my machine but I have seen this happen with other cards when the driver does not handle the PCI bus number correctly.

June 9, 2001 - Richard M Braun had this tip on the odinusers@yahoogroups.com mail list for someone asking about an error message that fonts were not installed when trying to run PhotoShop 6 under Odin:

> Try searching the PS6 disk for the fonts and installing them into OS2 using the OS2 font installer. This took care of the font errors I received when I installed Turbo Tax 2000.

June 13, 2001 - On the eComStation@yahoogroups.com mail list, Duane Chamblee offered this advise on how to install eComStation without losing an already installed version of OS/2 or the eCS preview:

> I agree with this, the existing Preview 1 may contains some problems that will carry over if upgraded...

> But, thanks to LVM you can try an upgrade without losing anything (backups are STILL a good idea) if you have spare Harddrive space...

> Clone boot partition: (for install, or testing)
> Using a freshly booted system:

> 1. Start LVM
> 2. Create a new bootable volume, give it any letter (x:)
> 3. Close and save LVM. (reboot if asked)
> 4. Format X: in the filesystem of your boot vol. (HPFS)
> 5. Copy the contents of your existing system(C:) to X: `XCOPY C:\* X:\ /H/O/T/S/E/R/V`
> 6. Start LVM
> 7. in LVM, hide the current boot vol (C:)
> 8. Change the X: volume's letter to C:
> 9. Reboot and test C:
> (it should be a clone of the other)

> Test the upgrade against this "new" C:
> to restore the old C: (if it doesn't work from bootmanager anyway)
> 1. Start LVM
> 2. hide/change letter of the new C:
> 3. assign C: to the old C: volume again.
> 4. Save and close LVM
> 5. Reboot.

June 14, 2001 - If you are getting a "SYS2070 The system could not demand load the application's segment. PMBIDI PMWIN.1500 is in error". Al Savage posted the following which may help in comp.os.os2.apps if you are running WatchCat on your system:

> A google search turned up at least three other threads on this topic (PMWIN.1500 and NS 4.61, going back to Feb-2000). This fragment sounds promising:

> "IBM TECH advised me that when I had this problem, it was because the Watchcat DLL's were in front of the Netscape DLL's in the Libpath statement of config.sys. swapping them around totally fixed it. YMMV"

> Hmmm. The first few items in my `LIBPATH` are: `LIBPATH=E:\IBMLAN\NETLIB;E:\MUGLIB\DLL;.;D:\NS4\PROGRAM;...` Make sure that you don't have some odd app's dir ahead of Netscape's dir, in your LIBPATH? And Lorne had this to say: "The program you ran is calling some routine in PMBIDI.DLL that is attempting to load a routine in PMWIN.DLL.

> According to the information displayed by EXEHDR the ordinal entry point PMWIN.1500 is called WINSETLANGINFO and it is forwarded to PMMERGE.3500. The error occurs if the routine is not present in PMMERGE.DLL. Perhaps the version of PMMERGE you are running got back levelled somehow and is missing the routine. (The one on my machine has it, AFAICT)."

June 18, 2001 - Our last tip is from Mark Dodel (that's me :-):

> Whenever I have a hung app and use the focus change feature of Warp to regain control (repeated `[CTL]-[Esc]` alternating with `[Alt]-[Tab]`, I end up with the following "Swith To" window which only offers the option to hit `[Enter]` to end the application. Frequently though I don't want to end the application. By experimentation I discovered that hitting the `[Esc]` key will close the "Switch To" window and not close the application.

Features
editor@os2voice.org
[Previous Page ] [ Index] [Next Page ]
VOICE Home Page: http://www.os2voice.org