#OS/2 mouse
12 messages in this thread
Steven,
Good news! and sorta bad news (mouse) on OS/2. I guess I hadn't thought of
that before but, I'll bet no-one's put in the time to cross the mouse
bridge. I think you'll need to get a seperate mouse for OS/2. I can't
imagine trying to use OS/2 without one! It is good to hear that it runs
well though! I've been wondering…I think this makes up my mind about
whether or not to attempt OS/2 on mi-Amiga (yet another piece of hardware
to remember).
O-very-beese. It does take up a little bit of space on your hard drive. If
you don't have 16m (ram) or so and try running a bunch of applications,
simultaniously, you can see that swap file eating up a lot more of your
disk. I think you'd have to expect another 5 to 20 on top of the 40m.
I have used all the versions since release and like 2.0 the best. I'm not
sure why I haven't had the company order me 2.1. I'll have to work on
that.
Yep, windows stuff should(!) work pretty much the same.
Robb (via AP)
Robb,
Well, as luck would have it, I remembered this old serial mouse lying
around, so I hooked it up to the serial port on a spare I/O card and voila!
Admittedly a mouse makes moving around a bit easier!! I tried running the
Windows emulation, which was OK, and even tried doing a program install
(Quicken), which went fine. Then I migrated Quicken to OS/2 and was able to
run it from the desktop. So it appears that went well.
However, I begin to wonder why I need OS/2 when all the power apps I
have are Window's apps? And I know I'm not going to spend another couple thou'
on OS/2 apps. So, is this OS/2 stuff just a cute little something to play
with? I had to devote an entire drive to it, remove the IDE controller in
order to use this SCSI drive, so there ain't much I can do here except install
lots of Window's apps to run under OS/2 which all run just fine under Windows.
I'm not sure I see the point.
Now, the 2.1 question. Since I know nothing about OS/2 versions, I can
only say that whay I've READ says that 2.1 release is much more robust and
stabler than any earlier version and that the Windows emulation is almost fully
3.1 compliant, and it supports better DOS sessions. That's what I've read. I
can say that the installation went without a hitch, although I didn't try
anything fancy. I did a standard install on an entire drive without any added
partitions, no boot manager, no dual boot, etc. My BB has 8 meg installed. I
cannot complain about the installation, other than it's so time consuming.
Steven,
I thought you'd have a better time with a mouse for OS/2. Hmmm…now it's
got me thinking though, I don't have room on this desk at home (it's big!
built it myself) for another mouse/pad.
Well, really can't tell you that you need OS/2 to run your Windoze apps
'cause the reason I want it seems to be different. I need it because I'm
trying to get IBM mainframes and Tandems and DECs and Windoze and DOS and
Novell/Netware and OS/2 gateways and Macs(Skimpy here) to all talk
together and since OS/2 runs just about everything a DOS or Windows
workstation can run I figure it's the best platform for me, at my desk,
because I can load and run the programs they are using. I'm mostly
communications oriented, at work, if ya couldn't tell. So, if I can get
the OS/2 platform to work at home I'll be happy (even though those calls
from work always come at the wrong time).
Yep, I've read the same stuff on 2.1. I've not had any problems (well the
winos2 stuff doesn't seem to do fonts quite right) with 2.0 and the stuff
I've been running. Just gotta put the paperwork in motion for 2.1. I could
get OS/2 brand new at home with less time and effort and $ than it takes
just to get an upgrade at work…What a waste of people-power.
Other than feeding the thing 25+ disks, OS/2 2.0 did seem to be much more
easy to install than the MS product. If you need to get into some real
hard specifics about DOS…boxes(?)…it can be a challenge though.
By the way, for anyone else, Steven is talking about running OS/2 on BB. I
am purely talking about it from a PS/2 at work, point of view.
By the way, I don't remember which PC-Board you have. What is your
OS/2-via-Amiga configuration?
Oh, hmmm, I think we may have stumbled into a thread here that's not quite
applicable? New Spreadsheets and OS/2 seem a bit distant.
Robb
(I'm sure we'll see summer here(?) soon!(?))
===> Via AP! <===
Robb,
My "PC Board" is an A2386SX 25 mhz w/8 meg in a 3000T. Because I have
a small hard drive on the PC side with an IDE controller, I use SuperStor to
compress it for more space. But OS/2 and SuperStor are incompatible, so I was
temporarily using a cheap scsi controller and a small scsi drive just to
install and get OS/2 running to see what it's like. I bought OS/2 out of
curiosity just to see what a real multitasking OS would be like in a DOS box.
I don't run at home on a network, so I didn't need it for networking. The
network at the University isn't oriented around OS/2, but is oriented around
DOS systems with some Macs. The network is very new, so it isn't universally
available at the school. However, the University doesn't support OS/2 nor
Windows nor Macs running System 7.x. I know, you are asking what does it
support? I really don't know other than if you have a pretty plain DOS system
you're in good shape!! I use an Amiga at school with an Amax in it emulating a
Mac, because all my work at school is done in a Mac environment. We have a
dozen Macs in the department and none of them will work right on the network.
Right now they gave up and just have us connected to a department printer!!
They can't figure out how to get us working fully on the network.
Anyway, I did get the serial mouse working and have played around for a
few hours, loaded up some Windows stuff and just generally fooled around with
OS/2. Given that I have so much Windows stuff I can't really see what
advantage OS/2 provides for my personal use. It is memory and disk demanding,
it is enormous in size. Hard to believe that it takes so much software to
multitask on the Intel based CPUs when the Amiga does it just as well in much
less memory and hard drive space. OS/2 is sluggish on the 386SX, but no more
so than is Windows. Compared to the Amiga it's a snail wrapped in a M-61
Tank!!
Can't wait to see what Windows NT is like! The OS/2 docs leave a lot
to be desired. There's a lot of info in them, but a lot more that isn't. I
can't find anything to tell me how system resources are being used. Don't have
any idea how much memory OS/2 is using nor how much is free. I have no idea
how to optimize the setup. I know how the DOS side is setup, but not how the
OS/2 side is set up. Precious little about how to configure things, modify
Config.sys, etc. Don't have any idea if the resources indicated on the DOS
emulation is freed up for OS/2. In other words I don't really know much about
it and the manuals aren't very helpful beyond the basics. Took me over an hour
of rummaging through them to finally figure out how to get the SVGA video
working. In the end it was really simple, but finding out was a real pain.
The books say nothing about changing the DOS prompt! Not a big deal, but I'd
just like to know. Nothing to explain what all those lines in the Config.sys
are for. Although I read the installation guide, it never told me whether I
would partition the hard drive BEFORE installing OS/2 are do it during
installation. Typically, we have this bloated operating system with
documentation more suited to a simple program!!
Oh well, it only cost me $169 to find all this out. A cheap education,
all things considered. Now I just need to buy a 240 meg IDE hard drive so I
can actually install this thing in my normal setup without having to change
things on my regular DOS hard drive. The sad thing is I'll have to reinstall
OS/2 because the scsi controller and the IDE controller don't like one another.
If you want to know more about OS/2, spend some time on OS2USER and OS2SUPP.
You can get answers to all of your questions there.
BTW, one reason that it takes more of everything for OS/2 to multitask is that
it also protects each program from another (unlike Windows or the Ami). Another
reason is that PCs don't have a 512K BIOS with a large part of the OS in it. A
third reason is the basic inefficiency of the Intel h/w with its lack of
registers.
PS, one of the reasons to use OS/2 over windows is Free System Resources (you
won't run out). OS/2 V2.1 also runs many Windows and DOS programs faster than
they run in their native environments.
BobS 24-Jul-93 21:33
Bob,
Thank you for the info. I've been agonizing over whether it's
worthwhile switching. As it is I would only have Windows apps to run, so I
wasn't really sure if it was worth the trouble. OS/2 didn't seem to run any
differently on the BB than did Windows, they are both slow. OS/2 also seems to
need a lot more ram and the BB only has 8 meg. However, at present the main
problem I was trying, unsuccessfully, to deal with was how to get the Amiga
mouse to work in OS/2. The AMOUSE.COM program won't run in OS/2, so I can't
get access to the Amiga mouse. I had to put in a serial card and use a serial
mouse I had lying around. Although that's not a major problem, you caannot get
two serial ports on the I/O card because of interrupt conflicts with the BB.
Thus, if I use the serial port for the mouse, there isn't one for a modem. If
you know how to get the Amiga mouse to work, I'd sure like to learn the secret.
Steven, with OS/2, cache ram numbers are also important. A 256K cache board
seems *lots* faster than a 64K cache, all other things being equal. I use a
486/33 with 8MB and have no speed problems except when entering and exiting the
Windows environment, which generates lots of reading and writing.
FWIW, I find Release 2.1 MUCH better than 2.0 in terms of crash resistance and
data integrity as well as serial port i/o. The 2.1 Docs are also much better
and include a section on fine tuning the OS for speed.
Rob,
Well, I have set the cache to 512K, but it's difficult to tell what the
difference is. I downloaded a program called Memsize and when OS/2 is running
it says I have less than 1 meg of free memory! Out of an 8 meg system that
ain't much! My small hard drive also makes it difficult to load many windows
programs. I have only 65 meg of drive space left after installing OS/2 and
reserving 20 meg for a DOS and DATA partition. I have over 70 meg of windows
stuff!!! OS/2 is quite sluggish on my 386 bridgeboard, but then not any worse
than windows. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to get the Amiga mouse to
work on OS/2. I have a serial mouse which is working fine, but I don't know how
to get the Janus AMOUSE.COM to work on the OS/2 side. I am using OS/2 2.1,
BTW.
I meant hardware cache ram, not the diskcache. Wasn't Amouse optimized for an
MS-DOS serial i/o emulation? OS/2 uses a totally different serial port driver
(and let us be thankful for THAT).
Rob,
Well, the BB doesn't have any hardware cache ram. Only caching you can
do is via a diskcache. There's no ram cache, if you are referring specifically
to memory caches between the slower 16 bit bus and the 32 bit CPU. That would
definitely make the BB run a lot faster, but it isn't in the hardware.
The BB mouse is an emulation of MOUSE.COM, so technically it works with
any program, including Windows, which supports a MOUSE.COM type of mouse. I
don't really know if OS/2 supports that. I have a call into IBM tomorrow to
try and determine what's possible. I know they must have any answer. Someone
out there must have a MOUSE.COM style of mouse they tried running under OS/2,
so perhaps there's a solution.
Stephen:
I got an ad from Tiger Software (800-888-4437) last week. IBM's running a
rebate program that gets you OS/2 2/1 upgrade for USD 89.90 minus a USD 30
rebate (plus 29 cent postage). The original OS/2 upgrade even let you upgrade
from DOS. Not sure if this one does though.
Paul
Paul,
The upgrade is much less expensive than buying it new. I didn't have
an older version to upgrade from, so I had to bite the higher price. However,
$162 is a lot less than the under $500 MS says NT will cost!!