The OS/2 Files

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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
CandyBarz Freeware. CandyBarz exchanges title bars with bitmaps or gradients and can totally change the look of buttons etc. Think of the "skin" feature of the WinAMP MP3 player.
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$20 and worth it.
NPSWPS One of the classics and freeware: automatic window activation by the mousepointer, sort by suffix, an extended file dialog, a closebutton for Warp 3, cut & paste in commandline windows, window animations etc., with support for many languages.
Styler/2 Shareware. A new program that adds bitmaps to title bars, changes the system font without causing clipping problems, adds cut & paste to commandline windows etc.
XWorkplace Freeware. XWorkplace provides lots of helpful extensions for the WPS like invoking commandline windows for the current folder, configurable status bars, an extended shutdown, CONFIG.SYS settings, virtual desktops etc. The absolute MUST-HAVE!
Xit Shareware, 25$. 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.
Smartcache Smartcache makes your surfing life easier by replacing the Netscape harddisk cache (don't set it to zero though, 64K is a good choice). It's a proxy with support for offline-browsing, URL blocking (No adverts! Protect your children from adult sites.) and cookie filtering. Additionally you can protect your privacy by hacking referers. Smartcache is a JAVA program as thus needs some RAM (approx. 11MB incl. the JVM), but it's faster than Netscape's own cache. Freeware under GPL.
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

To be found at Hobbes and in the IBM SoftwareChoice catalogue.

Package Description
emx emx means eMulate uniX or Eberhard Mattes eXtensions. Emx is no emulator, however, but provides a library containing several functions used by Un*x programs that OS/2 doesn't have or that are implemented differently. The complete package contains the GNU compiler gcc, the debugger gdb and the assembler gas. This makes it relatively easy to port Un*x programs to OS/2. Gcc can support C, C++, Objective C, Fortran 77 and ADA95 (and some others). Under GNU license.
Emacs Do everything in one editor. Emacs can be customized and extended using a special LISP language and is able to do everything but boiling eggs. There are special modes for editing source code for REXX, Java, C, Ada, HTML etc. with automatic indention and completion and display of keywords in colour as well as using it as a TeX shell , for writing e-mail, reading news and writing your diary. Requires the EMX runtime. Free.
emTeX The TeX distribution for OS/2 ported by Eberhard Mattes. Contains TeX, LaTeX and several add-ons. This distribution is not actively maintained anymore. Instead you can use emTeX/TDS (that uses much of the emTeX stuff) which is available at the CTAN servers, e.g. DANTE Server.
Java The JVM (Java Virtual Machine) for OS/2. This is mandatory to be able to run any up-to-date Java program.
Netscape
Communicator
Netscape Communicator 4.61 for OS/2. You should have at least this one to be able to display current web pages. Other available browsers are Mozilla and Opera.