OS/2 eZine - The Best OS/2 Reading Anywhere!

September 16, 2002

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From The Editor

Help! We're Shrinking

Did you notice this month's issue is pretty skinny? Want to help us fill these pages and maybe even make a name for yourself among your fellow OS/2 users? It isn't difficult, and doesn't take a lot of time either. If you're working on a cool OS/2 project that you think the readership of the OS/2 eZine would find interesting, we're looking for one-off articles as well as short series and monthly columns to fill the pages of the OS/2 eZine. Trying some cool new software? How about writing a short review? It doesn't take much time (here's how (http://www.os2ezine.com/pressroom.html)) and you can win some great prizes! If you have any questions, let me know by email .

Mozilla 1.1 and 1.2 for OS/2

I haven't tried these myself yet (being VERY happy with 1.0), but Mozilla 1.1 and 1.2a for OS/2 are now available for download (http://www.mozilla.org/releases/).

From the release notes, Version 1.2a adds:

Type Ahead Find is a new feature that allows quick navigation when you type a succession of characters in the browser, matching the text in one or more links on the page. To give it a spin just go to a web page, start typing and hit enter to load the selected link. You can also use it to search for any text on the page by typing / before your search text. Read the full Type Ahead Find documentation to learn about all of its features, prefs and future plans. The feature is not yet working on Mac but we expect to have that fixed by 1.2beta.
Selection of text in message headers has been partially implemented.
Drag and drop from the message search results window is new.
One of the most frequently reported bugs, "long strings in mail or news header cause scroll bars and attachment window to disappear, making message unreadable" has been fixed. (Bug 91662)
Preliminary XML prettyprinting, similar to IEs default-view for XML is now available. In this release the feature does not work in installer-builds you need to get a .zip distribution. However since the feature for now affects the DOM for unstyled XML-pages it is disabled by default. To enable it, add user_pref("layout.xml.prettyprint", true); to your user.js. (Bug 64945)
Text zoom now applies to framed pages.
Keyboard access is greatly improved including additional accesskeys for menus, other ui elements and page elements.

Version 1.1 adds:

Improved application and layout performance
Improved stability
Improved Web site compatibility
Improved CSS, DOM and HTML standards support
Distinct window icons for the different Mozilla applications (artwork contributed by Grayrest).
Browser tabs now close left to right (they used to close right to left).
The tab bar now has a button for creating new tabs.
All Search entry points now use your default search engine.
Download Manager has been enabled as the default download view (with many improvements)
Autocomplete in the location bar has more intelligent completion.
File extensions more accurately handled in downloads and we save the correct files when saving complete Web pages
Drag and drop support has been greatly improved.
View selection source: Context clicking on a selection now lets you view the HTML source for the selected area.
Page info displays more page info with improved General and Media tab content.
Better Bi-Di Arabic and Hebrew support including improved layout of Arabic pages on Linux and other platforms without their own Arabic shaping support.
We have new layout performance enhancements targeted at DHTML.
Mozilla now has support for the display of XBM images.
Image and plug-in blocking for Mail & News
Mozilla allows you to view HTML mail messages as plain text.
You can now quote the current message in a Mail compose window with Quote Original under the options menu.
The JavaScript Debugger has gone through a major development cycle. It now sports a palette of nine views which can be rearranged within the main window or docked in separate floating windows. It is also possible to create user-defined views and commands directly with JavaScript. More details are available in the FAQ, newsgroup, or IRC channel.
Chatzilla has improved tab completion and can now join channels with Japanese names.

Opera 5.12 Released

Opera Software released Opera 5.12 for OS/2 (http://www.opera.com/os2) after extensive beta testing. According to the developers, stability issues from the previous versions have been fixed and running of Win32 plugins has been improved. This is the first OS/2 release that can be registered in order to remove the banner ads.

Scitech Display Doctor Special Edition V10 & Scitech SNAP!

If you're an eComStation (http://www.ecomstation.com) or Software Choice (http://www7.software.ibm.com/2bcprod.nsf/bf7e05615440e8f086256b6c005eac99/7978bef08284174e87256a23006fc1a3?OpenDocument) user, you'll probably be interested in the latest and greatest video drivers. Scitech also announced that Scitech SNAP! Graphics version 2.0 (http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/enterprise/snap_os2_content.html) is now available. This is the replacement for Scitech Display Doctor Pro and contains a number of interesting new features such as multi-head support and zooming.

Scitech also announced that they will be releasing their SNAP! display driver technology under a dual commercial or GPL license. While the drivers themselves will not be open sourced due to previous NDA agreements, examples will be provided for would-be driver writers.

Lots of Driver Updates

IBM released updated USB Drivers (http://www7.software.ibm.com/2bcprod.nsf/bf7e05615440e8f086256b6c005eac99/eda0b842e1e56c1e86256c170050c84b?OpenDocument) this month for USB devices that meet the USB 1.0 OHCI, USB 1.1 UHCI, or USB 2.0 EHCI specifications.

IBM also released Device Driver Fixpack 3 (http://ps.boulder.ibm.com/pbin-usa-ps/getobj.pl?/pdocs-usa/softupd.html#warpdd) for Software Choice subscribers.

The Printerpak (http://www7.software.ibm.com/2bcprod.nsf/WebCatMod?OpenView&Start=1&Count=300&ExpandView) (OMNI, laserjet, postscript, plotters) has also been updated to version 30.771. The updated drivers support about 25 new printers from Canon, Oki, HP, Lexmark and Xerox.

Chris Wohlgemuth has released USB-Basic (Ohci and Uhci) and a USBMSD driver written from the Device Driver sources. CWUSBMSD.ADD (http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/h-search?key=cw-usbmsd-v1_1.zip) is a enhanced USB mass storage driver which supports more (or other) devices than the IBM version. Support for READ 10 commands and better disk geometry handling. Can force external hard disks to appear as removable devices. Tested devices include: Archos Jukebox Recorder20, EasyDisk Memory Stick, Siemens MP3-Player USB, Iomega Zip100 USB, Skymaster DCD 130 Digital Camera.

Updated UPS Monitor from Lone Peak Automation

New updates (http://home.att.net/~ASchw/upsmonitor.html) for the UPS Monitor series of programs are now available.

UPS Monitor is a utility program to monitor and log power line and battery status for a large number of Uninterruptible Power Sources (UPS). It's main function is to shut down OS/2 or eComStation safely by time or low battery signal during prolonged power outages.

Maul Desktop Publisher 2.20

Maul Publisher (http://www.manglais.com/) version 2.20 has been released. Maul Publisher is "the world's first professional desktop publisher for OS/2 Warp." For more information, here's an OS/2 eZine review (http://www.os2ezine.com/20020216/page_5.html) of a previous release.

Webmail/2 Version 12

Webmail/2 (http://www.michelinakis.gr/Dimitris/webmail/index.html) a cool web-based front end to your favourite mail server has been updated to version 12. I've installed it here, and it apparently has a long list of improvements, many of which were suggested by Webmail users, but I haven't noticed any changes myself yet.

Warpstock is getting Closer

Four new presentations have been added to the Warpstock 2002 schedule:

Migrating from NetBios to TCPbeui, by Oliver Mark.
OS/2 Device Driver Programming - What You Don't Find In The Books, by Daniela Engert.
Remote-booting eComStation from eComStation, by Micho Durdevich.
Remote-booting Windows And Linux from eComStation, by Micho Durdevich.

Also note this important scheduling change as well:

Java 2 Standard Edition, release 1.4 by Greg Shaw. Find out how this very important announcement is going to affect you.

To register, go to their online store (http://www.bamart.com/warpstockinc.html).

Warpstock Europe

You might also want to visit Warpstock Europe: Nov 8-10, 2002 in Arnhem, The Netherlands. You can register online (http://warpstock.os2.org/en/registration) or get more information at http://warpstock.os2.org/en

IBM's 4th Quarter Announcement

IBM has announced (http://www-3.ibm.com/software/os/warp/swchoice/) that they intend to deliver the following in 4th quarter 2002:

An updated version of the IBM Web Browser for OS/2.
Support for Web Start Java application deployment technology .
An XML Parser for Java applications on OS/2.

Privoxy 3

Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/) is a web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities based on Internet Junkbuster (tm) for protecting privacy, filtering web page content, managing cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups and other Internet junk. Privoxy has a very flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes. Privoxy has application for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks.

Privoxy is known to run on Windows (95, 98, ME, 2000, XP), Linux (RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Conectiva, Gentoo), Mac OSX, OS/2, AmigaOS, BeOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, and many more flavors of Unix. If you want to give it a try, you can download it (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=11118).

Tips for Windows 2000 Users

If you have Windows 2000 clients on your OS/2 network, you should download Service Pack 3 (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/servicepacks/sp3/default.asp) for two fixes related to OS/2.

The first fix is "Windows 2000 Clients Use Multiple Connections When Mapping Drives to a Single Server", see this page (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q302099) for more information.

The second fix is "Stop 0x00000050 Error Message During Copy from OS/2 Clients" see this page (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q281546) for more information.

New FAT32 Driver Followup

I got the following note from Lars Erdmann as a followup to last month's mention of the new FAT32 driver.

Well, one of the problems fixed was that there was a bug in DosFindFirst/DosFindNext with ulInfoLevel = FIL_QUERYEASFROMLIST. This is supposed to return the values of the EA's that were requested. There was a bug in that if a file does not have the EA's requested or it does not have any EA's at all, the names of the EA's requested still have to be returned. Instead the IFS returned basically nothing (the description for DosFindFirst/DosFindNext is admittantly rather obscure.)

Since this bug can have an effect in any software (that uses DosFindFirst/DosFindNext with ulInfoLevel = FIL_QUERYEASFROMLIST on a FAT32 drive) I strongly recommend people update to the version from Netlabs.

I stumbled over this error while using "Project Smarts" from VACPP Version 3.0. That tool obviously uses DosFindFirst/DosFindNext with ulInfoLevel = FIL_QUERYEASFROMLIST to determine the desktop directory. It starts from the very first hard drive partition. Since my first partition is FAT32, "Project Smarts" would trap on that one with the effect of a complete WPS hang.

Don't know what else has been fixed, though.

This Issue

Mike Engle looks at Xact, a scientific graphing application. Bas Heijermans takes a look at Web/2, Jason Stefanovich tells us how to get to Warpstock on the cheap, and James Cannon brings us some nice desktop art.

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The OS/2 eZine is committed to serving the OS/2 and eCS community by providing accurate, useful, and timely information every month. We will deliver user-oriented hardware and software reviews, thoughtful editorial comment, and 'how-to' articles which will include useful tips for both the novice and the experienced OS/2 user.

Robert Basler is the president of Aurora Systems, Inc. (http://www.aurora-systems.com) and has been a dedicated OS/2 user since he tired of rebooting Windows 3.1 twenty times a day. He spends what free time he can manage travelling the world. Photo was taken at Franz Josef glacier, New Zealand.

This article is courtesy of www.os2ezine.com. You can view it online at http://www.os2ezine.com/20020916/page_1.html.