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by Roger Govind, April 2001 |
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| OS/2 Usage Tips | ||
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Some useful tips collected over the years which help ensure you get the best from OS/2 Warp 4.
If you make any changes in your CONFIG.SYS the changes will only take effect once you have rebooted. SET RESTARTOBJECTS=STARTUPFOLDERSONLY This ensures only what is in the startup folder is started. SET KILLFEATUREENABLED=ON This allows you to kill rogue processes by holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the 'Switch to another application' in the Warp Centre bar. SET SCKILLCONFIRMDISABLED=ON This will drop the need for the confirmation box. SET SCUSEPRETTYCLOCK=1 This turns on the fancy digital clock in the Warp Center bar. SET SCCANBENUKED=ON This makes the WarpCenter object "nukeable" i.e. you can right click and choose "Delete". If you like killing objects this is for you!! SET SCFINDUTILITY= whatever you want This allows you to define an external find utility and bypass the built-in one. Click the little flashlight icon (Warpcenter) and you get whatever you specified! If you haven't yet registered your copy of Warp 4 and don't want to have it keep asking you to register, then rename the directory x:\os2\art (where x = OS/2 install drive). To actually remove the registration code from your machine (this is better) navigate *through the Drives ICON* to x:/OS2/install/Installed Objects and double click on "Install Object - Inventory". Then check the box next to "art" and then click on "uninstall" and then select "art" in the next box that opens and then "uninstall" again...this will totally uninstall the "art" directory and all components relating to registration. If you want to be able to position your Desktop -e.g. during a presentation you need to have a titlebar. This is how you can get a titlebar on your Desktop:
Now you will have a titlebar that will not go away until you restart the Desktop. If you want to minimise your Desktop you need to use the same procedure, but now press the SHIFT key while double clicking. You can get your Desktop back by choosing the Desktop entry from the Window List again without pressing any keys. You can get the Desktop back to fullsize without rebooting. Simply open the WarpCenter properties and switch "Show only when mouse is over Center's position".
It is possible to scroll text in the window behind the foreground one that by holding down the LEFT ctrl key the data can be scrolled without sending the active front window to the rear and having to pull it back to the front.
A double-click with LMB in the title bar of a window in the background maximizes that window (and vice versa) and puts it in the forground. When you press the Ctrl-Button while double-clicking, the window stays in the background. In the same way, You can drag windows around with RMB without moving them in the foreground. Position cursor with right mousebutton and tap left button. This pastes clipboard at cursor point. System wide from editors to filename input fields to command line windows and command line prompts. Essentially a neat text copy/paste operation. Great for grabbing URLS, filenames, directories, paragraphs etc. (You can use the left mouse button to position the cursor and tap with the right mouse as you did for the copy, but input fields will, with the slightest movement from you, enter into 'overwrite' mode which will result in you copying to the clipboard again.) So, left swipe right tap to copy... right point and left tap to paste. If you want to change the background you can drag and drop an image file on the preview on the background page in the properties notebook. You can use JPEG files as background image instead of BMP files. Infact you can use any image format that OS/2 can understand as a background image, GIF, PCX, PhotoCD, TIF, TGA, ... If there is a codec for the format, then it can be used as a wallpaper.
The Hardware Manager Properties Page should be checked to set the detection level for the HWM. The default is 'Use Previous' however, there are also other settings to choose from including 'Full Detection', 'Removed', 'Added', and 'None'. The properties page can be accessed by by Right Mouse Button clicking on the HWM icon in either System Settings folder or any shadow of it, such as, WarpCenter (if you have it there).
If you need Joliet CD format support and you have a current FP (like 4 or 5 for Warp 4 or equivalent on Warp 3) installed, just add /W to the CDFS.IFS entry in your Config.sys. This will look like: IFS=E:\OS2\BOOT\CDFS.IFS /Q /W After the next reboot you won't see the short names with "~" but the real long ones. Hidden feature in OS/2 (also known as an EasterEgg). This feature has been in OS/2 since v2.0. Make the Desktop the focus (click the left mouse button on it), Hit CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+O and wait. Press ENTER to exit. If you wish to get rid of this to reclaim disk space, delete the AAAAA.EXE and AAAAA.BMP files from the \OS2\BITMAP directory. |
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