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Must-have tools
There are a lot of nice programs out there that can make your life with OS/2 easier and prettier. What is even more nice is the fact that many of them are free.
Because of time and financial restrictions you can download only a few packages from my homepage directly. Instead there are links to archives carrying the latest versions.
WPS extensions
Most of these programs integrate themselves into the WPS with additional menu entries and buttons and the like. You can find them at Hobbes.
| Package | Description |
|---|---|
| Drag Text | Enables the use of text as object. Text in windows, files, and the clipboard becomes an object that can be copied, moved, saved or deleted using drag & drop or pickup & drop. Furthermore, programs can be started automatically at a specified time and their environment can be changed. The basic features are free, the full version is US$20 and worth it. |
| Styler/2 | Shareware. A new program that adds bitmaps to title bars, changes the system font without causing clipping problems, adds cut & paste to commandline windows etc. Included with eComStation. |
| XWorkplace | Freeware. XWorkplace provides lots of helpful extensions for the WPS like invoking commandline windows for the current folder, configurable status bars, an extended shutdown, CONFIG.SYS settings, virtual desktops etc. The absolute MUST-HAVE! |
| Xit | Shareware, 25$. This need tools adds buttons to your windows (e.g. window roll up), support for the Win95-keys, activation of windows by the mouse pointer, assigning functions to mouse buttons and the ALT and CTRL keys. |
Other utilities
Available at Hobbes.
| Program | Description |
|---|---|
| Auto Wget | AutoWget provides "fire and forget" downloading via HTTP or FTP. It uses URL objects created by the browsers, keeps a list of files to download and hands the URLs on to GNU Wget. Interrupted downloads will be continued. Freeware. |
| Black Hole | Black Hole creates a WPS object that is able to destroy otherwise undestroyable objects. |
| BootOS2 | This EWS-program creates bootable OS/2 systems on harddisk or floppy with selectable REXX, DOS, PM or WPS support. Great for creating a service partition. |
| DFSee | This is a command line/VIO tool you can use to mess up your partitions ;-). OK, apart from partitioning it also provides means for creating partition images (great for backup) and to undelete deleted files residing on a HPFS formatted partition. You can even use wildcards to select files. In contrary to File Phoenix it also works with partitions larger than 2GB. Shareware. |
| File Phoenix/2 | File Phoenix can revive deleted files on FAT and HPFS drives. Unfortunately it only works on partitions up to 2GB. Freeware. |
| LxLite | LxLite compresses single files that get unpacked into memory if loaded. Packing my system partition brought a gain of about 15 to 20 MB! If you are using an older harddrive you can also expect a faster boot. GPL'ed freeware. |
| ManyClip | ManyClip extends the OS/2 clipboard. You can have several clipboards which can be filled in different orders. The clipboards' content can also be saved and printed. EWS freeware. |
| Memsize | Memsize displays a lot of system information like CPU load, harddisk space, SWAP-space, free RAM etc. The display is very configurable. Freeware. |
| NewDASD | A free package for removable media support (ZIP, Syquest, MO) from IBM that's included in the fixpaks since FP#6 and enables formatting removable media with HPFS and using a cache. It's still nice to have because it fixes several problem a lot of people are having with the built-in feature on systems with fixpak levels below #11. If you have applied a FP greater 5 you'll need to copy OS2DASD.DMD and register the class in NEWDISK.DLL. You may also need to replace PMWP.DLL with the one from FP#5. |
| PSPM/2 | EWS. A graphical pstat which can be used as a process killer for processes and threads. |
| RAR | An archiver/packer with both a menu driven and a commandline interface. RAR supports multivolume archives and has a better compression rate than Info-Zip. The main drawback is that it is very expensive. (Who pays US$35 when a free alternative with only slightly worse features is available?) RAR comes with a free decompression tool. |
| Sysbench | A benchmarking program with several tests for CPU, graphics adapter, harddisks, CD-ROMs and memory. One of the tests is also helpful to optimize the diskcache. |
| Unzip / Zip | Info-Zip's (de-)compressing/archiving tool. The standard for filetransfer for OS/2, DOS and Windows. Widely PKZip compatible and free. WARNING: If you are using Object Desktops archive viewers be sure to use unzip version <=5.32. There has been a change in output format in 5.4 that leads to incorrect filename with Object Desktop. |
| VFDISK | Virtual Floppy Disk emulates a floppy disk drive in RAM. This makes handling diskimages (e.g. from fixpaks) much more convenient. EWS. |
| WatchCat | WatchCat can help if your machine hangs by killing the hanging process. However, you will need some extensions since the built-in kill features are not very effective most of the time. Get and install the XFree86/OS2 support driver and one of the WKILL9.ZIP or WNICE.ZIP packages that provide an interface to this driver. I'd also advise you to make a hardware switch since in many cases the keyboard also gets locked. Now you will be able to terminate even badly crashed programs. "Hasta la vista, baby!" |
Larger packages
| Package | Description |
|---|---|
| Firefox | The free Mozilla-Browser for OS/2 and eComStation. |
| Thunderbird | The free Mozilla-Mail-Client for OS/2 and eComStation. |
| SeaMonkey | The free Mozilla-Komplettpaket for OS/2 and eComStation. |