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Top Document: Compaq Contura Aero Frequently Asked Questions Previous Document: 3.3.8.1 Can I run OS/2 on the Aero? Next Document: 3.3.8.3 OS/2 Warp in 4MB RAM? See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge
Here's a summary of problems with installing Warp: (and some answers from
someone else):
Warp does not support the Aero's PCMCIA adapter. They may have released a
patch, but I'm not aware of it. This means that if you try to do the
standard install, after about disk 6 Warp will reboot the system and try
to do the rest of the install from inside Warp after booting off the hard
drive. Since Warp only recognizes the floppy if you boot OS/2 from the
floppy drive, this won't work (and any floppy access will hang the Aero).
I found out about response file installation -- write a response file to
automate the install process, so that you don't reboot the Aero, but
install everything off the floppies in one shot. The problems with this
were: (a) The response file processor is buggy. When it prompts you to
insert a particular floppy, it may develop amnesia and not remember the
name of the floppy, so then you have to play Russian roulette with the
floppy disks. (b) Apparently, printer drivers do not get installed. What
you then have to do is boot OS/2 from floppy (after creating a special
boot disk that puts you directly into the OS/2 command line) and then
extract the printer drivers en masse from one of the Warp floppies onto a
subdirectory on your hard drive. When you go to create a printer object on
the PM desktop, you can opt to get a printer driver from a hard disk
directory.
[A] I never developed a problem with installing from response files, but
from memory I was actually using images I copied to it to the hard disk. I
do remember that printers for me got installed properly; you just have to
put them into the response file properly. There's a separate list of
printer drivers in another file that you have to find the index for (so it
knows which one), then you just put that next to the port in the response
file.
[A] Hmmm... I remember that I specified the correct bit in the response
file to install the printer driver(s), but apparently it didn't work
correctly. sigh It's just a screwy business. Anyway, by extracting all the
printer drivers into a temp directory on my hard drive, I had the ability
to change printer drivers at will without worrying about floppies.
After I had gone through all this crap, I was left with two problems: (a)
The floppy disk was still inaccessible from Warp. (b) I could not print.
An IBM tech support guru told me that Warp defaults to using polling in
its printer driver instead of interrupt driven printing, because some
sound card owners had complained that previous versions of OS/2 wouldn't
allow them to share an interrupt between their sound card and the parallel
port. There is a way to go into the config.sys file and set a certain
option such that the printer / parallel port driver uses interrupt driven
I/O. Apparently, you have to do this if you want to do printing on the
Aero, but I'm not sure if that even works because of the Aero's funky
hardware.
[A]I have no problems printing, but I only use serial (all my printers I
have accessible have computers attached to the parallel ports, and the
others don't have centronics ports).
To change to interrupt IO you change a line to: device=print01.sys /irq
(It's in the command reference book). The serial port's fine for printing,
but I don't know about the printer port.
[A] Yup, saw that trick in OS/2 magazine. Apparently, a lot of users were
having problems with the polling printer I/O --- the timing is very
sensitive, and often won't work with your particular setup. The interrupt
driven I/O seems to solve the problem for most Warp users, so this
probably would have worked for the Aero.
After I ran into the printing problem, I gave up and returned Warp for a
refund. It just wasn't worth the aggravation.
User Contributions:Top Document: Compaq Contura Aero Frequently Asked Questions Previous Document: 3.3.8.1 Can I run OS/2 on the Aero? Next Document: 3.3.8.3 OS/2 Warp in 4MB RAM? Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: Philip Wilk <PWilk-aerofaq@ZenSpider.com>
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:12 PM
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