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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