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Messages - Roderick Klein

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271
Setup & Installation / Re: Soundblaster live & Sander's driver
« on: October 05, 2015, 11:57:04 am »
You can still find the generic WIN/OS2 driver on eCS CD 2. As for the SB Live. It might not work on all systems.
It does support high IRQ's. But it might run into trouble if your system has more then 2 GB of RAM.

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

272
Setup & Installation / Re: eCS 2.1 hangs on boot - OS2LVM.DMD
« on: September 17, 2015, 10:10:13 pm »
H i Roderick, Thanks for the reply! I'm still fighting this problem but have a possible solution I'm hesitant to apply. It looks like I've lost the LVM Table for this particular partition (it is 1 of 8 partitions on this hard drive). There are 2 other eCS JFS partitions also on this drive that boot just fine. And yes I can boot from the eCS 2.1 install disk as well. I would like to try the "ReCreate LVM Tables" option, but I don't know if it will screw up the other partitions on this disk, if that happened that would make this small disaster into a really fatal disaster. Does "ReCreate LVM Tables" do just that without loosing any data or messing up other partitions on this same drive?

Thanks again  klipp

Well first question I have is when you start DFSEE do you get any warning messages. As from what I remember DFSEE when it mounts a hard disc does some basic checking on the drive.

This recreate LVM tables should be harmless as this should remove the parittion it self from the MBR.
What I recommend you do is that you also create a backup of your MBR or Partitiom table. Look in the menu options of DFSEE how to do that.

Wurst case scenario is that when you fix the LVM table a partition might loose its drive letter. But you can always reassign this via minilvm or dfsee.
The key is keeping a backup of your partition table and store it on a USB stick for example.

Good luck!

273
Applications / Re: How to install from external USB CD/DVD?
« on: September 17, 2015, 11:53:13 am »
Martin, have you tried changing the positions of the AHCI and IDE in the setup you showed us.  I think the external DVD/USB drive presents itself as an IDE drive.

Another thing, how is USB setup in the bios?  You may have to set it up that it is active all the time and not just when the OS is up and running (that only works with windows).

It would make live simpler if it would present itself as IDE drive, but that is sadly not the case. A USB DVD/CD ROM drive is a special USB class.
Infact when you boot from a USB CD ROM player a special switch is added to USBD.SYS to make it work. (Choose edit config.sys in preboot menu to see this).

My guess is that his BIOS Is already set to active otherwise Martin would not be able to come into the pre boot menu and get the message he needs to insert CD ROM...

Roderick

274
Applications / Re: How to install from external USB CD/DVD?
« on: September 16, 2015, 08:26:15 pm »
Hi.

Yes, the good thing is that memboot disc works and it loads the boot menu. So the initial USB CD Boot works to select the options.

I'm trying to select the USB drive (as shown on the picture) but no luck yet.
I even tried enabled 1 of each USB host controller.

Regards

When you load eCS from DVD and you enter the preboot menu,. what is the amount of USB controllers set  to (per type ?).
Are all controllers set to 0 (including EHCI ?).
DId you set the amount of controllers to one because the different types where all set to 0 ?
It is possible this device only has USB 3.0 support.

Roderick


275
Applications / Re: How to install from external USB CD/DVD?
« on: September 16, 2015, 05:50:22 pm »
I am trying to remember how the menu looks exactly. Next to selecting booting from CD you need to set the spin button to one.
But I do not think you forgot that...

If you did that then there is possibly something going wrong in the USB stack...

Hard to tell from a distance. But that you get the message Insert CD ROM means the memboot disc works (but is normally does) and after that OS/2 can not find the CD player.

Good luck,

Roderick

276
Setup & Installation / Re: eCS 2.1 hangs on boot - OS2LVM.DMD
« on: September 16, 2015, 11:47:30 am »
If I remember correctly OS2DASD gets loaded before or after OS2LVM. UNICODE.SYS gets loaded later, I think before JFS.IFS.

Can you boot from the eCS 2.1 install CD ? I seem to remember cases where the boot from hard disc would hang but from CD not.
If you can then run DFSEE, it might enable you to find out what caused the hang...

At least you can then also make a backup of your MBR.

Good luck,

Roderick

277
Applications / Re: Experiment: bWarp - Broken Warp / Removing the stuff.
« on: September 15, 2015, 07:33:29 pm »
Also talking about SNAP.

Since on this VM I'm using the freeware version of SNAP (3.1.8) , I also noticed that there seems to be some hardcoded paths on SNAP like reference to io32.sys, SDDCFG.SAV, svgadata.pmi, video.cfg, VIDEO.TFG, I can not move those without breaking. About the video.* files I don't know if that "harcoded path" is a limitation of SNAP or of the Graphics Subsystem.

It can be interesting if Arca Noae is going to update this driver to remove any hardcoded path.

Regards

That video.cfg and video.tfg is all hard codec in the base video DLL of OS/2. And then it also sticks up its head this file names in GRADD DLL's.
These files all for example reference svgadata.pmi.
\OS2\DLL\bvhsvga.dll
\OS2\DLL\gengradd.dll
\OS2\DLL\PMMERGE.DLL
\OS2\DLL\sddgradd.dll
\OS2\DLL\videocfg.dll
\OS2\DLL\videopmi.dll

Do not know how difficult it would be to make the path dynamic...

Roderick


278
Applications / Re: Experiment: bWarp - Broken Warp / Removing the stuff.
« on: September 15, 2015, 07:27:38 pm »
Hi Roderick

Even that the documentation around the web says that DOS.SYS is only part DOS VM, I got shocked to find out it used to reboot OS/2. I also noticed that XWorkplace uses it for reboot.

It is not a vital OS/2 component, since it can be removed and it keeps working without major issues. But I want to know if there is any other use for this driver.

Beside DOS VM and Rebooting, does anybody knows if this driver has any other use?

Regards

* I am not aware that the DOS VM itself is able to reboot the OS/2 system via DOS.SYS. But I could be wrong..
Here are some of the native OS/2 applications that use this driver.

* Setboot.exe might use DOS$. The version that comes with airboot seems todo that..
I do not know what the setboot from IBM does...

* Estyler uses it as well...

* From what I can the DFsee uses it also...

* Its used in the WPS Toolkit from Christian Langanke.
wtkusys.c.

* 4os2 as well...

This driver has been around in OS/2 as long as can remember. I do not know why this is not part of the kernel or they did give a different name to this driver... But its certainly not used by DOS VDM as far as I can tell...

Roderick

I found some of these files by simply searching my hard drive with file commander. Via alt F7 search for * and the text string DOS$.

Roderick


279
Applications / Re: Experiment: bWarp - Broken Warp / Removing the stuff.
« on: September 15, 2015, 06:23:15 pm »
The name DOS.SYS is kind of confusing if you wanne strip DOS support so out it goes out of your config.sys.
However, its used by OS/2 applications to reboot the system...

Its documented on EDM2.

http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Rebooting_OS/2

Roderick

280
Applications / Re: Experiment: aWarp - Atrocious Warp - Moving Paths
« on: August 23, 2015, 11:11:54 pm »
Thanks for the replies.

I tried what Roderick says, moving back IBMCOM to the root. For the moment I haven't got any progress. It worked moving IBMCOM on a eCS 2.1 VM and not on Warp 4.52. I have to keep checking, since eCS has some other exe's on IBMCOM.

About "UNICODE.SYS" I tried with KON (Hex Editor) to change the path, it worked, but the since I have to maintain the same size (?) of the file I'm a little bit limited there. I don't know much about the rules of editing binaries this way, I don't know if there is a way on how to bend this rule.

About the INI's. Anybody tried if "IBMLVL.INI" can be moved away from the root path?

Regards

Your best bet I think is to see if you kind find fwatch.sys. If you use it in a VM you can setup the serial port as a file.

The only thing I have noticed with Fwatch is that for some reason fwatch.sys sometimes conflicts with video GRADD based drivers. I have never been able to figure out why. As on some systems loading FWATCH.SYS with GRADD based video drivers worked! So if you do get stuck run setvga. To make live even more fun you  have the classic VGA driver and VGAGRADD. So run setvga! If you run ALT F1 recovery on MCP it will install VGAGRADD. So if you do run into trouble watch this little detail :-)

Then when you do have fwatch working you see in the text file a succesfull MPTS start and the one failing. Hoping you can by comparing the text output see where MPTS is stuck.

The benefit of FWATCH is that its "user friendly" way to debug OS/2 file I/O. At least you do not need something like the kernel debugger. Which is slightly more complex then fwatch.sys. The thing however with fwatch is that you get a lot of data. As you can not filter on for example MPTS in the data that MPTS outputs.

Good lcuk

281
Applications / Re: Experiment: aWarp - Atrocious Warp - Moving Paths
« on: August 21, 2015, 09:57:27 pm »
On the topic of MPTS.
To try and find your problem with MPTS. See if you can find a copy of the driver fwatch.sys (I think it was IBM EWPS). It hooks a file API in the kernel. You can then see which files are opened by applications. It also reports failures of files it can not find. Guess somewhere another of these static paths is causing trouble, no clue.

Did you also put a copy of the IBMCOM directory BACK in the root directory if MPTS will then start ?

Years ago when working on getting SNAP to boot from CD, I found many entries in the video DLL's pointing to \OS2\SVGADATA.PMI (its readable as plain text). Its an example of how static paths are readable in DLL's.

When you do get MPTS running and change something (NIC for example) and exit MPTS, it might stick a lot static paths again in the config.sys. Search for example in \IBMCOM\DLL\LAPSPM.DLL for the string \IBMCOM\protocol\lanpdd.os2.
There is a whole block of what looks entries to be put in the config.sys. Static path + drive letter...

As for UNICODE, thats out of my skill set to know how you could fix this.
Unicode.sys seems it has code to detect the boot drive or uses an API to detect this.

If you use a something like file commander and search the OS2 directory for *.dll and \language text string.
UCONV.DLL UNIKBD.DLL have the same entry "C:\language"  so they most likely need be patched also.

I have never tried putting *all* OS/2 INI files into a single directory.  No clue if you could get that to work.
MMOS/2 seems to be less of a trouble maker as it seems to honour set the set MMBASE= variable in the config.sys.


Roderick

282
Internet / Re: Thunderbird 31.6
« on: August 10, 2015, 02:02:12 pm »
I do not know if this something in my profile.  But I have the same issue as Erik with Thunderbird 31.
The login credentials to send email via the SMTP server of my ISP where not loaded.

Also when I open an attachment from Thunderbird, Thunderbird crashes.  For Thunderbird 31 I have an exceptq report. Would that be useful for you David ? Or is this issue possibly something in my profile ?

Thanks,

Roderick

283
General Discussion / Re: Windows 10 and privacy
« on: August 02, 2015, 11:54:49 pm »
Hm I thought you cannot anymore install eCS on FAT, can you?

Anyway, that is off-topic.

You can't. From what I can remember FAT installation in eCS has never been possible in eCS.
Anybody welcome to correct me.

Apart from that you have no long file name support. So some programs will not work.
Just one quick example I could find in Firefox: plugin-container.exe.
Now maybe you can rename it to 8.3 file names. But you are bound to run into some software maybe needing file names longer then 8.3.

Apart the above pretty limiting factor. I also think that in terms of reliability FAT would be the wurst off in terms of when you get a crash... Then again not that weird as the FAT is the oldest file system. around...
With HPFS, JFS and FAT I have had system crashes. But FAT certainly gave the most damage. Its true HPFS and JFS can also blow up and CHKDSK can then "repair" your partition. But by far most blown up OS/2 installation for me happened on FAT volumes.

Lastly the performance drain you would have with FAT. While I know some people still using HPFS.
JFS also has the large file system  cache... A few months ago I did see Firefox load from a HPFS partition...
It works but its certainly putting your computer back in first gear, instead of making it work snappy.

Roderick

284
Networking / Re: windows 7 does not see os/2 device
« on: July 22, 2015, 01:35:41 pm »
Did you also read the manual on the DVD you got with the system. Its the eCS 2.2 quickguide that has a section in it on networking.

285
Programming / Re: support opengl
« on: July 05, 2015, 07:08:22 pm »
David his right, OpenGL software implementation of IBM is very slow.

Besides OS/2 having a very old version of Open GL that is software based from IBM and extremely slow.
SNAP also has MesaGL (of the top of my head thats what its called).  If you do have SNAP running on your system you can see that in the SNAP setup utility. It also shows the frame rate of some of the MesaGL animations it can display.
WHen you run that you understand with the frames per second how much OpenGL demands of your system.

I have read Arca Noae purchased a license for Scitech SNAP. But I doubt they will implement hardware OpenGL in SNAP.
Unless the situation has changest of the years. When I still worked at Mensys I did talk (about 10 years) to an engineer about OS/2 OpenGL hardware support. At the time two issue's where around.

1. Implemening hardware 3D support is a lot of work, compared to 2D support.

2. An even bigger issue is still that some vendors do not provide specifications for all chipsets. On Linux I have seen it recently where in some cases its better to run the binaries of the device manufactor. So getting specs for OS/2 would be difficult.

The last hurdle that then comes up (possibly) is that I do not know what our Java implementatation has for OpenGL support.
Should the Java API calls not communicate with a call to video subsystem (if we would have hardware OpenGL support).
I would be surprised if does OpenGL calls in Java would currently even be mapped to softwareGL.

Anyway a lot of details that would need to work to get Java OpenGL to work.

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

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