Wossen Wyatt 🇬🇾🐧💿💾This time we're netbooting OS/2 Warp.
Like McDonald's, I'm lovin' it!
Disk-less Tandys Part III - OS/2 Warp Connect 3.0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=d16FVexFxfw
YouTube
movqNeat OS/2 feature: The “settings” window of an icon usually shows some generic options. That’s what I’m used to these days. In OS/2, it can also show program-specific settings. The video shows me configuring two launchers for FTP-PM with different connection settings.
Digging deeper into the WPS (e.g., what do I have to do to create such a settings dialog for my own programs) is on my not-necessarily-small TODO list. I’ll get there … eventually.
OS/2, “DOS from drive A:”, and EXIT_VDM.COM:
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-01-03/0/POSTING-en.html
Maybe someone can confirm or disprove the hypothesis (HLT creates exception → OS/2 inspects next opcode). 🤔 It’s getting hard to find good sources on this.
Exploring OS/2’s virtualization features a little bit:
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-12-13/0/POSTING-en.html
OS/2’s shadows are somewhat similar to symbolic links or Windows’ shortcuts, but different: The exist only as a feature in the GUI, not in the filesystem. The good thing is that you can’t break a shadow’s link by renaming the original/target. The bad thing is, well, they don’t exist in the filesystem. 😅 That feels particularly odd to me, given my heavily UNIX-focused perspective.
“Shadow” is kind of an unexpected name, too. In the German version, this is called “Referenz” (reference), which is quite a bit more intuitive, I think. 🤔
Still trying to customize the keyboard layout on OS/2.
None of the resources I can find indicate that any file other than KEYBOARD.DCP is involved. And yet, my modifications only work in an OS/2 command window but not GUI applications.
I’m stuck. Might be time to ask for help … if I can find someone who still knows about this stuff. 🤔
Damn … I dug through the description of the KEYBOARD.DCP file format, made some changes, and it worked – but only at an OS/2 command prompt and not in the GUI. 😢
So that probably means the Workplace Shell has its own, different keyboard handling …
I guess finding out how to customize the keyboard layout on OS/2 is going to be one of my next projects. It’s quite annoying to be stuck with the standard layouts. On Linux, I made some adjustments to the standard German layout and I’ve been using that since ~2010 now. There must be a way to do the same on OS/2 – just gotta find out how. 🤔 (Famous last words.)
This is the “cleanest” way I found (so far) to write C code for OS/2 Warp 3/4 that links against the stock 16 bit TCP/IP stack (no need to install Fixpaks or anything):
https://movq.de/v/a91f758467/connect-tk45-stack16.c
tl;dr: Make OpenWatcom use headers and LIB files from the OS/2 Toolkit v4.5.
It appears to work, but it does not make me happy.
The JPEGs in my blog don’t render correctly in IBM WebExplorer 1.0. Should I debug this? 🤪
It’s kind of intriguing, ngl … Works in version 1.2 on Warp 4, though.
