Messages

1

Setup & Installation / Re: Installing CUPS on MCP

« on: January 18, 2025, 03:55:38 pm »

BTW, one possible problem is that, if your previous actions created a partial but incomplete setup (e.g. a WPS printer object without a print queue, an orphaned print queue without a printer object, or something else along those lines) then I could see the spooler getting upset when it tries to create a new object with the same queue name.

ISTR there was a command-line tool from FaxWorks that could purge broken print configs if the system got into such a state. It might be worth trying that to make sure you're starting clean.

2

Setup & Installation / Re: Installing CUPS on MCP

« on: January 18, 2025, 03:48:48 pm »

With unlock.exe provided from HobbesArchive, the printer creation now fails this way. It's an HP Color Laserjet Pro M252, which works pretty well under ArcaOS. My goal is to get Manage Printers, CupsWiz and PSPRINT to work under MCP, and eventually under Warp 4.

(The screen shot says see CupsWiz.L1. Scroll down to the end of CupsWiz.L1 to see the most recent errors.)

It's failing when it attempts to run prntobj.exe to create the WPS printer object and queue.  The error from prntobj.exe should be recorded in cupswiz.l2 (in the same directory as cupswiz.l1). That should tell us which API function call in prntobj actually failed.  (prntobj.exe comes with cupswiz and is installed in the same directory.)

FWIW the exact command it's running should be:

Code: [Select]

prntobj HPCOLOR1 CUPS3 "PSPRINT.HP Color LaserJet M552" "HP Color LaserJet M552"
It seems the actual error code the OS/2 spooler is returning is 5, which is an Access Denied error. I'm not sure what would cause that.

By the way, do make sure that C:\OS2\DLL\PSPRINT\PSPRINT.DRV has all its extended attributes (the output from 'dir' should show about 20Kb of EAs).  In general, printer drivers will break horribly if they lose their EAs, because they contain a lot of essential information.

3

Setup & Installation / Re: Installing CUPS on MCP

« on: January 16, 2025, 02:22:00 pm »

Alex is installing CUPS in MCP or ECS even worth the trouble ? As I seem to recall the that the postscript driver in ArcaOS has had extensive updates, this also includes PIN.EXE.
A lot of the postscript PPD files with PIN.EXE would just crash because of bad coding.
Is that correct Alex ?

That's true of the old IBM PSCRIPT driver, but since Neil is installing PSPRINT that should be moot. 

4

Setup & Installation / Re: Installing CUPS on MCP

« on: January 15, 2025, 03:52:27 am »

You may need to add the path to the correct CUPS install as a parameter to cupswiz.exe.

Regarding the trap, the only thing I can think of is the PSPRINT install is broken somehow. 

If you go into PrintMan and choose File -> Manage presentation drivers, what does the entry for PSPRINT report? In particular the Version and Status columns.  Next, if you double-click on the PSPRINT entry, does it pop up its list of supported printers?

5

Setup & Installation / Re: Installing CUPS on MCP

« on: December 27, 2024, 02:46:09 pm »

Click on the logo icon on the left of the cupswiz window to bring up the product information. Is the path to CUPS correct?

What does

Code: [Select]

<cupspath>\sbin\lpinfo.exe -m produce?

6

Programming / Re: VisualAge C++ 3.6.5 (+ Fix2) - WarpIn or RPM?

« on: October 25, 2024, 02:09:36 pm »

There is zero need for Netscape when installing Feature Install based products. See my tutorials on the subject:

• Part 1: http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL1007H/feature_2.html
• Part 2: http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL0708H/feature_2.html

Part 1 describes using the WPS Install Objects. It actually uses VAC 3.65 as an example, so you can just install it using the example CXXVARS.RSP I listed. 

Part 2 describes how to use FI in CID or 'backend' mode so you don't need to mess with the Install Objects at all.

IMO Feature Install is actually quite a neat install backend once you take Netscape out of the picture, although there is a certain amount of caution involved when using any program that runs in the WPS process (as FI does).  I wrote a couple of replacement GUIs (generally in VX-REXX) for the FI backend to install specific products.  My HPFS386 installer is one such example: https://hobbesarchive.com/?detail=/pub/os2/util/system/HPFS386Installer_2009-04-04.zip

(FWIW I much prefer this approach over rewriting the whole install in something like WarpIN.)

7

Setup & Installation / Re: OS/2 Booting with Bootman

« on: October 18, 2024, 02:38:36 pm »

Windows has its own equivalent to LVM, called Logical Disk Manager.  It's been a while since I used XP, but IIRC you can open it by right-clicking on "My Computer", choosing "Manage", and scrolling through the options tree on the left until you find the Logical Disk Manager (ISTR it's hidden under a folder in a slightly non-obvious place).

From there you can remove any XP-assigned drive letter from a partition.

If OS/2 still can't boot, then what you will want to do is: from OS/2 boot media (e.g. the install CD), go into LVM and make sure the OS/2 volume has a drive letter.

8

Setup & Installation / Re: OS/2 Booting with Bootman

« on: October 18, 2024, 12:06:17 am »

What's the problem with installing both OS/2 and XP to C:? They both use their own drive letter logic and neither one should know (or care) what drive letter the other thinks it has.

9

Setup & Installation / Re: How to get rid of the second boot menue?

« on: September 06, 2024, 02:39:17 pm »

Are you using an old or prerelease version of the UEFI ArcaOS boot loader? That menu is part of the loader, but it's been disabled by default in all GA releases.

10

Applications / Re: Unzip Version 6.0 hangs when booting to a commandline

« on: August 01, 2024, 01:52:35 pm »

Current versions of ArcaOS don't use klibccfg.dll at all.  It doesn't load it, TTBOMK doesn't even ship with it.

(It instead provides a replacement called prewrite.dll which provides the path remapping feature to the limit extent that it's needed/useful.)

11

Applications / Re: XWP v1.0.16

« on: June 14, 2024, 02:03:30 pm »

I'm just writing down which other software does not respect the default font size that can now be controlled with the XWP "Font Size" feature.
- ArcaOS Package Manager
- NewView

A distinction needs to be made here between "respect" and "adhere to".  These programs have their own user-customizable font size setting which they use in preference to any others. This is as it should be. 

In fact, NewView does use the system font setting as its default if (and only if) a user font is not specified. Again, this is as it should be.  Of course, this normally happens only when you first run it after a fresh install. Try deleting newview.ini and then see what happens. 

12

Hardware / Re: Getting a new printer

« on: June 09, 2024, 01:31:20 pm »

For importing into OS/2 (pscript or psprint) then it's generally better to use the Windows PPD instead of the Linux one.  You should be able to find it somewhere on the driver disk or from the  manufacturer's website.

As noted earlier, you shouldn't really need CUPS just to print from traditional OS/2 applications. However, you would need CUPS to print from applications that don't support the native OS/2 print system (like most of those written in Qt).

To get the printer supported in CUPS it's normally a matter of finding out which CUPS driver package supports it (there are several), and installing that.  (Or you could just select a generic Postscript printer as the CUPS model, if you don't need model-specific features.)

13

Hardware / Re: Getting a new printer

« on: June 06, 2024, 01:22:25 pm »

Does it import more than one ppd files too? I've tried to import at least 4 ppds for different printers in the lasts 20 years. Most of them with the IBM cli tools before your versions come up. I'm thinking about if it's worth starting from scratch again.

Sure, you can import more than one PPD. Every PPD you import is saved in \sys\install\prndrv\ppd_xx and kept whenever a new import is done.

Btw. I've sometimes still the problem with your psndrv (?) that it takes very long until the page came out. Sometimes pages are printed only after a reboot. Also I can't still print with small margins (less than 12,xmm). Although one of my printers allow 4-5mm the other can print without any margin on the other system. Maybe my setup is mess up hence the question to the expert on this topic :-).

Margin capabilities are defined by the PPD. Laser printers as a rule have a minimum margin size. Only certain inkjets can do margin-less printing TTBOMK.

Performance could be caused by any number of things. The first thing I'd check is whether the IBM PSCRIPT driver behaves the same.

One thing to try is reducing the print job size by tweaking the font download settings (this is highly dependent on what type of job you are printing so there's no set rule for it; try printing to file and comparing the file sizes with different settings).

If the printer's Postscript emulation is simply slow, you could also try printing as image (some apps like Lucide have a setting for this).

14

Hardware / Re: Getting a new printer

« on: June 06, 2024, 04:32:49 am »

If you use the Manage Printers GUI then there's no need to clean the PPD manually - just select Import PPD from the menu and it will handle all of that automatically.

15

Applications / Re: Lost / Missing Software for OS/2

« on: April 01, 2024, 01:58:56 pm »

I'm trying to find ATOK8 for OS/2.
I guess it is a Japanese input method editor

ATOK is commercial software; TTBOMK the Windows version is still sold but the OS/2 version was discontinued years ago. I'm pretty certain you won't find a legitimate copy anywhere except possibly the secondhand market (ebay or whatever), and even then I'd call it a long shot.