Big Blue's Speed Trip

Fast, stable, and relatively easy to use, Warp is by far the best OS/2 yet. But is it good enough to displace Windows?

Barry Nance

A whirlwind of events accompanied the release of IBM's OS/2 Warp last October. Reports of bugs, recalls, and incompatibilities even reached the mainstream press.

To judge Warp for ourselves, we evaluated it on an even dozen computers, among them a Twinhead 486/33 notebook PC with 8 MB of RAM, an 8-MB 486/25 Compudyne equipped with a Creative Labs SoundBlaster card, a 4-MB 486/25 IBM PS/Value-Point, a 16-MB Gateway 2000 386/33, and a 32-MB 486/66 Zenith Z-Station 500. We networked Warp (using client software sold separately) with Artisoft's LANtastic for OS/2, Novell NetWare 3.12, and IBM's LAN Server 4.0. We used video adapters with chip sets from Cirrus Logic, Tseng Labs, ATI, a nd S3. The software we ran on top of Warp included Lotus 1-2-3 for OS/2, Microsoft Word for Windows, Microsoft Access, IBM's C Set++ 32-bit C compiler, IBM's DB2/2 relational database manager, Watcom's VX-REXX compiler, KnowledgeWare's Application Developer's Workbench, Datastorm's Procomm Plus, and the BonusPak applications that come with Warp.

With rare exceptions, we found Warp installed easily and ran applications, utilities, and development tools with great stability. During our testing, we also observed several important differences between Warp and previous versions of OS/2. Warp displays screen objects, especially the drives object, faster than before. Warp makes it easier than ever to avoid command-line sessions; a few minutes with the speedy new drives object encouraged us to switch to an object-oriented view of files. And Warp runs programs, albeit slowly, in low-memory situations in which earlier versions of OS/2 would have failed.

In fact, the few problems we had with Warp were caus ed by unsupported hardware or niggling bugs that we were able to work around easily. You should always be careful when adding a new video adapter, sound card, or other adapter to your computers: Device-driver support remains one of OS/2's few weak points.

BYTE Editor-at-Large Jon Udell examines the issue of Warp/Windows interaction and Warp's implementation of Win32 in this month's Core Technologies Operating Systems column, ``A Warped Perspective.''

A New Face for OS/2

Warp displays a configurable (and optional) ``launch bar'' that you use to start programs ( see the screen ). The launch bar can show text or just icons, be displayed horizontally or vertically, and hold the icons of frequently-used programs either on the launch bar or in drawers that you open and close. What's more, when you drag and drop a program's icon to the launch bar, the latter automatically configures itself. In general, Warp adds more drag-and-drop to OS/2's already object-oriented interface.

Warp changes the way OS/2 loads frequently-used DLLs into memory. Earlier versions of OS/2 refetched discarded code segments by loading and relocating functions from the DLL file. Warp, however, loads the DLL functions once and then pages them, with all address fixups and relocations already done, out to the swap file. Your SWAPPER.DAT file will be larger under Warp (in fact, you may want to preallocate the size of the swap file), but your system will be more responsive as a result. In addition, Warp offers a Windows fast-load option that you'll like if you frequently run Windows programs. The fast-load option tells OS/2 to initially run a small, do-nothing Windows program that gets Windows started. Thereafter, your Windows applications load without the overhead of first starting Windows. Unfortunately, OS/2 shut-down detects the do-nothing program as a still-running program and makes you manually close it before you can turn off your PC.

Warp lets you choose from a variety of new mo use pointers, and you can use Comet Cursor to make it easy to find and track the mouse pointer on monochrome displays. You set screen resolutions directly with the System object, so you don't have to open a command-line prompt to change resolutions. Additionally, Warp can automatically restart following an IPE (internal processing error) or CPU trap--a useful feature for file servers running LAN Server or LANtastic for OS/2.

A System Setup object can create a set of OS/2 bootable floppy disks for maintenance purposes. These utility boot disks even have an option for removing OS/2 from your PC. A less drastic uninstall utility lets you remove portions of OS/2 from your computer. Each time it boots, OS/2 lets you press Alt-F1 to interrupt the boot process, at which time you can revert to an earlier CONFIG.SYS and INI file configuration, switch back to VGA resolution, or obtain a command-line prompt. If you modify your OS/2 configuration and then discover your PC won't boot, the new Alt-F1 behavior can sa ve you from reinstalling Warp.

A new warp tool diagnoses such hardware problems as shared IRQs (interrupt requests). It displays a wealth of detail on IRQ assignments, adapter memory usage, SCSI addresses, and other system-level data. The Presentation Manager-based System Information Tool also displays such information, but not in as much detail.

Left to Your Own Devices

Warp includes drivers for more video adapters, printers, SCSI cards, and CD-ROM drives than earlier versions of OS/2 did. Unfortunately, the lists that pop up during installation are needlessly cryptic. The video list, for example, is still dominated by the names of chip-set manufacturers, not the video-card vendors with whom most users are familiar. The list of supported CD-ROM drives includes Chinon, Hitachi, IBM, Mitsumi, NEC, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Sony, Texel, and Toshiba.

Many of the OS/2 complaints that IBM technical support handled center around video adapters, so the list of adapters supported by Warp is especially important. Warp comes with drivers for the products named in the table, ``Warp-Supported Video Adapters and Chip Sets''. Note, however, that Warp doesn't include drivers for some of these adapters' PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) versions.

SoundBlaster, Pro Audio Spectrum, and IBM sound cards work in Windows and OS/2 at the same time. However, you have to ignore the documentation on multimedia in the Information folder and leave the default settings alone, because if you follow the instructions about explicitly installing drivers, you will lose shared sound.

A few Internet messages complained about slow file transfers and dropped characters during serial communications under Warp. To get to the bottom of these problems, we talked to an acknowledged expert in OS/2 serial drivers, Ray Gwinn, a programmer based in Woodbridge, Virginia. Gwinn, who says he hasn't experienced the problems himself, offers a shareware replacement for IBM's COM.SYS and VCOM.SYS dri vers called SIO.SYS and VSIO.SYS (in the IBM.OS2 conference on BIX), which offer better buffer support for 8250 and 16450 UARTs, the old but popular serial communication chips.

Under earlier versions of OS/2, the low-level printer support was interrupt driven, using IRQ7 for LPT1 and IRQ5 for LPT2. On the one hand, interrupt-driven print has low overhead and good throughput. On the other, IRQ conflicts with an 8-bit adapter (a sound card, perhaps), parallel cables that don't employ the pin-10 acknowledge line, and certain printers caused problems in previous versions of OS/2. Warp lets you choose between polled and interrupt-driven print, with polled the default. Some parallel ports and printers work acceptably with OS/2 polled printing, some do not. If you encounter this problem, you can add the IRQ command-line parameter to Warp's PRINT01.SYS device driver to control print modes.

Installing Warp

We recommend running Warp on at least a 386SX equipped with 6 MB of RAM (IBM says 4 MB), a mouse, VGA or some other supported video adapter (see the table, `` Warp-Supported Video Adapters and Chip Sets ''), 35 to 55 MB of hard disk space, plus up to 30 MB for the BonusPak components. Windows support requires use of the Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.1, or Windows for Workgroups 3.11 distribution disks.

From floppy disk or CD-ROM, Warp installs on supported hardware easily and painlessly. It automatically and correctly detects most SCSI cards, video adapters, sound cards, and other system options. IBM publishes a list of computers and peripherals that work with OS/2 (you can download the list from FTP (file-transfer protocol) sites, such as ftp.cdrom.com). The list also contains drivers available from vendors and on-line sources.

Unfortunately, we found that the Warp install program incorrectly updated the CONFIG.SYS file on some PCs. On the Z-Station 500, for example, with the parallel port set to bidirectional, Warp wouldn't print unless we used the /IRQ command-line parameter in the BASE-DEV=PRINT01.SYS statement (during a test of Warp's ability to reinstall itself, the install program had deleted the /IRQ parameter). The install program also insisted on inserting the Warp HPFS (High Performance File System) driver on a file server machine that was already running the LAN Server 386HPFS driver. The upshot is that it will sometimes be necessary to edit CONFIG.SYS after Warp has taken its best crack at configuring itself.

Running at Warp Speed

Technically, you can run Warp on a PC that has only 4 MB of RAM. However, in a low-memory environment, you won't be able to load Windows, multimedia software, or network software, and you won't be able to use the HPFS (which requires its own device driver and RAM cache). We found that a 4-MB machine could slowly run two and sometimes three DOS sessions, along with a small OS/2 program. With 6 MB or more, Warp begins to be useful and even speedy.

Warp multitasks nicely. You can run a Windows database program such as Microsoft Access in its own Windows session while you run other Windows programs in a separate session (if you have sufficient RAM). While Access is performing some long-running operation (e.g., table joins), you can switch to other sessions to continue working. Loading a Windows program can take a few seconds longer under OS/2 than under plain Windows 3.x, but once loaded, the programs run as fast as they would under Windows.

From Networking to Games

After installing Warp, we set up the Z-Station 500 as both a NetWare workstation (using the NetWare Client for OS/2 version 2.1) and a LAN Server 4.0 file server. ODINSUP, a requester module that comes with the Warp NetWare client, lets both sets of network software use the Ethernet card; the computer shares its disk drives and locally attached laser printer at the same time it can access files on the NetWare server. As an added bonus, we were able to share the NetWare server's disk dri ves indirectly, via LAN Server 4.0, with workstations on the LAN. The workstations don't have to run NetWare client software to access the NetWare server (the access is slightly slower, however).

The OS/2 version of RPRINTER, a NetWare utility, services NetWare print queues, feeding jobs to the OS/2 print spooler. LAN Server also feeds its print jobs to the spooler. The OS/2 print spooler accepts and correctly manages print jobs from a variety of sources. In contrast, running the DOS-mode RPRINTER underneath regular Windows often caused Windows to crash.

At the other end of the computing spectrum, OS/2 runs game software rather well. One of our Warp users formerly had several DOS boot disks, each with a different EMM386 expanded/extended memory configuration, to run each of his games. Now, with OS/2, each program object in the desktop's Games folder can have its own memory and other settings. The user doesn't have to reboot to run a game and can run different games concurrently.

Ap ps? We Got Apps

The less-than-useful ``productivity applets'' found in earlier versions of OS/2 are gone, replaced by a set of Workplace Shell-enabled software called the BonusPak. The new BonusPak additions to Warp are true applications that make good use of object-oriented Workplace Shell features like pop-up menus, drag and drop, and templates. The BonusPak includes the following:

-- IBM Works A word processor, spreadsheet, business charts, database, and report writer all in one package. It was previously a product called Footprint Works (from Footprint Software).

-- HyperACCESS Lite A Presentation Manager-based, asynchronous terminal emulator from Hilgraeve.

-- Personal Information Manager An integrated appointment calendar, to-do list, planner, and phone/address book. Formerly Arcadia's Workplace Companion.

-- FaxWorks A send/receive fax application. FaxWorks can handle individual names or even distr ibution lists dragged and dropped from its phone book. The program is from SofNet, which is now part of Global Village.

-- IBM Internet Connection TCP/IP over a phone line. Internet Connection uses SLIP (but not PPP) and a set of Internet tools that includes Gopher, NewsReader/2, an FTP client with drag-and-drop, and Telnet for both TTY and 3270 connections. A beta World Wide Web client, Web Explorer/2, should be an official part of the Internet Connection by the time you read this. You can connect to virtually any Internet provider with the Internet Connection, including IBM's Advantis network.

-- Multimedia Viewer Extensions to MMPM/2 (Multimedia Presentation Manager/2), IBM's sound and video utility that has been bundled in previous versions of OS/2 for organizing and displaying GIF, PCX, and TIFF images. Web Explorer/2 uses the Multimedia Viewer.

Warp also comes with CIM (CompuServe Information Manager), IBM's MMPM/2 Video IN (based on Intel's Indeo tec hnology), and a multiuser whiteboard-sharing product called Person to Person.

IBM's Best Shot

There's little doubt that Warp is a more mature operating system than the beta versions of its perceived nemesis, Windows 95. Unlike Warp, Windows 95 will have a hard time running in 4 MB of RAM. What's more, Warp lets you multitask 16-bit Windows applications in separate Windows sessions. Windows 95 still runs such programs cooperatively, not preemptively, so users will still be staring at the hourglass waiting, for example, for Excel recalculating to finish. And Windows 95 can't protect multiple DOS programs from crashing because it lets them share the same interrupt tables in memory, something Warp does not allow.

People already accustomed to DOS or DOS-plus-Windows and who have hardware that Warp supports will find it a refreshing, productive step up.

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ABOUT THE PRODUCT

OS/2 Warp Version 3     $129

IBM
1 Old Orchard Rd.
Armonk, NY 1
0504
(800) 342-6672
(914) 765-1900
fax (800) 426-4329

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WARP-SUPPORTED VIDEO ADAPTERS AND CHIP SETS

ATI Technologies        ATI28800; VGA Wonder XL; Mach 8, 32, and 64
Cirrus Logic            CL-GD5422, -5424, -5426, -5428, -5430, -5434
Headland Technology     HT209
IBM                     8514, XGA, XGA-2, VGA16, VGA256C
S3                      86C801, -805, -805I, - 864, -928
Trident Microsystems    8900B, -C
Tseng Labs              ET4000, ET4000/32, W32, W32i, W32p
Weitek                  Power9000, Power9100
Western Digital         Paradise and WD90C11, -24, -24A, -24A2,
                        -30, -31, -33, -34

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Adding a Program Object in OS/2 Warp

screen_link (28 Kbytes)

You can add a program object to the Launch Bar simply by dragging and dropping it, a new feature introduced in Warp. The Launch Ba r will automatically reconfigure itself to hold the new object.

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Barry Nance is a BYTE consulting editor and has been a programmer for 20 years. He is the author of Using OS/2 Warp 3.0 (Que, 1994). You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at barryn@bix.com .