OS/2 Hints and Tips

Current Tips on this page!

I will continue to add any helpful hints and tips as I come across them. In the mean time, below are a few links to Sites that have various tips for OS/2.

I feel that I get the best help from the various mailing lists dedicated to OS/2.
You can find information on how to subscribe to many of these on the V.O.I.C.E. web site and on the OS/2 Super Site.

If anyone has any hints they'd like to add, just e-mail me.

Printing to a Network printer attached to an OS/2 machine from WinXX

This is something that gave me a few fits a while back, and I recently saw someone else on a mailing list have the same problem, so I thought I would add the solution.

When you connect from Window 95/98 (and possibly Windows NT) to a Network Printer on an OS/2 machine, it needs to connect to the Physical Name of the printer, not the Network Share name. However, when you browse resources from Windows, it will only see the Network Share name.

In other words, if you had a printer on your OS/2 box with a physical name of "Printer" and then when you Shared the resource you set the Network Share name to "Epson", Windows would see the resource as Epson and let you connect to it, but it would state that the printer is off-line and would not allow you to print. The easiest solution is to make sure the Physical name and Network Share name or your printer are the same.

Running the USRobotics Sportster 56K Modem with Standard V.42 bis Compression

This hint was sent to me from Ricky L. Bindhamer.

For those trying to run a USRobotics Sportster 56K Modem with Standard V.42 bis Compression, I have found that If you are using IBM Dial up for TCP/IP to dial up other Servers. the correct initialization string according to IBM is; AT&F&D2&C1X4V1Q0S7=70&M4&B1&H1&R2 Also on the Dialer's Add/Modify Entries; Connect Info page of the Dialer set up, DO NOT "Check" the VJ Compression Box, (Yes I KNOW that the Help says "you may experiance problems" if it is not selected.) V.42 bis Compression is superior to VJ (Van Jacobson) Compression. You will be will frankly be astonished at the improved speed that most Web Pages are loaded. (As a comparison, select a few bookmarks Using VJ, Then Hang-up, Uncheck VJ, Redial, and select the same bookmarks.)

I Hope this "Hint" will help other OS/2er's. I only stumbled accross it after a year and half of frustrating web - surfing. (It does not appear to noticably change 'download to harddrive' speeds) I am running OS/2 Warp 4 (Merlin) with a USRobotics Sportster 56K Voice/Faxmodem.

Thanks Ricky!

Setting up RealAudio 3.0 with OS/2 and Netscape/2

Well, I did it. I finally got RealAudio working on my OS/2 system. What motivated me was that I found this really great Internet Radio Station, but we'll get to that later.

The first thing to do is review the other sites that talk about setting up Plug-ins and Helper Apps with Netscape. A couple URL's to follow are:
Netscape Navigator for OS/2 Warp Unofficial Home Page and Alex Chapman's Netscape/2 plug-ins : hints and tips

After reading through what they have to say, you should be ready to Install RealAudio. I won't rehash what's said on these pages, but I will add a couple of comments from my experiences.

First, make sure you have Sound support setup in WinOS/2. Also, make sure that you have the Winsock support so that you can run the 16 bit Windows version of Navigator.

Install Navigator for Windows. Dan Libby from Netscape suggests that you do this to install Windows Plug-ins. Next, install RealAudio 3.0. If you got to the RealAudio page, and select the current version, then OS/2 for Operating System, you will be given this version to Download.

The RealAudio installation found both my Windows and OS/2 versions of Navigator and setup up the Plug-in support for them, however, some report that you must manually edit the file winplug.reg in your OS/2 Netscape directory and add the missing Windows 3.1 plugin. For example:

1 E:\NETSCAPE\Plugins\Npra16.dll

Also, I have my RealAudio and Netscape for Windows installed on a different partition than Netscape for OS/2. Some people reported problems possibly caused by this, but I haven't had any.

Also, I had to disable the 16 bit sound in the Advanced settings of the RealAudio player. I should note that I have the Soundblaster 16 sound card.

After you have this working, go to a RealAudio site and enjoy. One of my favorites, is Hard Radio, an Internet only Hard Rock radio station. You can also check out Audio Net, to find some other Real Audio sites.

Installing OS/2 4.0 and Windows 95 on one system.

First, partition your hard drives and install Boot manager.
Install Boot Manager on the start of the first Hard drive.
Next, decide how you would like to partition you hard drive(s).
One setup that I did has two 2.7 gig hard drives.
The first has Win95 (1g), then I have 5 Linux partitions, then a 700mg FAT partition.
On the second drive I created a 2 gig HPFS partition. Then the rest as FAT partition.
It looks something like this:
After you have your hard drives partitioned and Boot Manager installed, then you can install OS/2.
Next, Install Windows 95.
Win95 disables Boot Manager for some odd reason. After the installation is finished, you can either use Win95's fdisk, or use the OS/2 boot disk to go to the command prompt and use fdisk to set the Boot Manager as startable.
Then you should be able to boot into both OS/2 and Windows 95.

I have since reorganized my drives. I now have the second drive dedicated to one giant HPFS partition.
All the rest of the partitions have been moved over to the first drive, keeping the same drive letters. I've wiped out the Linux partitions and purchased another box for Linux, since I never seemed to boot out of OS/2.

I haven't booted into Win95 on that box for almost a year.

There were a number of people on comp.os.os2.setup.misc newsgroup who help me on this.