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OS2 Warp on Compaq LTE Elite!

pcm2a

Experienced Member
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Jun 24, 2013
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190
In my Compaq LTE Elite laptops I have CF cards for the hard drive. The nice thing about that is I can backup and restore the entire partition in just a few seconds. So today I thought I would take a stab at OS2 Warp. My Compaq has a broken floppy and no cdrom so a local install isn't really possible. I used VirtualBox to install OS/2 Warp 4.51 directly to the CF drive (usb adapter) instead of installing to a virtual drive. After the install I popped that back into the Compaq and part way during boot it fails.

Before giving up I gave a stab using the same procedure with OS/2 3. This time it worked! I now have a working install of OS/2 3.0 on the laptop.

I have no ideas if there is any way to get the Orinoco card working, probably not but it is still pretty cool. All the drivers in the config.sys look pretty similar to dos drivers. I'm wondering if I should give these shoddy dos drivers a try tomorrow.

Check out the cool screenshot.
 

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They have dos drivers too...that dont work :) but yeah, I'm going to have to investigate that tomorrow and play more with this OS/2. OS/2 4 sounds like it supports Orinoco right out of the box. I'm not sure if any TCP/IP networking stuff is on this OS/2 3 and the only forums I could find seem to be down, hopefully not forever.

I installed OS/2 4.51 into a plain VM just to check it out and it's actually really awesome looking.
 
I have Warp 4 installed on a 380D which is nice and Warp 4 has TCP/IP networking and internet support right out of the box. If your system runs at least a Pentium I recommend going to Warp 4, otherwise stay on 3. The drivers are somewhat interchangeable though.
 
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Very cool, thanks for those links! The version in my screenshot is Red 8.162. I think that's a "connect" version but to be safe I'll see if I can get a Blue 8.2 Connect version instead.

I also need to find an OS that I can run in a VM where I can plug in this USB/CF card and mount the HPFS filesystem. I'll need that to be able to transfer files around until I get that network working. From what I read some Linux flavors can mount it read/write.
 
Linux supported it but the Linux driver was buggy and last worked with the 2.2 kernel from 1999. http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/vyplody/hpfs/index-e.cgi

NT 3.5 supported with a relatively simple registry change. With a bit of work, NT4 can use the same pinball.sys of NT 3.51

The other (DOS or BSD) HPFS access methods tend to be slow and read only.

The easiest way of transferring files to HPFS from other OSes is to make a second partition that is boring old FAT16. Stage the files on the FAT 16 drive; use OS/2 to move them into the HPFS partition from FAT partition.

If you do find a reliable read/write tool for HPFS, please update the forum with that information.
 
That logo screen only shows for about .5 of a second but I don't think I see any connect. I got a copy of OS/2 3 8.2000 Red Connect but it just must be mislabeled. Nothing during the installation asked about TCP/IP or Networking like OS/2 4 does.

Great idea on the partitions. I now have 100 megs set aside for a FAT16 drive. Windows won't mount a secondary partition but I bet my macbook will. I'll dig around for a real Connect version.
 
I didn't quite know what the differences in the version were either other than yeah 4 or 3 Connect was the server version with tcp/ip then Warp I think bundled everything as well (IIRC). But 3 runs great on a 386/486 with 4-8MB of RAM which is pretty cool. It ran the os2ecs.org website (wayback machine link) for quite a while which I always thought was a pretty bad ass demo.
 
I haven't located a solid copy but I did locate a "OS/2 Connect 3 German version". It's also difficult to read.... Install logo screens look different but do not say Connect and neither do the boot screens. When I'm doing the install tons of the screens do say Connect and I did go through some TCP/IP network screens, so I would say this is definitely the Connect version. I didn't have any idea what I was picking for the most part. I gave up part way through.

I'll keep lookin...
 
I didn't quite know what the differences in the version were either other than yeah 4 or 3 Connect was the server version with tcp/ip then Warp I think bundled everything as well (IIRC).
Not quite correct as Connect and Server/Advanced Server are different products, see image below. This is from my Warp Server 4 Advanced Server promotional bundle. Warp Server 4 and Advanced Server 4 (included 386HPFS support) were just Warp v3 with various server components added providing quite a few more services than the Connect package. As mentioned by NexT Warp 4 was a Gui rehash and had networking built-in like the V3 Connect package but has higher system requirements.

In hindsight I personally wouldn't run v3 with under 16megs of ram though.

Here's a nice history of OS/2 http://os2news.warpstock.org/OS2History.html
 

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It's not the end goal but here is an image of OS/2 3.0 Connect running in virtualbox with networking (AMD PCnet) functioning correctly. Pretty fancy. Next up a real install...which I expect to go much less smoothly.
 

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I'm almost there! I now have OS/2 3.0 Connect installed on the Compaq and working great. Runs on my Compaq 40, 50 and 75, obviously the best on the 75. I have the Orinoco drivers installed and working, sort of.... Hopefully someone can help me out with what I'm missing.

- The lights on my wifi card come on
- The wifistate utility shows the wifi connected to my router (screenshot 1)
- I can ping the laptop''s static ip address 192.168.10.73 (screenshot 2)
- I cannot ping the router's ip address 192.168.10.1 (screenshot 2)

I am also attaching screenshots of each page of the tcp/ip configuration. Everything looks good to me, but I'm clearly missing something. There was no DHCP selection in 3.0 Connect.
 

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Good work so far. You may have to add a few fixpacks. For DHCP-first go to MPTS, select TCPIP, Network Interface Paramaters-Configure. You'll be presented with a selection of options, well at least on my v3 system. One is DHCP. Not used it myself though. I just use a static IP on my beasty and a bnc nic just cause I can. Actually looking at mine it may have a later MPTS setup on vanilla v3 Warp.

I'll have to go though my old threads and see what I've actually done to my system.
 

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Having a quick gander it seems at one point I installed the Remote Access Client from my Warp Server 4 package which will explain the differences. And yes it is just a vanilla v3 looking at the boot screen.

I was using Gotcha! but now back to using PCCamera again for the screen shots.
 
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I'm totally fine with static ip, that's what I have been using on all my old windows install. I just would have tried DHCP if it was there to see if it would get things working.
 
I have found some interesting information out that might help us figure out what's going on.

- The wifistate utility shows that I'm connected to the router.
- I have tried with both a router and my phone as an access point (which both work fine in Windows 95).
- I can move the laptop farther away and closer and see the signal to the router/ap increase and decrease.
- I can suddenly turn off the router/ap and the wifistate utility shows that it is no longer connected.

I say all that because upon investigation neither the router or my phone reports a connection from the laptop! How could the wifistate utility report that it is connected if it really wasn't connected? I think this is the root of the problem.
 
You may need to change the password connection method on the router. OS/2 Warp predates many of the wireless protection methods. I think you will have to set the router to use WEP with 64-bit encryption for OS/2 to transfer data with the router. Yes, this makes it easy for anyone else to enjoy your router.
 
I was going with open for the initial tests. No reason to try out WEP if open doesn't work...
 
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