Heath's Tips- by Heath Phillippi

Welcome back. In celebration of OS/2 e-Zine! 's new column, "Answers from e-Zine!, this month's column is a hodgepodge of various tips and questions readers have sent me over the past few months. Hopefully we will answer some common nagging questions that are out there.

Q & A

First off, some questions and answers...

Question 1:

What do I have to do to Warp to get Netscape (or any other Winsock app) to run?

Answer:

First off, see http://www.xs4all.nl/~ronvwier/OS2/ and http://www.wizard.net/~sissors. They are very good sites for getting started. You can also get some necessary file updates installed for you by using the "Retrieve Software Updates" icon included with Warp.

My additional suggestions are:

  1. Copy \tcpip\etc\*.* to \tcpip\dos\etc and rename the file resolv.org to just resolv.
  2. Do a search of your hard drive and make sure there is only one winsock.dll on the entire thing. Make sure this is the OS/2 one, not a Windows version. Delete all others and make sure the good one is in your path.

Question 2:

How do I get Web Explorer to erase it's temp files?

Answer:

Change the settings of the program object you run WebEx with to point to EXPLORE.EXE and not LINKUP.EXE. WebEx should now clean up after itself.

Question 3:

After I dial my ISP once and hang up I have to reboot to dial again. How can I fix this?

Answer:

Add the line SET HOSTNAME=UNKNOWN (you can put anything in the place of UNKNOWN). This is a known bug with the dialer that hopefully will be addressed in the next release.

Tips

The following are a few of the better tips I have received in the past months. Many thanks to all the readers who sent tips (even if I didn't have the space to include them this month).

Tip 1:

Here's something your readers may be able to use. I've certainly been saved by it several times.

A lot of folks like to "experiment" a lot with OS/2, screwing around and changing hardware, etc. I have Boot Manager installed, and the operating system itself is contained on a fairly small partition. That small partition contains only Warp itself, drivers, and TCP/IP stuff. I have another hard drive, and I have found that using the BACKUP command to make an archive of my entire C: partition has gotten me out of a jam many times. The archive file is huge, but for someone who has the disk space to spare, this can be a life saver.

- Jerry Bookter

Comment:

I also install another working copy of Warp to a spare partition to play with. Boot Manager allows you to boot to it very easily, and this setup allows you to just delete everything if the need arises.

Tip 2:

Here are three quick tips that took me quite some time to figure out--but all's well that ends well.
  1. If you are having trouble getting OS/2 installation to work with your hard/floppy disk (the error message is not specific about which one is causing the problem) try the following:
    1. In CONFIG.SYS in the BASEDEV=IBM1S506.ADD add the parameters /A:0 /I this causes IBM1S506.ADD to ignore the primary adapter in your system and allows the driver IBMINT13.I13 to control the hard disk(s)--I needed this for a Buslogic3 IDE Cache Card controller (PCI Bus version but I presume it applies to all bus's).
    2. If you still get the message about not being able to control hard/floppy disks check out your floppy disk drive. They rarely go wrong but if your 3 1/2" drive is connected as drive B: and you use the system Chipset Setup to swap the floppy drives (so that your 3 1/2" drive appears to be A:) then OS/2 is going to give you the above message. I got around this by disconnecting the 5 1/4" drive temporarily for the installation. Afterwards I reconnected and used the "Swap Floppy" option with no problems.
    If you are wondering why I my system is set up like this--well, the floppy cable isn't long enough to stretch, twist and turn in the right order to reach the drives.
  2. If you connect an IDE CD-ROM to the EIDE port on the motherboard and you get what appears to be random read errors (particularly on a CD-ROM installation) then check with the CD-ROM manufacturer to see whether their hardware will work attached to an EIDE port (note the first "E" in EIDE). I used a Hitachi CDR-7730 and this needed a special driver and some kind of BIOS extension to avoid the dreaded SYS3175 - File Not Found.
  3. When booting off a floppy disk and using a Boot Manager setup in which OS/2 is not the default choice you need to do a hard disk boot first and select OS/2 (even if it causes a crash) so that the non OS/2 partition is hidden when you do the floppy boot.
By the way IBM OS/2 Tech Support in Singapore is the best support I have ever had to use anywhere--very patient and forgiving of my dumb questions--if you read this guys, thanks.
- Paul Muir

Well, that's it for this month. If you have any questions you want answered mail the editor or myself. Also, if there are any topics you feel should be covered in greater length, let me know. Thanks again for reading.
Heath Phillippi is currently a Customer Engineer for AmeriData, Inc. in Appleton Wisconsin. He is the OS/2 Warp Champion for the OS/2 BESTeam, as well as a proud member of Team OS/2.

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