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PCLT9 Apr 1995
This is not the place for a full discussion of the Warp installation process. IBM has done a lot of work so that Warp will install automatically on most mainstream computers. However, there are many obscure hardware vendors who sold equipment that just barely works on Plain Old DOS, and there are a number of new cards that appear initially with only Plain Old Windows drivers. The manual that comes with OS/2 is fairly comprehensive here and does not need to be restated.
The "Easy Install" process will install Warp on the C: drive and establish a Dual Boot configuration. DOS system files are moved to the C:\OS2\SYSTEM directory. The BOOT.COM program switches the DOS and OS/2 system files and selects which operating system boots. Before starting, make sure that there is enough space (~50 megs, plus 10 more for multimedia) on the C: drive to hold all the files.
The "Advanced Install" will install OS/2 on any disk letter, provided that it is possible to install the Boot Manager in its own one megabyte partition on the first hard disk. If there is no room for Boot Manager, it will probably be easier to move some files around and install on the C drive.
Warp will detect the presence of most Sound Blaster or Media Vision sound cards. During the installation of the Warp operating system, it will also install the multimedia drivers in the MMOS2 directory.
If Warp is installed on a typical DOS/Windows system, all of the disks will be formatted with the "FAT" file system. OS/2 has another file system, called "HPFS" that provides long file names and better performance on larger systems. However, HPFS requires a large amount of memory and is not a good choice on typical desktop configurations. A user with 8 megabytes of RAM who intends to run Warp with Internet or Multimedia support should use only FAT volumes and should remove or comment out the first line of CONFIG.SYS:
REM IFS=D:\OS2\HPFS.IFS /CACHE:64 /CRECL:4
This will free up memory and can make a big difference in performance.
Some clever options can also take up large amounts of memory. Although it may look nice to have a picture as the background of the display, an image has to be loaded into memory. At high resolution (1024x768) the image will occupy 768K of memory. Someone in a memory constrained environment should avoid "cute" options.
The Bonus Pak is distributed as either a directory on CDROM or a whole bunch of diskettes. There are many programs in the Pak, but the four that will be discussed here are the Multimedia Viewer, the Internet Connection for OS/2, Person to Person, and Works.
The Multimedia Viewer provides additional programs and file formats to extend the base multimedia support installed with Warp. The component of the operating system that provides the ability to play multimedia files is called MMPM and it is installed in the \MMOS2 directory. In OS/2 2.0 it was a separate program item. In OS/2 2.1 it was distributed with the OS/2 system but was installed separately. In Warp, MMPM is installed automatically when the system detects a sound card during the installation of the basic operating system.
The Multimedia Viewer include components of a previous product called Ultimedia Workplace. It was originally targeted to the developers of multimedia projects. However, the ability to more easily handle images and sound files now extends to the ordinary user community. In particular, Gopher and the Web Browser make it easy to transfer a photograph from the Smithsonian or an image of artwork at the Louvre. Multimedia Viewer is supposed to provide an easy way to organize these images.
The Bonus Pak program calls a utility named MINSTALL to install the Viewer software. MINSTALL is part of the MMPM support and is responsible for installing and updating all software related to multimedia support. For example, Multimedia Viewer includes support for the .AU sound file format commonly used on the Internet to store sound files. Although this support is packaged with Viewer, it actually goes into the MMOS2 directory and extends the capability of all the existing multimedia utilities and program interfaces. Other files are installed in the \VIEWER directory.
Multimedia files are too large to be comfortably fetched using a SLIP connection through an ordinary modem. It may be better to wait until the LAN Client version of Warp is distributed. The Multimedia Viewer is also appallingly buggy and may not be very useful until IBM releases the first set of fixes.
The Internet Connection for OS/2 is the package of Warp support for client access to Internet resources. It contains five general types of components:
The Internet Connection package is obviously the most important part of the Bonus Pak, but its installation has no important options. The user is asked to select a target disk letter, then the files are copied into the \TCPIP directory and its subdirectories. The hard part will be the configuration that comes later.
Person to Person (P2P) isn't part of the standard set of Internet programs. It is an rather nice IBM package for workgroup communication that happens to work over the Internet. A group of users in different locations establish a network connection. P2P supplies a shared "whiteboard" on which they can exchange text, graphics, or other files. P2P does not provide voice communication, since this is easily arranged through a telephone conference call. It does allow the exchange of other forms of information.
Works is a grab-bag of simple applications: a word processor, spreadsheet, address book, and date book. These applications are integrated with the Workplace Shell, and WPS is always running. Several people have reported that performance on memory challenged machines was greatly improved by removing Works. Some have suggested that the system was more stable without these applications. At this point, the best advice appears to be to avoid installing Works if its functions are not needed.
Copyright 1995 PC Lube and Tune -- Windows on the World -- H. Gilbert