Subject: [os2genau_digest] No. 1718
From: Digest <deadmail>
To: "OS/2GenAu Digest"<deadmail>
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 00:01:17 EST-10EDT,10,1,0,7200,4,1,0,7200,3600

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Saturday 04 October 2008
 Number  1718
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Subjects for today
 
1  Re:  PMVNC Howto : Kris Steenhaut <kris.steenhaut at kolibrieweg.eu>
2  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program? : Ed Durrant <edurrant at durrant dot mine dot nu>
3  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program? : Peter Moylan <peter at pmoylan dot org>
4  Re:  Describe - Windows version : John Angelico" <talldad at kepl dot com dot au>
5  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program? : Peter Moylan <peter at pmoylan dot org>
6  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program? : Peter Moylan <peter at pmoylan dot org>
7  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program? : Peter Moylan <peter at pmoylan dot org>
8   On board floppy controller failure on ASUS M2V-TVM : Ed Durrant <edurrant at durrant dot mine dot nu>
9  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program? : Peter L Allen" <allenpl at tastelfibre dot com dot au>
10  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program? : Kris Steenhaut <kris.steenhaut at kolibrieweg.eu>
11  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program? : Ian Manners" <deadmail>

**= Email   1 ==========================**

Date:  Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:49:20 +0200
From:  Kris Steenhaut <kris.steenhaut at kolibrieweg.eu>
Subject:  Re:  PMVNC Howto

Ian Manners ha scritto:
> Hi Kris,
>
>   
>> It would be feasible if you would be so kind to explain a bit how it 
>> works. I downloaded both
>>     
>
> ok, when I get home later tonight (2am our time), if I have time,
> I'll sit down and do a basic how to for you and others.
>
> If I cant find one that someone else has alredy done. 
> And if I make the mistake of sitting at the computer ;-)
>
>   
OK. Thank you very much.

-- 
Groeten uit Gent,

   Kris

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**= Email   2 ==========================**

Date:  Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:41:41 +1000
From:  Ed Durrant <edurrant at durrant dot mine dot nu>
Subject:  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program?

Alan Duval wrote:
> Ed Durrant wrote:
>> Alan Duval wrote:
>>>>
>>> I note that the ASUS A7N8X-E deluxe motherboard is said to be very 
>>> good on the www.ecomstation.ru site.
>>> You can buy it now on www.ebay dot com dot au for $95.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Alan Duval
>>
>> Hi Alan,
>>
>>  That looks like a pretty old board - it only supports Athlon XP from 
>> what I can see (i.e. no multi-core processors). I would expect that's 
>> probably at end of life unfortunately.
>
> Yes! I just realized that after looking at the specs.
> If anyone wants an ASUS M2V-TVM  motherboard you can get one from USA. 
> Go to this URL:
>
> http://cgi.ebay dot com/ASUS-M2V-TVM-SOCKET-AM2-Micro-ATX-Motherboard-New_W0QQitemZ350096746941QQcmdZViewItem?_trksid=p3286.m20.l1116 
>
>
> I bought mine from there.
>
> Regards,
>
> Alan
 
>
> 

>
Or $95 from these people in Clayton, Victoria

http://www.scorptec dot com dot au/product/21764

Cheers/2

Ed.
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**= Email   3 ==========================**

Date:  Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:16:51 +1000
From:  Peter Moylan <peter at pmoylan dot org>
Subject:  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program?

On 02/10/08 19:49, John Angelico wrote:
>  On Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:36:20 +1000, Peter Moylan wrote:
>
> > As part of a furniture rearrangement, I'd like to set up one of my
> >  computers as a pure server with no keyboard or monitor. What's a
> > good way to control it from my desktop machine? I can use INIServe
> > to control my own software, and do a lot of the rest of what I want
> > to do via FTP, but there will surely be times when I want to get in
> > and do other things.
>
>  Umm, after watching #2 son Chris do things here with simple NET
>  ADMIN, may I ask how much you expect to want to do?
>
>  If it's not much, could you get by with nothing more special than NET
>  ADMIN (assuming you will be running Netbios)?

It's quite possible that that would be enough, but for some reason I've 
never been a fan of Netbios and I don't have it installed at present. In 
any case, now that I have VNC up and running I seem to have a good 
resolution of the problem. Thanks to all who commented.

-- 
Peter Moylan                          peter at pmoylan dot org
                                      http://www.pmoylan dot org

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**= Email   4 ==========================**

Date:  Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:01:02 +1000 (AEST)
From:  "John Angelico" <talldad at kepl dot com dot au>
Subject:  Re:  Describe - Windows version

On Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:17:55 +1000 (EST), Ian Manners wrote:

>Hi John,
>
>>Ian, we have the Voyager CD here - not far from you.
>
>Think thats the file I found, contains versions for OS/2, Win16
>and Win32 from 24th April 1996 - German and English.

Yes, that's the one.

>>We also have some vague ideas about writing a DLL to convert ODF to/from
>>DeScribe.
>
>I've never used DeScribe myself, used Wordstar, then Framework from
>AshtonTate, and DeD and LateX on DEC Rainbow then Word at work,
>then AmiPro, StarOffice and OpenOffice. Cant even remember what
>the DEC Wordprocessor I used on the VAX was back then.

Seems we have had similar diversity of WP experience :-). I think I have
counted 14 wp packages (not incluidng humble typewriter/s) but I still
reckon DeScribe the best.

The filter idea is an outgrowth of the fact that DeScribe licensed the
Mastersoft filters which probably means there is a standard interface from
DeScribe to the Mastersoft DLLs.

If we can figure out how that part is done, it may be possible to plug in a
new DLL for ODF. But it won't happen next week, of course... 

>
>>If the documents are not too complex, the old Word 5DOS or Word95 filters
>>are acceptable.
>
>So its mainly the formatting is different and those filters just strip out
>the high bits ?

Don't know about the innards, but it could be that MS were not as
aggressive about the file formats as they became with later versions. Even
the RTF filter might be enough.

Best regards
John Angelico
OS/2 SIG
os2 at melbpc dot org dot au or 
talldad at kepl dot com dot au
___________________
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**= Email   5 ==========================**

Date:  Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:46:24 +1000
From:  Peter Moylan <peter at pmoylan dot org>
Subject:  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program?

On 03/10/08 19:09, Ian Manners wrote:
>  Hi Peter,
>
>  I have boxes of PCI and AGP cards that I'm happy to send one or two
>  of to you after all, the software you provide is very cheap but still
>  with excellent support :-)
>
>  And I know the cards are supported by SNAP.

Thanks, Ian, I'd appreciate getting one. Where I'm up to now is that the 
machine running VNC server runs SNAP properly, which means that a 
readable screen appears on the client. I can't adjust the horizontal 
position the way I'd like it - the setup utility moves it in rather 
coarse increments - but that doesn't matter because I'm planning to 
remove the monitor from it soon. Meanwhile, the machine I'm now writing 
this message from is running the VNC client very well, and the SNAP 
driver is about 90% OK. (Mostly the screen is good, but I get lots of 
mouse droppings; and for some reason the driver forgets its colour 
depth, so that on a reboot it comes up in a mode that's guaranteed to 
crash.)

>  Also with PMVNC Server, try ticking the 15bit color box on the Misc
>  setup tab.

Thanks for that hint. I'm surprised that it makes such a big difference. 
Back in the days when I was writing my own drivers for MS-DOS, the 
software for 15-bit and 16-bit colour was almost identical. And I 
imagine the hardware is almost identical too. Oh well, don't argue with 
something that works.

I'm about to stop messing around with my configuration and go for a few 
days' holiday. There's a new woman in my life. That's the good news. The 
bad news is that she lives in Kempsey, which is about three and a 
quarter hours' drive from here, so I do a lot of commuting. I wasn't 
planning to go there this weekend, but after such a frustrating time 
today I've decided to take some time off.

(And I still have e-mail access up there. After I decided that this one 
was going to last, I switched her over from dial-up to broadband, 
including a router that supports both wireless and VoIP. The VoIP is to 
improve her outrageous phone bills, and the wireless is for my laptop. 
And she's now happy to know someone who knows how to install such things.)

-- 
Peter Moylan                          peter at pmoylan dot org
                                      http://www.pmoylan dot org

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**= Email   6 ==========================**

Date:  Sat, 04 Oct 2008 16:02:27 +1000
From:  Peter Moylan <peter at pmoylan dot org>
Subject:  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program?

On 03/10/08 03:08, Kris Steenhaut wrote:
> Ian Manners ha scritto:
>> Its there anyway, makes my life easy in managing my wifes Mac.
>>
>>   
> It would be feasible if you would be so kind to explain a bit how it 
> works. I downloaded both
>
> pmvnc-1.02-bin.zip = server
> pmvnc103_ow.zip = client
>
>
> But alas the *inf and readme* are meant for people already knowing how 
> it works, thus leaving me in complete dispair.
>
> It would be nice to handle eCS and my Mac with the same keyboard and 
> mouse though.
>
Kris, it might help you to know that the two files that Ian mentioned 
above are for OS/2. If you want to control a Mac from a PC then you can 
install the above-mentioned client in OS/2, but you'll have to search 
for a version of VNC server that will run on a Mac.

Personally, I found that you hardly even need to read the INF and README 
to get going. The only non-obvious things that you need to know about are

1. You have to install the "VNC server" on the machine you want to 
control, and you have to leave it running all the time. (In OS/2 you can 
do this by dragging from the server exe to the Startup folder. I'm not 
sure how you do it on a Mac.) The server installation script leaves 
something on your desktop that you can run to set the password, etc.

2. You install the client on the machine that you need to do the 
controlling from.

3. When you run the client, you're asked what you want to connect to, 
and there's a special syntax for this. In my case, I specify 
192.168.1.5:0, where the first bit is the IP address of the machine that 
I want to control, and the ":0" at the end is a compulsory side-effect 
of a convention that's used in Unix. Just add the ":0" without bothering 
to wonder what it means.

-- 
Peter Moylan                          peter at pmoylan dot org
                                      http://www.pmoylan dot org

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**= Email   7 ==========================**

Date:  Sat, 04 Oct 2008 16:24:40 +1000
From:  Peter Moylan <peter at pmoylan dot org>
Subject:  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program?

On 03/10/08 18:21, Peter Moylan wrote:
> On 03/10/08 11:40, Peter L Allen wrote:
>
>> > The colours are terrible, sometimes to the extent that things on
>> > the screen are unreadable, but I'm used to that from things like
>> > Acrobat and Java applications ... in fact, everything that was
>> > written with SNAP Graphics in mind. I'm still not sure what to do
>> > about that problem. I have a Matrox Millennium video card for which
>> > the SNAP driver crashes the OS, so I've always had to use native
>> > Matrox video drivers. One of these days, I guess, I'll have to
>> > switch video cards.
>>
>>  Ran Matrox cards for years but had to rely on single user SNAP
>>  as full version would crash. Eventually found this was caused by the
>>  old native Crystal sound card driver. Now fine with uniaud and SNAP
>>  full version and much more robust overall (Warp4 FP15),
>
> Thanks for that. It's been so long since I've checked what sort of 
> audio I have - and I'm not in the mood to open up the box yet again - 
> that I don't know what my sound card is. However, I see that my 
> CONFIG.SYS contains 9 lines referring to files whose names start with 
> CW, so it's a good bet that I have the Crystal driver. I'm guessing 
> that the following line
>    DEVICE=D:\MMOS2\OPL3.SYS /N:OPL31$
> also belongs to the Crystal software, so I guess I should REM out 
> those 10 lines. (Don't you just hate it when software comes without a 
> documented uninstall method?)
>
> I've just downloaded Uniaud (114RC6) and will now try to install it, 
> then I'll try SNAP again (I have version 3.1.8, which I think is the 
> last version SciTech ever released. Can't figure out how to uninstall 
> the Matrox driver - can't even find it - so I'll just hope that the 
> SNAP installation includes a deinstallation of the existing driver.
>
Status report: someone whose e-mail I've lost said that I had to run 
"minstall" to deinstall the Crystal driver, and indeed that turned out 
to be necessary; through a sequence of many crashes and reboots, I 
discovered that REMming out the relevant part of CONFIG.SYS is not good 
enough. Paradox: since I couldn't find a copy of the Crystal driver on 
my machine - probably it got lost in my past shuffling of hard disks 
between machines - and since I don't know what card it is without 
opening the box, I had to download an arbitrary Crystal driver package 
for the sole purpose of uninstalling it.  MMOS2 doesn't want to 
uninstall a driver unless the installation files are present.

I misremembered about the Matrox video card. It turns out that both 
machines in question have S3 video. The one on which VNC server is 
running has an S3 Trio64V+, and SNAP works well on it, which means that 
VNC now runs with a readable colour scheme. Centering and sizing the 
screen was a bit of a headache, but it hardly matters since I'm planning 
to remove the screen and leave the box sitting in a corner as a pure 
server. Getting SNAP to work did require a bit of experimentation with 
screen resolution, colour depth, and refresh rate. In particular, I 
found that I had to reduce the refresh rate to a value lower than what 
the S3 video driver supported. No speakers on that machine, so I don't 
care whether it has sound drivers.

My destop machine, where I'm typing this e-mail and where I've installed 
the VNC client, has been more of a problem. It has an S3 Trio64V+. (Hey, 
I've just noticed that both machines have the same video card. Why would 
SNAP work on one and not the other?) Getting the Crystal sound driver 
removed was a bit of a headache, but now I finally have Uniaud working. 
The SNAP video driver sort of works. It leaves mouse droppings in a 
pattern that in the long run creates a grid of vertical lines over the 
screen, about 40 pixels apart horizontally. In addition, it seems to 
forget its colour depth on reboot, and it kept rebooting in a 256-colour 
mode, a mode that is apparently guaranteed to cause a crash within a few 
minutes of startup. I just have to remember to set it back to 16-bit 
colour quickly enough to beat the crash.

I'm off for a break now. Will tackle this again when I get back - 
there's probably one combination of resolution and colour depth that 
will eliminate the mouse droppings. Of course I could always revert to 
an S3 video driver (for VNC to work, I think SNAP is required only on 
the server side), but it's worth keeping the SNAP driver for the sake of 
making PDFs readable.

-- 
Peter Moylan                          peter at pmoylan dot org
                                      http://www.pmoylan dot org

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**= Email   8 ==========================**

Date:  Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:58:17 +1000
From:  Ed Durrant <edurrant at durrant dot mine dot nu>
Subject:   On board floppy controller failure on ASUS M2V-TVM

Hi,

  It looks like I may have to move to a new motherboard sooner than I 
thought ! When I boot the system, I get an error "Floppy Controller 
failure Press F1 to continue" and (of course the floppy drive does not 
work) - yes I do need the floppy drive from time to time!

  I've checked the usual culprits,checked cable seating and replaced it 
with a known good cable. Replaced the floppy drive itself with a known 
good drive.

  I've cleared the CMOS to check this wasn't a corrupted CMOS memory 
issue - no change.

  I have also back-leveled the BIOS as that was a recent change to the 
system.

  All of the above has not helped.

I have one free PCI slot in the system, but I cannot find anyone 
advertising a PCI floppy disk controller, I suspect if I did find one, 
it would cost more than the motherboard in any case!

 The board is (of course) out of warrenty and I can't think any company 
would repair a faulty on board floppy disk controller any more.

 So I'll be searching to see what I can find, that is fairly current and 
can take the components from this board. I could simply buy the same 
board again but that's not a challenge!

Cheers/2

Ed.
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**= Email   9 ==========================**

Date:  Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:04:26 +1000 (EST)
From:  "Peter L Allen" <allenpl at tastelfibre dot com dot au>
Subject:  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program?

snip

>my machine - probably it got lost in my past shuffling of hard disks 
>between machines - and since I don't know what card it is without 
>opening the box, I had to download an arbitrary Crystal driver package 

Pete,

In a case like this -  pci104vka.ZIP on hobbes keeps the screwdriver in the tool box.

Good luck with the rest - us old industrial discards need it!

				Regards,
						allenpl

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**= Email   10 ==========================**

Date:  Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:39:45 +0200
From:  Kris Steenhaut <kris.steenhaut at kolibrieweg.eu>
Subject:  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program?

Peter Moylan ha scritto:
>> It would be nice to handle eCS and my Mac with the same keyboard and 
>> mouse though.
>>
> Kris, it might help you to know that the two files that Ian mentioned 
> above are for OS/2. If you want to control a Mac from a PC then you 
> can install the above-mentioned client in OS/2, but you'll have to 
> search for a version of VNC server that will run on a Mac.
>
That's what I thought too. Someone mentioned he is controlling his 
wife's Mac from OS2, so I went for a search for a Mac thing and found 
nothing at all for that side.
Strange.

>
> 3. When you run the client, you're asked what you want to connect to, 
> and there's a special syntax for this. In my case, I specify 
> 192.168.1.5:0, where the first bit is the IP address of the machine 
> that I want to control, and the ":0" at the end is a compulsory 
> side-effect of a convention that's used in Unix. Just add the ":0" 
> without bothering to wonder what it means.
>
Well, that's it. How I'm I supposed to know about  "0" when  nothing is 
mentioned in the readme?  You know, simple human  beings don't do Unix. :-)

So, I presume, to educate myself, I could install the server program on 
one eCs computer and the client program onto another eCS computer, and 
then have a go? Right/wrong?

A proposito, would that be the same procedure for DTOC?

Anyway, now it's becoming clear to me. Thank you very much!

-- 
Groeten uit Gent,

   Kris

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**= Email   11 ==========================**

Date:  Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:15:48 +1000 (EST)
From:  "Ian Manners" <deadmail>
Subject:  Re:  Recommendations for remote control program?

>That's what I thought too. Someone mentioned he is controlling his 
>wife's Mac from OS2, so I went for a search for a Mac thing and found 
>nothing at all for that side.
>Strange.

Vine server for Mac.
<http://sourceforge dot net/projects/osxvnc/>

Cheers
Ian Manners
http://www.os2site dot com/

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