[Please note: this is a text only version of the on-line magazine, OS/2 e-Zine!.  OS/2 e-Zine! is a graphical, WWW OS/2 publication and, if possible, should be viewed in its HTML format available on-line at http://www.os2ezine.com/ or zipped for off-line reading.  Some graphically oriented articles have been removed from this document.]

OS/2 e-Zine!		November 16, 1998	volume 3, number 18
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Copyright 1998		Falcon Networking	ISSN 1203-5696

	"Over Three Quarters of a Million Satisfied Visitors!"


OPINIONS:

  Chris Wenham 
  Chris Wright 
  Warpstock: Looking Back 

REVIEWS:

Gammatech Vs. Graham

  The Utility War - Chris Wenham
  Hard Drive Optimization - Sam Henwrich
  Disaster Recovery - Chris Wenham
  System Diagnosis - Sam Henwrich
  Making Life Easier - Chris Wenham
  Final Conclusions - Chris Wenham

  Homepage Publisher 2.1 - Christopher B. Wright
  First Looks: Warpzilla NGLayout .001 - Christopher B. Wright

ARTICLES:

  Rexx Newbies, Part IV - Chris Wenham
  The fourth part of our series that teaches Rexx to absolute beginners. This week the concept of looping is introduced, and how to automate repetitive jobs


ADMINISTRIVIA:

* How to Subscribe to OS/2 e-Zine! for FREE.
* How YOU can Sponsor OS/2 e-Zine!
* The Sponsors that Make this Issue Possible


Copyright 1998   -   Falcon Networking
ISSN 1203-5696

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Chris Wenham

The Unexpected Side Effects Of Things

In most bargain-bin Golden Oldies CD collections you'll find a little number called Johnny B. Goode, a swinging piece that modern kids might remember from the movie Back To The Future. It was while listening to this tune that I started thinking about how many things we take for granted have quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, started revolutions, made profound statements, and added considerably more to the world and its culture than the humble engineer, writer or composer ever intended to come of it.

Think about OS/2 beyond its obvious purpose as an operating system. Counting off on your fingers, OS/2's purpose in this world has come to include representing choice, emphasizing reliability over hype, and challenging the assumptions of a mainstream world. It's what you get for your PC when you don't want Windows, it's quietly running in a back room while paint and gloss get applied to the showroom models, or it's the answer that gets the funny look from the salesperson who, up until that point, was in a pushbutton world that had every decision already made for him. What would any programmer have thought if they'd been told in advance that some of OS/2's most important functions would never even need a working installation?

The meaning of OS/2's life is about to change now, reaching beyond the classic role of underdog and alternative and into roles that never even existed a year ago.

Poster Child for an adopted platform

It's a tragedy you could make a movie out of: Father raises child. Father enrolls child in local baseball little-league. Father becomes coach of local baseball little-league and champions a kid with great potential to hit the big time - but it's not his child that he's championing. This is the story of OS/2's life in a nutshell, but from this point onward it's not the father - IBM - who'll be writing the next chapters. It's us, the OS/2 user community.

(http://www.warpstock.org/) Warpstock. Warpzilla. (http://www.os2ss.com/win32-os2/) Win32-OS/2. Three examples mark a trend, so the pundits say. Well, have three more: (http://www.netlabs.org/) OS/2 Netlabs. (http://www.jmast.se/21warp/index.htm) 21 Warp. (http://www.os2ezine.com/v3n17/stepone.htm) OS2Support.Org.

I guess the users want the emotionally orphaned kid to win the World Series after all, or at least play in the pro-league. One very important thing we all must do is make noise. Start churning it out again like Team OS/2 did in the old days, get attention, write letters, and make OS/2 the poster child for what grassroots can really do. It's important because it not only affects OS/2, it affects every  product in existence. Like the Molly Maguires of the computer age, the union we build will be copied by thousands more until it's people driving the industry, not majority stock holders.

A hybrid of Free and Commercial software

Warpzilla isn't just the only example of why OS/2 users should see fit to embrace open-source or free software. If you want to scan today in OS/2, you'll probably be grateful for the OS/2 port of SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy), an open-source product ported to OS/2. The OS/2 Roadrunner cable-modem login client (or at least the one for my area) is a port of an open source Linux program. So is GIMP, a Photoshop-like paint program.

OS/2 could possibly become one of the best examples of how both free (open source) software can coexist with proprietary or commercial software. There are benefits to both and there are the facts of having to live with both. So, lets turn OS/2 into a showcase platform where the two worlds come together. Windows is too driven by commercial software, Linux is just the opposite, it's time for us to define the middle ground again.

A teacher in the art of survival and longevity

And OS/2 could enter the textbooks again in another role: As a teacher to movements, platforms and communities about the art of survival. It's been 11 years, it's been pronounced dead by a hundred quacks, perhaps someone at Harvard Business School can tell us why... or perhaps we already know.

Personally, my favorite side-effect purpose of OS/2 is the one of challenging assumptions. Every now and then someone will send me a program in an e-mail attachment or other mechanism and a few minutes later, before I have a chance to respond, will say "Well? What do you think of it?" I experience unnatural pleasure in responding: "I don't." and waiting for them to trouble-shoot the wrong problem. I don't know why I'm not the least bit disappointed that I can't run the program. I think maybe, for me, that's not the important part at all. I like popping little bubbles of arrogant assumption.

Oh, and as for Johnny B. Goode, it was the song that got Rock 'n Roll started. That's one of the little jokes Spielberg was trying to milk in his movie. And just one of those things that did far far more than it was originally created to do.

If you know of what OS/2 does or has done besides just run programs and talk to hard drives, then talk about it in our (http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/rant/Nov16-1998.html) interactive forum with me and other readers.

 
(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

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***********************************

Chris Wright

Open What?

Should OS/2 become a GPL'd operating system? This is a question I've heard on and off for quite some time now. It's been mentioned, occasionally, within the electronic pages of OS/2 e-Zine! It was discussed among some of us at Warpstock. It's been talked pretty much to death on Usenet in the comp.os.os2.* groups, and it's become a mantra for a lot of people who are so disgusted with the way the IBM Pointy-Haired Bosses have manhandled OS/2 that they'd rather IBM weren't associated with it any more.

The idea of an open-sourced OS/2 is a seductive one. I admire the intent, idea and ideology behind the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Public License. I believe that free software must be the future if we are ever to have a society where all people can use computers, instead of the predominantly rich and upper-middle-class professionals who use them now. Open source is the only way I can think of to successfully combat the emergence of a technocracy, an elite group of technologically savvy people who have a disproportionate amount of power in the day to day workings of society.

But OS/2? Open source? Would IBM swing that way? I don't think so. While I can think of a few arguments why IBM would benefit from an open source OS/2, I don't see anyone convincing them. The Pointy-Haired Bosses at IBM -- not the developers or project managers, mind you, but the office sitting, Perrier-swilling suits who are too high up the corporate ladder to fire any fewer than 4,000 people at a time -- don't or won't understand why open source is good for the computer business, and will simply assume that relinquishing your exclusive rights on developing something you used to own means not making any money.

There are a lot of good people at IBM. There are a lot of people at IBM who have developed for OS/2 for a long time, who like OS/2, and who want to see it be more than what it is right now. Most of these people have actually worked on it at one time or another. There are also a lot of people who have only seen the word "OS/2" on a piece of paper, don't know it from 10,000,000 other IBM projects, and are simply interested in pursuing strategies that will keep IBM in the black.

I can't really blame them for this. IBM is not out to save the world, after all, they're out to make money. This is a very straightforward though somewhat mercenary and less-than-idealistic position to take, and while I'd rather they be something else -- an idealistic corporation dedicated to bettering the world, ending war and hunger, and inventing a form of muzak that doesn't drive me into a bloodthirsty rage in dental offices -- I can understand that they are, after all, interested in making money and making their stockholder's happy.

IBM SUIT: We've decided to take OS/2, a very stable and technologically advanced operating system, and release it's source code over the internet so that people will be able to use it for free.

STOCKHOLDER: You did WHAT?

(Sound of breaking glass as IBM Suit is thrown out of the fire window on the 36th floor).

I don't think IBM would go for it. I'm not opposed to trying, but I really don't know how to go about doing this.

Who do you talk to when you're trying to go about this?

CHRIS WRIGHT: Hello, I'd like to talk to Lou Gerstner, please.

IBM SUIT: Why?

CHRIS WRIGHT: I'd like to talk to him about releasing the OS/2 source code under the GNU Public License.

IBM SUIT: I don't think so. His office is on the 50th floor, and his desk is right next to the fire window.

Corporate culture being what it is, I don't think the suits are quite ready to delve into the world of open source just yet. I have heard rumors that IBM is planning to release a new version of UNIX -- apparently, AIX wasn't proprietary enough for their tastes -- but I've never heard of them even considering releasing a Linux distribution. That would be an interesting conversation to listen in on:

IBM PROGRAM MANAGER: We'd like to distribute a version of Linux.

IBM SUIT: What's that? Is it Java?

IBM PROGRAM MANAGER: No, it's an operating system similar to Unix that is distributed under the GNU Public License. It's an open source product that...

(Sound of breaking glass as the IBM Suit throws himself through the fire window on the 40th floor).

I know I'm veering into silliness. My point is, Most companies who develop software look at the concept behind open source and say "we'll never make any money off of this" and will shy away from it. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant; it's a bias that needs to be overcome before anyone will consider taking any steps at all towards open source development. Netscape is the only big company I can think of that has been so bold as to consider it, and they've been getting bashed by a) people in the mainstream industry who think they've all gone insane, and b) people in the open source/free software movement who think they haven't gone far enough.

To veer back onto the point of this column, I don't see an open source OS/2 any time in the near future. I'd like to see, I'd be happy to work towards seeing it, but I don't think it will happen.

For the moment, I continue to use a proprietary operating system in a manner so brazen and shameless that Richard Stallman himself would surely be spinning in his grave; were it not for the fact that he is still, as far as I know, alive and in perfect health. Strangely, I feel remarkably little guilt over this. I love using OS/2; I'm entranced and amazed at its stability, its reliability, and the power of the Workplace Shell. I find it easier to use than Linux, and more consistent than Windows NT. I have installed and uninstalled many operating systems on my machine -- Windows 95, Windows NT, Linux, and BeOS -- but there has always been an OS/2 partition on my machine, except for the time when Windows NT "helpfully" formatted over it and rendered my machine inoperable for three days (but that's another story for another time.)

Open source OS/2 continues to be little more than conversation to fill in the gaps of time between flame wars on Usenet. Whether or not it can ever become anything more than that remains to be seen -- if you have any ideas, please feel free to post them in our (http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/wright/Nov16-1998.html) interactive forum.

 
(wrightc@dtcweb.com) Christopher B. Wright is a technical writer in the Richmond, VA area, and has been using OS/2 Warp since January 95.  He is also a member of Team OS/2.

***********************************

Warpstock: Looking Back		-Pete Grubbs

Summary: Want to see the future of computing? Look in the mirror.

Bright Lights, Big City

I live on a dirt road in rural Pennsylvania. Honestly. The chunk of pavement closest to my house is a tertiary road about a half mile west of my gravel driveway. It's hicksville. Redneck country. And while I've been in city traffic a bunch of times, I always experience some small sense of culture shock when I'm back in it, so my limo ride from O'hare to the Wyndham was doubly interesting. (We don't see that many stretch limos out here in the sticks, you know. We certainly don't ride around in them much.)

Watching all that traffic pile up, ebb and flow, made me think about the ubiquity of the automobile in America. They're everywhere and our society would pretty much grind to a halt if they suddenly disappeared. In fact, we'd be hard-pressed to imagine life without the automobile, but there was a time, less than a century ago, when the internal combustion engine and the assembly line were just a gleam in Henry Ford's eye. The fact is, the automobile didn't burst onto the scene full-fledged and functional. It took time for manufacturers to sell sufficient numbers to create the kind of demand that would lead to roads and bridges which were friendly to cars as well as horses. It took even longer to build highways and longer still for a national system of highways to link the entire nation. While those years were passing, the automobile became less of the novelty that it had been at its birth and more of the transportation tool that we've come to take for granted. It became more standardized, more reliable, and this makes sense if you think about it from a user-oriented perspective.

When we get new toys, we will often forgive them if they don't work right the first time, every time, just because their uncertainty is part of their charm. If you've got a car to go to church to on a Sunday morning, but a horse & buggy ready to rush your spouse to the doctor on a rainy Monday night, then you don't mind if the car doesn't always run the way you expect it to. But when the car becomes your only means of transportation, it had better be reliable. The first time you get into it and it doesn't start when you desperately need to get somewhere, you'll begin making plans to replace it.

So, too, with computers.

As I've remarked here before, we haven't always had the Personal Computer. We haven't always had the Internet or the World Wide Web. We haven't spent fifty or sixty years standardizing our business infrastructure, our communications, our personal work habits, our lives around these beige boxes. It seems as if we've been doing it forever because of the rate of change in the computing field.

As a college sophomore in '78, I took an introductory computer science class, learned how to use a card punch machine (no, I don't remember anymore) and wrote a couple of simple bookkeeping programs in BASIC. Like most of the computing world, I logged into our campus mainframe and did all of my work from a terminal. Later that same year, I got my first look at a real PC, a TRS-80. (Did I hear someone snigger?) I remember sitting late into the night, manually loading a spaceship game, laboriously typing in line after line of code just to play something slightly more sophisticated than Pong. It was cool! If it didn't work right the first time, if my dyslexia got the better of me and I transposed a couple of characters, so what? I wasn't working. I wasn't writing a term paper or editorial on deadline. I wasn't sitting in front of tool. I was playing with a really neat toy and part of the challenge of the game, part of the fun, was just making it work.

From Toy to Tool

Fast forward twenty years and look at the change.

For better or worse, saying that most of my life is centered around my computer is pretty accurate. I correspond with my colleagues, friends and family, create course syllabuses, write reviews and editorials, balance my checkbook, track project expenses, research on the Web, deal with faxes and play games right here. While many of these tasks aren't critical, a number of them are. When I'm working on deadline I don't have time to duplicate work. I have to get it done the first time.

While a huge chunk of computer users have been dealing with these beasts for years, another chunk, one that I believe is significantly larger, has just got into the game. In their new book, Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft, authors Michael A. Cusumano and David B. Yoffie briefly describe the growth of the Internet:

"In 1993, the primary users of the Internet were scientists, professors, and engineers at university and government labs and a handful of corporations. By 1998, there were 130 million users from all walks of life. Web commerce also exploded from nothing in 1993 to $22 billion in 1998, with predictions of hundreds of billions of dollars early in the next century."

As we're all painfully aware, these are the people who have filled Microsoft's coffers with a gazillion bucks, for the most part unwittingly, because they didn't know that they had a choice. For the most part, they aren't business professionals, engineers, wonks or geeks. They don't know ROM from RAM from Virtual Memory from Virtual Reality and they don't care. They're happily playing their new versions of Quake, Diablo or Solitaire, mucking about with Office '97, surfing the Web for the first time with Internet Explorer, marveling at how neat everything is and wondering about those funny blue screens that lock up their machines so frequently.

It's as if they're out for a Sunday afternoon ride.

Do they get concerned if their machines hang? Most likely, but they're not getting too upset because they haven't built their daily routines around them. E-mail, web surfing, word processors and that lot haven't become important to these folks on a daily basis. Yet.

But as the months stretch out ahead, as the newest newbie suddenly discovers what it's like to suffer through a Blue Screen of Death at a crisis point the night before a business report or homework assignment is due, when the FAT file system claims another sensitive piece of data, these people will, like the rest of us, howl in frustration and start ratcheting up the demand for better, more reliable products.

They'll start making the same demands that we've been making for years.

Does that mean they'll abandon Microsoft and rush to IBM for copies of Warp? I wish. Unfortunately, unless something much more dramatic happens than anything we've seen to date, most of these poor unfortunates will address their demands to Redmond, but that isn't really the issue I'm looking at. The point I'd like to make is simply this: The concerns that we have right now, the concerns that we have had for years, are the concerns that the computing industry as a whole will have in the very near future. Since we remain with an operating system that has proven its dependability time and time again, the rest of the industry will eventually adopt our point of view, with regards to reliability, at least. As time passes and the fad that was computers becomes a necessary tool, users will become less forgiving, more demanding. The applications mantra that so many of the pundits have chanted will fade to a dimly remembered echo as millions of voices are raised to complain about another BSOD. After all, if every application in the world runs on your machine but you have to reboot 3 or 4 times every working day, if you have to re-create work that you've already lost twice, you're really not getting much done with all of those wonderful applications that work on your machine. You might actually be better off running a half dozen applications on a platform that doesn't crash all the time.

Are We The Only Veteran Users?

What's that I hear you ask? What about all of those Windows users who have been dealing with GPFs as long as we've been avoiding them? Since they've had lots of time to let the glamour wear off, why aren't they jumping on this bandwagon? Why haven't they raised these issues?

Frankly, some of them may never realize how badly they've been taken. Others got into a comfort zone with DOS and have pretty successfully resisted moving out of it. If Microsoft has its way, the Y2K bug will push them, kicking and screaming, into Redmond's Next Best Thing, but, who knows? Maybe they'll jump to Caldera or PC DOS 2000 and hang onto their old boxes. As for the rest, they are starting to make their voices heard. You can hear them on the Internet and in the trades: People within the industry, like ZDNet Editor Jesse Berst, raking MS over the coals for the unnecessary cost of Windows '98; ComputerWorld columnist William Ulrich questioning Microsoft's Y2K record; Avie Tevanian of Apple and Steven McGeady of Intel whose DOJ testimony is a damning description of the slow death innovation and reliability have suffered at Bill Gates' hands. And those OEMs who posted warnings to their customers to avoid upgrading from Win '95 because the new code was too flaky. People outside the industry, like Ralph Nader, who has a column in the November 9th ComputerWorld, again calling for a closer scrutiny into Microsoft's business practices which have resulted in a situation that victimizes "consumers who pay high prices to use mediocre and unreliable products." Slowly, but surely, these legions of Windows users are beginning to get to the same place that we stalwart OS/2 people have been for years. They're starting to hear the message: It's RELIABILITY, stupid.

If IBM, Microsoft, Sun, et. al., want to know where the computing world is heading, they need look no further. Poll the OS/2 users of the world, large and small. We've been riding the crest of the wave the whole time.
 
Pete Grubbs can be reached at (peg5@psu.edu) peg5@psu.edu

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The Hard Stuff		-Craig Miller

Summary: Craig Miller introduces you to our new regular hardware help column: The Hard Stuff

The only thing I love more then OS/2 is the hardware I run it on. I'm a speed freak when it comes to my hardware. If it's not the fastest thing out there I don't want it. To get the right answers though takes a long, long time, because everybody is saying their product is the fastest nowadays. Well, there can only be one "Fastest", so who? But for an OS/2 user, sometimes the fastest is not always the "best" because of drivers and such. Their is a balance, and that's why "The Hard Stuff" is now part of OS/2 e-Zine!

Now,  your probably wondering about my experience in  hardware and OS/2. I've been using OS/2 since ver 2.1 and have never looked back. I love the WPS and how flexible it is. The stability, of course, was a big factor. To me OS/2 is the only operating system, but I've also used Win95, 98, NT as well and just plain hate all three of them. At this time I'm running Warp 4 / Fixpack 6 and having zero problems.

At the time of writing my hardware looks like this:

* A Pentium 2  450Mz MXX
* Asus Motherboard
* 256 Megs of SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic RAM)
* 8 Meg Matrox G200 AGP Video card
* AWE 32 Sound Blaster ISA
* 8.4 gig Quatum fireball UDMA Hard drive
* 40 speed Asus CD ROM (UDMA)
* 17 inch Viewsonic (model)
* 3Com Network card (10 meg)
* U.S.Robitics 33.6 Fax Modem (Sportster)
* 8 gig Tape Drive by Conner with IDE Cable
* LS-120 Disk Drive
* Color QuickCam

I have been working with computer hardware for over seven years. I do it everyday because it's part of my job, so I get to see all the problems hardware can throw. This hands on approach is the only way for me, with reading only able to take me so far. I've done networking for several companies and have a considerable of knowledge on the Internet (I own an ISP).

I have dual boot enabled with Linux (Red Hat 5.0), Win98, and of course, Warp 4. I use Linux around .1 percent of the time, Win98 at 5 percent (for games), and the rest is OS/2. I have several printers networked including a Lexmark 5700 and HP office pro 500. I also have a color Quickcam the is in my LPT1 right now.

Most web sites that talk about hardware never talk about OS/2 and most sites that talk about OS/2 never talk about hardware. To me this is so odd. I've found there are three types of OS/2 users when it comes to everyday usage on their computers.

The Driver: This guy knows OS/2 and can move around fine. He can get on the Internet, type a paper out, and even fix a few nagging problems in the OS. He's heard of the hard drive, knows how much ram he has and the speed of the CPU. He's never or almost never opened up his own computer and pulled out the modem to upgrade it (or even clean it out.) This person is happy just running OS/2 and knowing the software.

The Mechanic: The person who can tear down a computer and then rebuild it in a half an hour. Doesn't think twice about rolling up his sleeves and upgrading his master hard drive. His knowledge in OS/2 is good but nowhere as close as the driver. The Mechanic still hasn't used templates for anything except make a new folder, and Rexx is something he heard about once in a newsgroup.

The Owner: The best of both worlds. The owner is not shy to crack the case of a computer to change out the video card, nor afraid of the config.sys. The owner is a rare person indeed because most people like to stay on one side of the fence. To make the most of OS/2 a person needs to be an owner, for if you just picked up a AGP Diamond Viper V330 and it has no driver support for OS/2, all the  knowledge on OS/2's WPS won't help jack.

There is a big problem with not knowing about the hardware you are about to purchase, especially as an OS/2 user. A prime example is when I got rid of two of my Western Digital four-gigabyte hard drives for one Quatom eight gig drive. Now this was around six months ago before IBM made a upgrade to the install disks to handle these large drives. I sat there for awhile and wondered why OS/2 couldn't see the whole drive (8 gigs). We'll the brain started producing smoke and decided to jump on the Internet and find out about the problem. That was a joke, nothing. Went to the news groups and posted my problem, nothing (too new of a problem, I guess). I finally broke down and decided to call IBM and ask them, I mean they made OS/2 right? I called and was placed to a woman who was quite nice but said if I wanted IBM to help me with an OS/2 problem it would cost $150.00 per question!

I think I blacked out for at least half an hour.

After I woke up, I got back into my chair and decided to call Quantum for help. A gentleman answered the phone after a minute or so of that elevator music. I told him I just bought a new hard drive from his company and was having some problem with OS/2 seeing the whole drive. I was happily surprised that he heard of the problem and showed me where to get the fix from. I think it took a whole twenty minutes to fix the problem. After I got OS/2 running fine in it's new home I jumped onto the net and posted it to the news groups, hoping to save someone some time and some heart ache.

This is when I really noticed that  OS/2 users did not have a  reliable, up-to-date site to jump to and find out about the newest hardware and how it would run on OS/2. To show people what the difference between AGP and PCI video cards, or the difference between socket 7 and socket 1, and more importantly what it meant to OS/2. I believe that OS/2 e-Zine! is the perfect spot for people to get up to date knowledge on the stuff the run under the hood.

With that last note, I would like to say I have a lot of work ahead of me. In two weeks I will be going over video cards. I will talk about PCI and AGP, and also review different cards for speed, drivers, and OS/2 compatibly as well as contacting each company to see where their future support of OS/2 lies. If you have any questions about hardware under OS/2, then I want to hear them. Send mail to craig@os2ezine.com.

 
Craig D. Miller can be reached at (craig@os2ezine.com) craig@os2ezine.com

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While You Were Out...		-OS/2 e-Zine! Staff

Summary: A summary of events that occurred in the past two weeks for those who may have missed it.

Aurora Enters Beta Testing

The next version of Warp Server, code-named Aurora went into formal beta testing last week with copies shipped to applicants worldwide. This first beta is expected to last until about December 18<SUP>th</SUP> (the software is set to expire on that date), we do not yet know if IBM plans additional test stages after this date. Among the more anticipated features of Aurora are the new Journaling Filesystem taken from AIX and Symetric Multiprocessing (to handle more than one CPU). OS/2 e-Zine! will have a full report on Aurora beta in our December 1<SUP>st</SUP> issue, including performance results on the new filesystem.

Star Office 5.0 released, free for personal/non-commercial use

Happened on: Friday, November 13th
Where:(http://www.stardivision.com/) Star Division web site

Unlucky for some, but not for OS/2 users. On Friday 13th, Star Division released the latest version of their office suite, Star Office 5.0 for OS/2. Not just released it, but released it for free. Free as long as you use it for personal or on-commercial use. As of now, you can head to Star Division's web site and register to download the suite, as long as you can stand grabbing about 75 megabytes of data, of course. At the moment the suite is packaged as one file, so you might want to make sure you're downloading it with a client that is capable of resuming an aborted transfer.

Included in this new version of the suite are the usual productivity tools (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation graphics and database), but also a personal information manager, e-mail client, newsgroup reader, web browser, drawing program with 3D and OpenGL support, a primitive paint program, plus quite a lot of other goodies.

To learn more about Star Office, read our (http://www.os2ezine.com/v3n16/so5fl.htm) First Looks at the German beta of the suite published one month ago. OS/2 e-Zine! will have an extensive report of the entire suite early in the future.

 
(feedback@os2ezine.com) The OS/2 e-Zine! Staff are made up of professionals involved in and around OS/2. Many have a long background as supporters of the platform, as programmers, consultants, and sometimes just users.

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OS/21st		-Sam Henwrich

Summary: How about a Christmas Turnkey? That's not a typo either, see how OS/2 and StarOffice can be bundled, and a memory hogging WPS unbundled on a dirt cheap PC sold to first-time computer owners.

The first thing I did after downloading the free personal edition of Star Office 5 for OS/2 was to make this little change in the config.sys and reboot:

SET RUNWORKPLACE=D:\Apps\Office50\soffice.exe

It was just an experiment, but you know what? It works like a charm. In fact I'm using it this way right now. But why?

If you've tried StarOffice you'll notice that the company that makes it, Star Division of Germany, has bent over backwards to re-create a typical modern object-oriented desktop within the office suite itself. Under normal circumstances it'd be a desktop running on top of a desktop. But why not just let it have its way? That is, let it go all the way and actually become the primary desktop? That's what the above change to the config.sys does. It loads StarOffice instead of the Workplace Shell.

But is it feasible? Let's look at what the Star Office desktop can do:

* It can launch programs outside of the Star Office suite and create icons for them on the main desktop. I've just used it to launch InJoy and connect to the internet, for example.
* It includes a file manager capable of everything the Workplace Shell can do.
* It can't keep track of tasks outside the Star Office suite, but the standard "Control Escape" window list isn't disabled either.

The idea is not for all of us existing Warp users to suddenly say "Duh, okay!" and switch to something that is still far inferior to the Workplace Shell, the idea is to build a dirt cheap PC (such as the sub-$600 computers that IBM is now selling), put Star Office 5 on it, and sell it to first-time computer users; the same kind of market that the iMac is targeted to. By unloading the Workplace Shell, you decrease memory requirements (and shave a little more off the bundle's price), increase the performance of the suite, and radically reduce problems of both confusion (imagine a novice trying to figure out which desktop he's supposed to use) and crashes.

For a great number of users, Star Office might be all they really need too. The suite is not just an office suite, it's a Megasuite. It has everything, even a kitchen sink. There are the standard productivity applications like the word processor and spreadsheet. It has a web browser that handles frames, java and javascript. It has an e-mail client. A newsreader, an address book, ToDo list and planner. If there is such an animal as a "typical computer user" then Star Office was tailor made for them. For everyone else, it's still running on top of an operating system that can run thousands of other native applications, Windows 3.1 programs, and maybe sometime in the future a lot of Windows 95 applications too.

Sweet arrangement.

While I'm not an economics or marketing major, this machine should be ideally priced below $1,000 including the monitor. Just how cheap it can get, and how much profit the company who puts these together can earn, would depend on whether these machines would qualify for StarOffice's free personal license or not. It's entirely fair to assume Star Division would consider it a commercial use, and thus require a paid license for each copy of the suite, even though the ultimate customers would use it on a personal or non-commercial basis.

What Could Be Better

Even though the web client in Star Office is very good, it isn't perfect. This could be solved in a heartbeat by including Communicator with the system as well. It could also be solved in the long run if Star Division used the Next Generation Layout engine of the open-source Mozilla project.

But what else is better? If you have some opinions on this idea, talk about it with me and other readers in our (http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/os21st/Nov16-1998.html) interactive forum.

(henwrich@yahoo.com) Sam Henwrich is a long-time OS/2 user in Endicott, NY

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The Utility War		-Chris Wenham

Summary: Gammatech Utilities and Graham Utilities are two well respected suites of programs that aid in preventative maintenance and disaster recovery for your OS/2 system. But while each have unique tools, there are several areas where features overlap. In this comparison review we test each suite's offerings to determine which is the best at what. 

The reigning king of utility suites for any platform has to be Norton Utilities, a package that millions have come to trust when it comes to disaster recovery and preventative maintenance. But Norton is for DOS and Windows, only handles FAT partitions, and messes up OS/2's delicate extended attributes. For us, we have to look to one of two lesser known suites: The Gammatech Utilities, and The Graham Utilities.

Both suites have large areas of functionality that's unique, especially Graham Utilities, but what will probably concern the buyer is where their features overlap. Because both tackle the jobs of preventative maintenance, performance tuning and disaster recovery differently. If an unfriendly operating system's install process messed up your partition tables, or that floppy disk with your girlfriend's phone number has a bad sector on it, what do you do? Which will save your bacon?

The View From 10,000 Feet

The two suites are visually quite different. Gammatech Utilities has fewer programs in its suite, and most of them have graphical interfaces. Graham Utilities is chock full of both large and tiny programs that run in a fullscreen (or windowed) session. And while Gammatech Utilities mostly relies on online documentation and help files, Graham Utilities comes with a thick printed user manual.

Graham Utilities also seems to be weighted more heavily on the disaster recovery side. The package comes with a special disaster recovery floppy, and during the install process it saves copies of your partition table and vitals of your HPFS drives onto it for safe keeping. Once install is complete you just toss the recovery disk back into the box and stick it on the shelf. If disaster strikes, the disk not only has the data it needs to reconstruct your partition information, but it also includes all the programs needed to do it.

Gammatech has less to compare to this, but it does have a better hard drive optimization program, as you'll see. Another tool that Graham doesn't match is a Sentry program that can monitor and forbid changes to your boot sector and selected files.

The Utilities In Detail

To cover the packages in sufficient detail we've broken the review up into several parts, each focusing on a different aspect of the suites. These are:

Hard Drive Optimization - The job of file defragmentation, why it's necessary, and how it improves your system's performance

Disaster Recovery - Undeleting files you accidentally erased, pulling data off a damaged drive or floppy, and recovering from accidental formatting or partitioning.

System Diagnosis - Tools that assist in the identification of problems, condition of the system, and capabilities of the hardware

Making Life Easier - Tools for day-to-day work and everything that the suite's don't otherwise compete on.
 
(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

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Hard Drive Optimization		-Sam Henwrich

Summary: Round 1: It's taking 10 minutes to load the operating system, 2 minutes to start your mail client, it's time to think about defragmenting the contents of your hard drive. Which utility is best when your daily activity stresses even HPFS 's ability to keep files together in single continuous chunks.

A hard drive does not truly store information like a filing cabinet, that is, you can't just push files down to occupy the empty space left behind by ones you've thrown away. If a new file must be saved that is larger than any single continuous block of free space, then it will be broken into two or more chunks. The file system transparently keeps track of where the chunks of each file are kept, so to you, it still appears to be a single and unbroken file. The FAT filesystem that comes with DOS is terrible at this, it doesn't even bother looking for areas of large enough free space first. HPFS is better, but it's not immune.

The solution is to periodically run a defragmentation utility. These take a couple of hours to run, depending on the size of your hard drive and severity of fragmentation. They work by re-ordering the files so that they span the minimum number of separate chunks or "extents." FAT defragmentors have to do the most work, while their HPFS counterparts have it easier. With HPFS, the filesystem itself merely has to be given a second chance to re-arrange files into unfragmented blocks. But any FAT utility must explicitly do all the calculations itself and override the operating system.

Since OS/2 can both be installed to and natively manage both filesystems, Gammatech and Graham Utilities both have the ability to defragment drives formatted in either. However, neither package does this all within a single program. You run a different program for each file system supported, often with a different user interface and different behaviors. For example, Gammatech has a PM (GUI) defragmentor for HPFS drives, but it's FAT equivalent runs in a text-mode window. Graham, which is the most consistent between utilities, will defragment a drive visually (showing a map of the drive), but while it offers a compressed view of the drive's contents in the FAT utility, it does not in the HPFS equivalent.

User Interfaces

Gammatech utilites wins the ease-of-use category for its HPFS optimizer, which comes in both a PM and full-screen version. You can select the drive to work on with a click, set it's priority and click to go. What's unusual, but possibly useful is a built-in scheduler that will run the optimization process at a set time of day or period of time. We found that the command-line equivalent of the utility could be easily run unattended by a CRON or other kind of scheduling program too, however, which may be more desirable.

Graham Utilities makes up for this, however, with a visual defragmenting utility that shows a map of the hard drive's contents, changing the display as it goes through the optimization process. Gammatech Utilities features a visual optimizer, but only for FAT partitions, and without a PM version.

Methods of work

Each utility suite uses a different method when it comes to defragmenting HPFS drives.

Graham Utilities lets you specify exact files or file masks, letting you defragment the contents of only one directory at a time, or the whole drive. The actual mechanics it uses underneath are simple: It lets OS/2 do all the work and merely identifies the files that are fragmented, moving the file so the operating system can re-seat it in a continuous slot. It's sort of the hard drive equivalent of giving the carpet a good shake and letting the furniture fall back in a more agreeable pattern.

Gammatech is quite different. For a start, it takes the whole drive in one go, even though it does offer the ability to deselect files it has chosen for optimization before it actually begins the process. Secondly, it seems to take a more direct route to defragmenting the files, rather than letting OS/2 do the work as with Graham's defragger. We have not yet confirmed this as fact yet, but our comparative testing led us to believe so.

Job Completeness

Where the two suites differ even wider is how complete they consider the job to be. It was with disappointment that we found Graham utilities often left the drive with barely any serious defragmentation performed at all. After running it once we followed it up with Gammatech's optimizer, which reported over one and a half thousand files left in a fragmented state.

This was easy to obverve as the program ran too. Graham's HPFS defragmentation utility frequently reported that "Free space is too fragmented to allow defragmentation". Perhaps only a handful of files were ever optimized in the whole, 2 hour long process. Graham Utilities' program did not attempt to defragment the free space.

Gammatech Utilities' HPFS optimizer was a different story, when we could get it to run without freezing up the whole system (as it did a number of times during our testing. We've been unable to determine if this was because of a conflict with other software, or a flaw within the program itself). It does a more thorough job, either defragmenting the free space or making multiple passes until the files sift down into optimized state. When it's done, it's pretty much done.

Conclusions

Both competing utilities need enough free space on the drive being optimized to temporarily store the largest file to be defragmented. But the less free space there is, the more likely it is to be fragmented itself, and Graham's HPFS program won't be able to do a complete job. Gammatech's optimizer was the only one that could manage in such a constrained environment.

Gammatech: Pass. Good PM interface and a optimizing routine that doesn't stop until the job's done. Big problem with locking up the system, however 

Graham: Fail. Nice visual optimizer, but performs ineffectively, especially when free space is also fragmented.
 
(henwrich@yahoo.com) Sam Henwrich is a long-time OS/2 user in Endicott, NY

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Disaster Recovery		-Chris Wenham

Summary: Ouch! It went boom! Slippery fingers or a careless install program have deleted your data or messed up your hard drive configuration. Let's see how the two utility suites handle the job of rescue and recover.

Disaster recovery is one of the biggest reasons why people buy utility suites. Hard drive fragmentation you can not even notice if you treat your computer well and install HPFS. But when data gets erased or you find you can't access your hard drive anymore, that's something that you just can't sweep under the rug and put off until later. It's a problem that needs to be fixed immediately. There are four different types of disaster recovery that the two major suites deal with: Deleted files; damaged media; corrupted partition tables or boot sectors; and corrupted Workplace Shell desktops.

Undelete

The one place where both suites compete head-on in the disaster recovery arena is with undeletion: the recovery of files that you had deleted. Normally, once a file is dragged to the shredder, it's gone forever. Unlike the Mac's trash-can or the Windows recycle bin, when you want to kill a file in OS/2, you can consider it done. But thanks to the nature of hard drive management and the way filesystems store files, it's yet possible to get back what you thought was gone.

On a hard drive, files are stored with a record that says which sector or cluster the file begins at, and where it ends. Without that record, the operating system just can't find the file and doesn't count nor respect its integrity when calculating free space available, or when storing new files. So when it comes to deleting a file, something you do every day and which programs do to their temporary work files all the time, the operating system merely removes the file's record. It doesn't bother to explicitly scrub the  information from the platter's surface.

What undelete programs do is search for files that are still present on the drive (in limbo) and attempt to reconstruct them. They work best if they're invoked immediately after the accidental deletion has occurred. If you leave things for even a few hours, especially if there are other active programs running, then the chances increase that the deleted file could be partially overwritten before you get the chance to recover it. Undelete programs cannot perform miracles. They're not what the FBI use, if that's what you're thinking.

Like with the defragmentation utilities, each suite must cope with the fact that the undelete process is different between FAT and HPFS formatted drives. While Gammatech integrates both functions within the same program, Graham Utilities separates them into two different programs.

Graham edges slightly better than Gammatech in terms of speed, however. In a test, we had each utility scan the same HPFS formatted drive. Gammatech took 2 minutes and 20 seconds to complete, but Graham found the same number of deleted files in only 1 minute and 25 seconds. According to the manual, Graham achieves this speed by scanning only the free space on the hard drive, although you can configure it to scan the entire drive if you want to for those rare circumstances when it might be needed.

Both utilities recommend undeleting a file to a drive or partition other than the one being recovered from to increase the chances of a successful undelete. This is because as it writes a file back to the drive, it may accidentally write over the tail end of the very same file you're trying to recover.

Neither utility seemed to have any special favors with God, however. Both utilities had equal luck in file recovery, we didn't find any case where one could retrieve a file that the other couldn't. What was annoying with both is that they wouldn't give an estimate of how good the chances were of recovering the files you select. You may wipe the sweat from your brow one moment, only to discover that the recovered file was corrupted anyway. Neither suite was capable of evaluating what the remaining integrity of the undeletable files were.

Gammatech: Pass. Slower, but has a nice PM user interface
Graham: Pass. About twice as fast as Gammatech at doing the same job, but has a fullscreen (character mode) interface

Damaged Media

Like all physical things, disks are prone to damage. The most common that you'll encounter are bad sectors, cases where an imperfection or fleck of dust has damaged the surface of the platter. Usually, the sectors surrounding it can still be read, and if you have a file that spans these sectors then it can be quite frustrating to know that most of the file's data is recoverable, but that one bad sector is preventing the operating system and any program from even trying.

Gammatech Utilities has an answer to this problem in the form of FILEREC.EXE, a command line tool that can lift a file from a damaged floppy or other drive. You give it the name of the file to be recovered, the destination to recover it to, and what Hex value to fill in for the data that cannot be recovered. The default is to use the space character, but you might want to change this to '00' for binary files. The program reads as far as it can until it reaches a bad sector, then fills in as much as it can with the replacement character, resuming again from the other side of the bad sector until it reaches the reported end of the file.

We tested this with a TIFF (graphic) file that was stored on a damaged floppy disk. The floppy had been used to store an image that we'd scanned at a local Kinko's service bureau, only to discover upon return home that the disk had a bad sector. Gammatech's FILEREC.EXE managed to pull most of the file off the disk, and by using a photo processing program we manually re-touched the corrupted image into acceptable condition - thus saving us the expense of a return trip to Kinko's.

Graham Utilities has no such equivalent, unfortunately. We talked with the author of the suite, Chris Graham, who told us that while there was no tool specifically designed for this job, it may be possible to do the same job with the Disk Editor program, but with a lot of manual work. We did not attempt to figure out the procedure to do this, however.

Gammatech: Pass. It may use a command line interface for this tool, but it's easy to figure out and not so hard if you only need to use it once or twice.
Graham: Fail. Maybe it can do the same thing with the arcane Disk Editor tool, but we reckon you'd have to be a hard disk guru to even try it.

Partition Table / Boot Sector Recovery

A hard drive can be divided up into multiple partitions, useful for installing multiple operating systems, or for keeping your data and programs separate. But even if you only have one partition on the whole drive, you still have a partition table hidden away there which can get corrupted. If you've ever played with the FDISK program, you know how easy it is to completely render a whole drive's worth of contents unreadable. Because if the operating system doesn't see a partition defined, it doesn't consider it to even exist.

Graham Utilities makes sure that, almost from the point where you open the pink box it ships in for the first time, you'll be ready to recover from a damaged partition table. Indeed, you can even run all of its utilities straight off the CD-ROM or Recovery floppy before you install, in case you should have deleted files that you don't want to accidentally overwrite with the very programs you want to undelete them with!

But during the install process, Graham Utilities will prompt you to insert the included recovery diskette (you don't have to supply and make one yourself), onto which it will save not only your partition information and boot sectors, but also the critical "super" and "spare" blocks of any HPFS formatted drives you have. These can be life savers if a mistake in FDISK or another operating system's install routine were to wipe your OS/2 partition. With the install floppies from your copy of OS/2 handy to boot from, you can run the RESTPART program on the recovery disk and usually get back into a working system again.

Gammatech Utilities takes the problem by the horns two different ways. First off there is a Sentry program that can be set to monitor the boot sector periodically and present you with the option of returning it to its original state if it detects a change - possibly saving you from a virus. Secondly, Gammatech can back up your boot sectors to a floppy. Gammatech's GTDisk program also has a partition fixup function that, if FDISK can recreate the partitions in all the right locations and sizes, then Gammatech might be able to recreate the logical boot sector. It's not quite as easy and straightforward as Graham's partition restore program, though.

Gammatech does not come with the convenience of a recovery disk either. If you want one, you'll have to make it yourself.

Gammatech: Pass. While the Sentry program might not catch a boot sector modification in time, it at least has a backup-and-restore utility and has limited partition repair features too.
Graham: Pass. Jesus may save souls, but Graham saves hard drives. Make sure the write protection tab on your recovery disk isn't set when the install program asks for it, though.

Desktop Recovery and Preventative Maintenance

Gammatech's Sentry program is useful for another form of disaster recovery, however, and that's for the Workplace Shell Desktop. The Sentry program includes a mini-scheduler that can make timed backups of the OS2.INI, OS2SYS.INI and Desktop directory tree in case of corruption. This is similar to the archiving feature found within Warp itself, but which only runs on each system boot. Plus, Gammatech's Sentry can keep up to 100 generations of desktops, instead of just three.

As far as preventative maintenance goes, Gammatech's Sentry allows you to lock individual files so they cannot be written to. This goes further than just setting the READ ONLY attribute, it actually marks the file as "in use" from OS/2's perspective, and as such has an upper limit of about 1500 to 3000 files that can be locked. This could be quite handy to protect files that absolutely must not change. But as with its boot sector protection, it's only good for when the Sentry program is actually running.

Graham does not have any close enough equivalents for desktop backup or file protection. It does have a set of tools for mass-backup of extended attributes: the resource forks supported by OS/2 for HPFS and FAT filesystems which store such information as icon data, comments, keywords, permissions and other meta-information related to the file. This is useful if you need to process files with a program that's not written to handle EAs, such as a DOS defragmentation  or disk repair utility. But it's not really any use beyond that scope.

Gammatech: Pass. A superior alternative to Warp's desktop archive feature, plus powerful locking of files
Graham: Fail. Nothing to backup your desktop, nor any facility for protecting files from modification

 
(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

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System Diagnosis		-Sam Henwrich

Summary: How can you tell what's wrong? And how can you determine the capabilities of your computer when the manufacturer's spec. sheet disappeared? Gammatech and Graham Utilities have some solutions.

There are many times when you will need to know the technical specifics of your machine's hardware, for when upgrading, or installing new software, or tracking the cause of a problem. There are also times when you need to get a picture of what's going on inside the operating system, how it's using memory, and how many threads are running.

System Information

The classic "SysInfo" program has been a staple of utility suites ever since Norton Utilities in the DOS days. But while Norton's SI.EXE was comprehensive and even featured benchmarks integrated within the same program, both Graham Utilities and Gammatech split their reports into separate programs.

The so called "System Information" utilities that both suites supply are little more than a text file report displayed in a scrolling window. Graham's SI.EXE program will tell you basics such as the machine type, operating system version (you may be surprised to know that Warp 4 reports itself as OS/2 version 2.40), display driver type and a handfull of other basics.

Gammatech&nbsp;is a little better, it will tell you more about your system's basics, including physical memory and Presentation Manager statistics (everything from the width of window borders to the cursor blink rate). But again, it's nothing more than a text report in a scrolling window.

They each get better when you run the programs designed to specifically focus on a particular information type, such as the hard drive or HPFS structure.

Gammatech has an Analyze utility that not only reports on hard drive and filesystem details, but also scans the hard drive for bad sectors and other defects. It does not offer to fix what it finds, however. In another program, Disk Map, you can see a graphical representation of the disk's contents. That's about all DiskMap does, however. It would be nice if it could defragment the drive graphically in this program, but it doesn't. That's in the realm of its competitor.

Graham offers more or less the same informaiton in its System Diagnostics program (see below), which aside to its main function will display a wide variety of information on your system's basics, detailed serial and parallel port information and more. It's HPFS-View and FAT-View programs will also display the contents of a disk graphically, and defragment them as you watch.

Gammatech: Pass. Reports on all of your system essentials in an easy to use GUI
Graham: Pass. More information than Gammatech in the basic hardware department, none if you're looking for details on the Presentation Manager system.

System Diagnosis

In order to find a problem in your computer's configuration or hardware, it's necessary to cull more than just the statistics that System Information programs supply. You need to run programs that actively test the system.

For this, Graham Utilities is well equipped. Its System Diagnostics program, which runs in a fullscreen session, can test almost everything except perhaps specialty hardware. It can test serial and parallel ports, test printers with graphics, plain text or postscript, and has a wide number of video tests that cover everything from color purity to VGA graphics (it can't test the super-VGA modes, however). It also has a set of hard drive tests that are more comprehensive than the one found in Gammatech's Analyze utility.

And speaking of which, Analyze's disk scan is really all that Gammatech has to offer in the system diagnosis category.

Gammatech: Fail. It can test hard drives, that's it.
Graham: Pass. A gamut of tests for checking the functioning status of your system components.

Current Processes and Memory

All of a sudden, with no warning whatsoever, Graham Utilities suddenly pops up with a graphical process and monitoring program with a smart looking memory and CPU usage display, called Task Manager. Whereas practically the entire suite runs in character mode or fullscreen sessions, this new edition that came in a service pack for the suite, is the only utility in Graham Utilities that runs in a Presentation Manager window. And it's actually pretty slick, as far as process monitors go.

An interesting feature that may be highly useful to programmers is a "Compact Memory" function. It works by momentarily allocating as much physical memory as possible, then releasing it. This forces OS/2 to unload anything that isn't absolutely necessary and store it in the swap file. The result is a huge increase in the amount of available physical RAM that's reported. This is not the same as a "Ram doubling" utility, however. It does not compress memory and it will not improve system performance. In fact, it'll slow down your computer momentarily as you switch to other applications and OS/2 has to read back from the swap file.

Gammatech Utilities does not have any process or memory monitoring utilities.

Gammatech: Fail. No process, memory or CPU monitoring utilities
Graham: Pass. But only on a technicality. Task Manager is not included out of the box, but is available as a free update to the suite
 
(henwrich@yahoo.com) Sam Henwrich is a long-time OS/2 user in Endicott, NY

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Making Life Easier		-Chris Wenham

Summary: While each suite covers the basics of system maintenance and disaster recovery, they also include a number of smaller utilities that just make working with OS/2 a little more convenient.

In the Leftovers department, both suites offer a number of smaller and trivial utilities that, while not necessarily being system critical, can help you out during day-to-day tasks and chores. Graham Utilities reins as king here, with literally dozens of such tiny programs.

One of my personal favorites in Graham's suite is the Clipboard utility, which takes a text file name as its parameter and, simply enough, fills the system clipboard with its contents. One of the first uses I put this to was to create a folder of program objects set up to copy such frequently useful data as my e-mail or newsgroup signature, full mailing address, canned e-mail responses, phone numbers and more. By dragging a shadow of this folder to the WarpCenter or Object Desktop's Control Center, I'm about two clicks away from filling the clipboard with a smorgasbord of frequently used text.

Another entry in Graham's goodie bag is the Batch Enhancer, which many will remember from the Norton Utilities of the past. Batch Enhancer, or BE for short, is a multifunction program who's sole purpose is to enhance any simple batch file (.CMD) that you write. It has functions for drawing boxes to the screen (character mode, not graphical ones), playing simple tunes, getting responses from the user, and even as far as controlling system semaphores. Batch Enhancer will be of primary use to people who need to set up a simple query-response program, such as a menu, that doesn't need the Presentation Manager to work.

There's a lot of the other kind of utilities designed for those who spend most of their time at the command prompt. There's an enhanced Change Directories program, a word count utility that can manage multiple files in one go, a program that can convert ZIP and other archive formats to LZH, and another that converts a batch of files to UPPER or lower case. For those who transfer binary files over e-mail or newsgroup systems, Graham also comes with MIME and UU encoding and decoding programs.

Gammatech doesn't have as many of these small utilities. There's a DelTree program for recursively deleting large directory trees (something that's notoriously slow and CPU intensive to do in the Workplace Shell). It's natural counterpart is MakePath, which you'd use to create multiple-depth directories in one pass (as opposed to OS/2's MKDIR, which can only create one directory at a time).

Both suites have utilities for sorting the directory structure on FAT formatted partitions for performance improvements (a procedure unnecessary on HPFS due to its faster, binary-tree method of searching for directories), they also both have programs for scrubbing the free space of your hard drives to make absolutely sure that sensitive, deleted files cannot be recovered. Writing over the disk space with ones and zeroes multiple times to make sure that not even the Government can read what you don't want them to.

Another common program to be found in both Gammatech and Graham utilities, but reserved for more advanced users with an intimate knowledge of filesystem structures are the disk editors: programs that edit the contents of your drives at the very very raw level, bypassing the distinctions made by filenames and directories. Under these programs, disks are all uniform expanses of data, with each sector editable separately. If you're knowledgeable enough you can do anything from modify the partition tables and boot sectors, to edit your CONFIG.SYS. They are NOT recommended for novices or even most intermediate users to play with. One can irrevocably corrupt the delicate data structures of your drives if you're not careful.

 
(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

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Final Conclusions		-Chris Wenham

Summary: Okay, you've heard the talk, now which one is right for you?

It seems that each suite is tuned towards a different kind of user. With its character-mode programs and extensive collection of command-line utilities, Graham Utilities seems tuned more towards the power user, and its mimicking of classic Norton Utilities programs, right down to the same program names, implies that it's also of high appeal to those coming from the DOS era of machines. Graham Utilities is a one-package fix for both twitchy fingers used to typing commands like "FF", "BE", and "SI", plus it's the classic life preserver of the OS/2 world: capable of helping you recover from even some of the nastiest crashes and accidents.

Gammatech Utilities is geared for novices and intermediate users, those who don't have a DOS legacy, and those who don't want to mess around with anything but a GUI. It isn't quite as comprehensive as Graham's, but it can certainly boast talents that its competitor can't match at all, or only matches poorly.

                         - * -

Gammatech Utilities
by (http://www.gt-online.com/) SofTouch Systems
MSRP: $99.95

Graham Utilities 2.1
by (http://www.warpspeed.com.au/) WarpSpeed Computers
MSRP: $95

 
(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

***********************************

Homepage Publisher 2.1		-Christopher B. Wright

Summary: The first WYSIWYG web page editor for OS/2 gets an update. Here's our look at what's new

HomePage Publisher is OS/2's oldest WYSIWYG HTML editor, and is very popular among those of us who don't feel comfortable when we can't see what we're building. A program that gives you a complete set of WYSIWYG tools, but at the same time creates suprisingly clean HTML code, it has been updated incrementally every few months. The latest release brings it up to version 2.1.

Version 2.0 had four incremental updates -- A through D -- that fixed various problems and added a few minor features. With this latest release, enough new and optimized features have been added to justify adding a whole tenth of a number to its version. This is definitely an update everyone who already uses HPP will want to get (especially considering the upgrade is free to all registered users) and some of the new enhancements will definitely make using it more enjoyable.

First of all, it has been optimized to handle large pages better. I'd noticed in earlier versions that when pages contain a lot of text, HPP would work veeerrrry sloooowllly. In fact, on one page I'd been working on, it got to the point where a character would appear on a page in increments of 5-10 seconds! This has been updated, and the program is now a lot more useful when working on large blocks of text. Of course, it's generally a good idea to keep your pages small to begin with, but this is not always practical in every situation.

Table support has also been vastly approved in HPP 2.1. There is now a control on the extended options bar that allows you, after clicking into a table, to specify whether you are updating a cell, a row, or the entire table. A very nice feature that makes editing what feature you want a lot easier. Complementing that is a re-design of how start and end fields are displayed in the full view. A little more care has gone into the symbols used to define paragraphs, links, and other fields to give you a graphical idea of what kinds of elements you're working with as you design.

HPP 2.1 includes a few more typeface options other than the standard "Times Roman", "Tms Rmn", "Helv", "Arial" and "Courier", and selecting and working with text is now a lot easier. I still find it somewhat awkward to select text with a mouse that doesn't turn into an I-beam, but that's personal preference and many people won't have a problem with it.

One of the most interesting new features is that HomePage Publisher will now let you FTP files to your web site with the new "publish" command. You can enter in all the information you need to publish your page (FTP address, username, password), and HPP will move your file wherever you specify. This feature complements the "mirror web" command very nicely, and you can now update your live site as you work on your remote site.

HPP 2.1 is a very worthwhile upgrade, but I'm eager to see more authoring features. Netscape Communicator has been released for OS/2, which now supports a lot of the CSS-1 standard ("Cascading Stylesheets") as well as HTML 4.0 features such as Layers and Dynamic HTML. These are things that HPP doesn't really deal with at all right now, and for it to continue to be as useful as it is now they need to be supported -- at some point. For now, however, HPP 2.1 is a solid update to a solid web page development tool.

                         - * -

Homepage Publisher 2.1
by (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/clerin/) JBC Software Development
download from (ftp://ftp.bmtmicro.com/bmtmicro/hpp210a.zip) BMT Micro (4.2M)
Registration: $95

 
(wrightc@dtcweb.com) Christopher B. Wright is a technical writer in the Richmond, VA area, and has been using OS/2 Warp since January 95.  He is also a member of Team OS/2.

***********************************

First Looks: Warpzilla NGLayout .001		-Christopher B. Wright

Summary: The open source browser from Netscape is evolving fast with a new layout engine that's twice as powerful and flexible as the old one. Here's our first look at the version that has been ported to OS/2.

The last time I reviewed the Warpzilla browser (the OS/2 Port of the Netscape Code), I mentioned that in the README the developers stated they were going to be essentially starting over as they moved to the new NGLayout rendering engine. The first public results of that work are now available, and it's impressive.

Warpzilla integrates the NGLayout ("Next Generation Layout") rendering engine with an OS/2 browser. This NGLayout engine is being worked on by a separate open source project that Netscape has officially endorsed for inclusion in all its browser products. Warpzilla also, for the first time, includes a more browser-like user interface with Communitcator-like toolbar.

In order to run Warpzilla you will need the EMX runtime package from Hobbes, since this library was used in the porting process. Running "xpviewer.exe" at a command line (or creating an icon for it on your desktop) will cause the Warpzilla browser to appear.

When you open Warpzilla for the first time, you see what basically amounts to a window with a web page in it. It's not until you re-size it that you see the "new" UI, which looks pretty much like Netscape version 4.5, right up to the new "What's related" tab. This re-sizing maneuver seems to "wake up" the interface by forcing a re-painting of the window, and is indicative of its very early  "pre-beta" state. Most of the buttons actually work to some extent, though not all of them. The pre-set bookmarks in the lowest button strip work, but the bookmarks button itself does not, and neither does the "What's related" tab. The navigation buttons (forward, back, reload, stop) work just fine, but the navigator components buttons at the bottom (mail, newsgroups, composer) do not. The whole program feels like an unfinished patchwork at this time.

Currently, the only way to jump to a web page is to enter the address into the URL field on the button bar -- you cannot use the CTRL+O or CTRL+L key combinations that you can in Communicator/2 and Navigator/2 respectively.

The NGLayout Engine Flexes Its Muscle

But the NGLayout rendering engine itself is very impressive. First, it's very, very fast -- it loads pages a lot faster than either of the Netscape products currently available for OS/2. Second, it's very advanced. I ran it through the gauntlet of CSS-1 (Cascading Style Sheets) specification tests that the World Wide Web Consortium hosts on their web site and recognizes most of the CSS-1 spec. It didn't seem to handle one or two of the tests, but it clearly beats out Communicator and Internet Explorer 4.0.

One of the most impressive demonstrations of the NGLayout's power is seen in one of the included test pages that come with Warpzilla. Not only can it use an animated GIF (image) as the background of a page or table cell, but it can also nest frames within frames, with each being independently scrollable. The stress-testing page not only places four free-form frames together (frames that are anchored to a paragraph, rather than the browser's window as Communicator currently only supports), but embeds two more within the third, animating the background image of a table cell with text centered over it. Maybe not something that you'd have any practical use for in any sane web page design, but it does demonstrate the amazing flexibility and power of this new layout engine.

There did seem to be a few quirks in the way it renders HTML -- one of the pages on the W3C site had words bleeding off the left margin for no reason that I could determine. Also, when Warpzilla was actually loading a page it had a tendency to lock me out of everything else -- I couldn't switch to other open windows or applications, couldn't open new applications, and couldn't close anything. Finally, while it's fast actually loading a page, there seems to be a significant delay between the time it takes to tell it to do something to it actually starting to do it (like open a new page, or open a dialog box, or even close the the application). Such things are to be expected with software in development, however.

Java and plugins are not supported and I couldn't tell if Javascript was or not because I couldn't ever see any Javascript pages. For example, at one point I tried to browse over to BMT Micro's home page (the home page uses mouseover commands to highlight whichever navigation graphic your mouse hovers over), but the page didn't render correctly. I don't know if that's because Warpzilla simply has a few quirks and skipped over a large portion of the page, or if it didn't recognize the Javascript commands and refused to render the parts of the page that had those commands embedded in it. Attempts to go to other javascript-enabled pages (the StarDivision pages and the Dialog Enhancer pages, for example) were unsuccessful because the browser would crash before they loaded.

For a pre-beta, this is a very usable piece of software, and I'm very impressed with what they've done so far. It's not at the point where I'd consider using it as my primary browser, but it is at the point where I'll keep it on my machine to use it once and a while. And if this is where they are now, by the time an actual beta rolls around we should have a fully functional (and pretty stable) base product.

                         - * -

Warpzilla NGLayout
by (http://yuggoth.ucam.org/~mjf35/warpzilla/nglayout/) Warpzilla porting team
download from (http://yuggoth.ucam.org/~mjf35/warpzilla/nglayout/ngviewer.zip) the Warpzilla homepage (2M)
Registration: Free
 
(wrightc@dtcweb.com) Christopher B. Wright is a technical writer in the Richmond, VA area, and has been using OS/2 Warp since January 95.  He is also a member of Team OS/2.

***********************************

Results from our October 1st Survey		-Chris Wenham

Congratulations go to Geoffrey Lamble for winning the free copy of Master Of The Empire in our prize drawing! His winning entry was picked on the 14th and we'll be shipping his copy of the new OS/2 game to him soon.

Where do you usually go to get support now?

When problems rear their ugly head, where's the first place you go to get technical support? In our last survey we decided to take the opportunity to coincide the topic with Trevor Smith's article on Guerrilla Tech Support.

For this survey we had 1,304 valid votes. A vote is considered valid if it answers all the questions, has an e-mail address, and is not a duplicate.

Since IBM now charges for answering support questions beyond the first 90-days, most users have found it's far cheaper to go elsewhere when questions need answering. Over 37% of you voted, not surprisingly, for the web as your first port of call. The next most popular was Usenet - where not only is there a huge cache of information already available, but new questions are quickly answered too. A very tiny number of people got their support from their PC maker, company help desk or third party support company.

We did have a number of readers who wrote in to say that we forgot to put in one important option: Listservs, or mailing list support groups such as OS/2-L.

By what means would you prefer to get support?

We also asked what means you'd prefer to get support by, if it were possible for you to get it that way. Most (53%) seemed to favor a web knowledge base, presumably where they could search an online database for quick answers to their questions. E-mail (21.7%) and phone (13.6%) were the next most popular, with the idea of on-site consultants having limited appeal.

Complete November 1st Survey Results

Where's the first place you go to find support now?

Category			Count		Percentage
IBM				89		6.8%
Your PC manufacturer		3		0.2%
Your company's help desk	8		0.6%
Local user group		94		7.2%
Usenet (Newsgroups)		433		33.2%
The Web			487		37.3%
Internet Relay Chat (IRC)	70		5.4%
Paid third-party support	4		0.3%
Other				115		8.8%
TOTAL				1,304		99.8%


By what means would you prefer to get technical support?

Category				Count		Percentage
By phone (toll free or otherwise)	177		13.6%
By a web knowledge base site		697		53.5%
By e-mail				283		21.7%
By on-site consultants			21		1.6%
By real-time internet chat		74		5.7%
Other					50		3.8%
I do not understand the question	1		0.1%
TOTAL					1,304		100.0%


 
(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

***********************************

Rexx Newbies, Part IV		-Chris Wenham

Summary: In the fourth installment of our series we teach how to do repetitive jobs by using simple loops.

Consider the act of pouring a cup of coffee for your guests. Assuming it's brewed, you fetch a cup, pour the coffee into it, add the creamer, add the sugar, stir and give to your guest. For each guest the process is pretty much the same, with slight changes where one guest prefers black coffee, or extra sugar, or no sugar, or whatever. If you have five guests, you repeat these same basic actions five times. From the point where you fetch the cup to the point where you hand over the cup can be thought of as the beginning and end of a loop - a procedure that can be repeated with little variation and predictable results. Written in English, the coffee-pouring loop might look like this:

* Fetch a cup
* Pour coffee into cup
* If guest wants creamer, then add the creamer
* If guest wants sugar, then add the sugar
* Stir
* If guest insulted my mother then spill coffee in his lap, else deliver the cup to the guest
* Go back to step 1 if there is another guest waiting.

The important part is step 7, the one that closes the loop yet still provides a means of exiting it. If there's still another guest waiting for coffee, then repeat the procedure, and if not, then the loop is ended and you can switch off the coffee maker. You can see how much more elegant this is than the alternative, which assumes you have 3 guests with differing tastes:

* Fetch a cup for guest #1
* Pour coffee into cup
* Add creamer
* Add sugar
* Stir
* Deliver cup to guest #1
* Fetch a cup for guest #2
* Pour coffee into cup
* Add sugar
* Stir
* Spill coffee in guest #2's lap
* Fetch cup for guest #3
* Pour coffee into cup
* Add creamer
* Stir
* Deliver cup to guest #3

Sixteen steps instead of 7. Hmm, which is the more efficient set of instructions? Which would definitely be the most efficient set if you had twenty guests? While the second method spelled out in concrete terms that guest #1 liked his coffee with cream and sugar, guest #2 liked only sugar (as well as needing a lesson in manners), and guest #3 liked only creamer, it would be trivial to simply ask the "if" question of yourself or the guest each time you poured a new cup.

Of course, none of us really need a list of written instructions to make a cup of coffee, but consider if it had been a repair manual for lawnmower engines - where some model engines have a slightly different housing or primer assembly? Each engine is repaired in pretty much the same way, but a concise list of instructions is still needed if you're to put an unfamiliar machine back together properly. The repair manual could redundantly spell out the instructions for each and every slight variation in the manufacturer's line, or it could write one set of instructions and insert lines such as "If this is a model G120, then remove the left retaining screw first" in appropriate places. The manual becomes thinner and easier to maintain for future models.

In Rexx programs, loops such as these are one of the single most powerful and fundamental techniques to learn. You cannot really write even medium sized programs without them as you'll find the need to do essentially the same series of tasks an arbitrary number of times will crop up time and time again. Computers were invented to do these kind of repetitive tasks after all.

In Rexx, loops are started and configured around the "do - end" instruction pair. "Do" marks the beginning of a block of instructions, it'd come just before step 1 of our coffee making procedure above. "End" of course marks the end of the block of instructions. Here's an example:

/* Do something, man! */
Do
  Say "This is the first instruction within a do-end block"
  Say "This is the second instruction within a do-end block"
End

The output of this program when run is:

[C:\]do
This is the first instruction within a do-end block
This is the second instruction within a do-end block

The Do and End instructions alone don't add anything to this program, but watch what happens when you make one measly little change to it; adding the number 3 after Do:

/* Do something, man! */
Do 3
  Say "This is the first instruction within a do-end block"
  Say "This is the second instruction within a do-end block"
End

You get this when the program is run:

[C:\]do
This is the first instruction within a do-end block
This is the second instruction within a do-end block
This is the first instruction within a do-end block
This is the second instruction within a do-end block
This is the first instruction within a do-end block
This is the second instruction within a do-end block

Woah, magic. Just putting a number after the Do instruction made it repeat everything within the Do-End pair that many times. If you've typed this instruction in yourself, try putting 100 after the Do instruction, and watch things scroll off the top of your screen.
The next logical step is to put in a way to find out how many times we've looped. We do this by throwing a variable in the mix to keep track. While the Do instruction has a counter built into it to keep track of things for itself, we can explicity say what we want this counter to be called, what number we want it to start with, and what number we want it to end on. Here's the same program as above, but with one more addition to the&nbsp;Do instruction and one more Say instruction so we can watch what's happening:

/* Do something, man! */
Do counter = 3 to 5
  Say "We're in loop number" counter
  Say "This is the first instruction within a do-end block"
  Say "This is the second instruction within a do-end block"
End

Running our program now will give us this kind of output:

[C:\]do
We're in loop number 3
This is the first instruction within a do-end block
This is the second instruction within a do-end block
We're in loop number 4
This is the first instruction within a do-end block
This is the second instruction within a do-end block
We're in loop number 5
This is the first instruction within a do-end block
This is the second instruction within a do-end block

What we did is expand the Do instruction to explicitly name the variable as counter, tell it what number to start on (3) and what number to count to (5).
Since counter is a variable just like any other, we can use it in our new Say instruction to tell us where in the series of loops we are. If you're wondering why you'd want to start at a number other than 1, think of a program that adds page numbers to a book or presentation. The copyright notice page and table of contents might be un-numbered, but still considered as pages 1 and 2 respectively - meaning that you'd want to start page numbering at 3 instead of 1 when you got to the actual content.
There are no restrictions to what you can put inside of the Do-End pair. Any valid Rexx code goes, everything that you've learned to date and everything you will learn (with one or two exceptions, but we'll note those when we come to them). Indeed, you can even put more loops within the block, for example:

/* Rows and columns */
Do row = 1 to 3
  Do column = 1 to 3
    Say "Row" row "and Column" column
  End
End

Would produce this when run:

[C:\]do
Row 1 and Column 1
Row 1 and Column 2
Row 1 and Column 3
Row 2 and Column 1
Row 2 and Column 2
Row 2 and Column 3
Row 3 and Column 1
Row 3 and Column 2
Row 3 and Column 3

Only one Say instruction in the whole program, but it gets used 9 times. 3 loops of 3 loops, do the math. Useful stuff, especially when it comes to things like filling out tables and calculating seating arrangements.
In part V, we will briefly cover the PARSE command (which we touched on earlier), how to call functions, and at last, our first example of a practical Rexx Macro that controls another application!
 

(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

***********************************

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Copyright 1998   -   Falcon Networking
ISSN 1203-5696