OS/2 e-Zine! - Answers from e-Zine!

Answers from e-Zine!

elcome to a brand new place to get answers to the OS/2 questions that are nagging you! Each month we'll bring you tips, tricks, questions and answers from our readers and contributors relating to common (and some not so common) OS/2 problems and questions. If you've got a question or tip you would like to share with us, send it in and we'll make you famous!

Now, for this month's questions and tips...

- I only have one floppy disk drive, yet OS/2 puts a "Drive A" and a "Drive B" icon in my Drives folder. How can I get rid of the "Drive B" icon?

I know when I first started using OS/2 Warp at work, I was frustrated by the "B:" drive icon. I have two floppies at home (where I started with OS/2), so I had never encountered this before. Remembering that OS/2 is object oriented, and with a bit of research, I found an answer. These instructions are for OS/2 Warp, but the theory should be sound for OS/2 2.1+.

To get rid of the "B:" drive icon (remember, this just gets rid of the icon from the drives folder, if you have a "B:" drive, you'll still be able to access it via a command line):

Right click on the "Drives" icon
Choose "Settings"
Select the "Include" tab
Select the "Add" button
Delete the * (in the "Comparison value" field) and type drive b in its place
Change the radio button from "Include" to "Exclude"
Click on the "Add" button
Close the "Settings" notebook

Now, when you open the drives icon, you won't have a "B:" drive!
- Stacy King

- I have been using Warp for some time with only 8 meg of RAM and I recently upgraded to 32 meg. As soon as I swapped the new memory for the old, OS/2 would not boot, giving a TRAP error before it loaded the WPS and mentioning something about the SINGLEQ$ driver. I'm positive the memory is the proper speed, parity, etc. and all BIOS settings are optimal. What could be wrong?

With a problem so vague, there are a number of things that could be wrong but one thing to watch out for when getting errors related to SINGLEQ$ is possible conflicts between the video driver and parts of the system. As unlikely as it seems, try backing out to normal VGA and see if this clears up the problem. To do this:

Reboot
Press Alt-F1 when the small white square appears in the top left corner of the screen
Press V to reset your system to a normal VGA display
Continue booting normally

In some cases this may solve the problem and the WPS will appear. If it does, you can then reinstall your card's normal video drivers (either with selective install or with the install routine that came with your video card's OS/2 driver) and see if they continue to cause problems or if all is well. In some cases, the drivers just need to be re-installed after all hardware and memory is in the system.
- Ethan Hall Beyer

- I run both Warp and Win95 on my 486dx2-66 9-meg machine. In order to take advantage of HPFS, I've got each on a separate partition, Warp on an HPFS and Win95 on a FAT. I downloaded Just Add OS/2 Warp a while ago after seeing something in its documentation about allowing you to access/use Windows 95's long filenames in addition to Warp's HPFS long filenames. After searching long through JAOW's docs, though, I came to the unpleasant conclusion that the only way this could be done was if both OSes were on the same partition, running under dual-boot (and therefore no use of HPFS possible).

My question is this: Is there any way to use JAOW to access Windows 95's long filenames when Warp is on its own HPFS partition?

The short answer is no. The utility in the JAOW package will create a LFN Extended Attribute for the VFAT filenames on your FAT partition. However, very few OS/2 programs can make use of these. The Workplace Shell and Stardock's Object Navigator are notable exceptions. However, unless you are content to only manipulate these files with the WPS, you gain no practical benefit from running the JAOW program (as the majority of OS/2 programs will have no idea how to use the LFN EA on the FAT drive).

One of the rumored features of the upcoming release of OS/2 (codename Merlin) is native support for VFAT LFN entries. We'll see...

- Kris Kwilas

- A couple months ago I saw a television add for the Macintosh. This kid was sleeping, and he was awakened by his computer playing some sort of multimedia file, a montage of scenes he presumably recorded and put together with some cacophonic accompaniment. Wow, I thought, that's pretty cool. Using your computer as a multimedia alarm clock. I bet OS/2 can do that.

My question is this. How can I rig up OS/2 to play a given track on my CD-ROM at a given time? I have figured out how to command OS/2 to launch an application (CDPM.EXE) at a certain time through Planner, but I don't know how I can tell my system to play a specific track (besides track one). I imagine this would be an elementary thing to do under REXX, but the on-line documentation doesn't help me out. Any ideas?

There is a PLAY.CMD REXX program that comes with MMOS2. Use this command line, assuming you have your CD hooked up as cdaudio01 (look in the "Parameters" box in the "Settings" notebook of the PM CD player program to be sure).

PLAY DEV=CDAUDIO01 TIMEFMT=MS FROM=800000 TO=1017000

This example is for a time format in milliseconds (1000 ms per second) and is for track 4 on one of my CDs which begins at 13:20 (800,000 ms) and ends at 16:57 (1,017,000 ms). You must convert the times to milliseconds by multiplying seconds by 1000 and inserting the numbers as above. For more info on REXX see The REXX Cookbook (e-mail for more info).
- Merrill Callaway

That's it for this month. If you have a tip or question that you don't see covered here, don't hesitate to send them in!

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