Warp 4 stability?
Matt McLeod
I've had Warp 4 GA for about a week now, and it's driving me up the wall.
First, the machine: 486SX33, 20Mb RAM, 1G EIDE disk, ET4000/W32i video
card, ATAPI CD-ROM, SoundGalaxy "Washington" 16 soundcard. Has been running
Warp 3.0 and Linux just fine for quite a while.
I had to let it reformat the boot partition, as it didn't recognize the FAT
filesystem on it (which, incidentally, Novell DOS 7.0 and Warp 3.0 had had
no problems with at all). This was annoying, but not fatal.
However, it now locks up randomly. Complete lockup - no errors, no way out
beyond resetting the machine. At first I thought it might have been the OD
demo from the Sampler CD, so I removed that. Problem still occurs. So I
remove the ext2fs drivers (which were fine under 3.0). Still no fix.
Remove the XFree86 support driver, and still no fix.
By this stage there's nothing funny installed anymore. Only the Warp 4
base, and TCP/IP (no NIC, just SLIP/PPP).
There doesn't seem to be any common denominator in all of this - sometimes
it happens while I'm using Kermit in fullscreen to telnet out, sometimes it
happens while doing stuff on the desktop, sometimes while starting a
fullscreen session, and the last time but one it was when running a REXX
script in a windowed OS/2 command session.
There are also some video problems (icons and window decorations corrupted
sometimes), but those I can live with if need be. The lockups are a
different matter.
I'm extremely dissappointed so far - this is not the kind of behaviour that
I expect from OS/2. The hardware is fine - everything else I've run on this
machine runs just fine (OS/2 2.1x and 3.0, Linux 1.2.x and 2.0.x, NTWS4b2,
W95, and assorted apps), so it looks rather like there's a nasty bug in
there somewhere...
Anyone else had a similar experience and found the cause of the problem? I
quite like the enhancements made in 4.0, so I'd like to be able to use it
with confidence that it isn't going to crash on me.
--
Matt McLeod "Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses."
System Administrator - Sir Humphrey Appleby
Hunter Network Association KDE: http://www.zws.com/kde/
Matt Hyne
On 10 Nov 1996, Matt McLeod wrote:
Both my machine at work and my machine at home have been running OS/2 Warp
4.0 for over 2 Weeks continuously without a single lockup.
I call that VERY STABLE - you might want to try changing your video
drivers.
Matt
________________________________________________________________________
Matthew Hyne - Research Engineer (Radio Systems)
CSIRO - Division of Telecommunications and Industrial Physics
Cnr Vimera & Pembroke Roads, Marsfield NSW, Australia
Tel : (02) 9372 4175 Fax : (02) 9372 4490
Pag : 132222 # 50489 Email : mh...@rp.csiro.au
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: http://delta.rp.csiro.au (offline)
MCLEOD M J
Matt Hyne (mh...@rp.csiro.au) wrote:
: On 10 Nov 1996, Matt McLeod wrote:
:
: Both my machine at work and my machine at home have been running OS/2 Warp
: 4.0 for over 2 Weeks continuously without a single lockup.
:
: I call that VERY STABLE - you might want to try changing your video
: drivers.
Tried that, and now I'm in even deeper trouble. :(
I switched from the ET4000/W32i drivers to teh ET4000 drivers (using
selective install). Rebooted, but now there's no simple way to set the
refresh rate (I usually run at 640x480 at 72Hz. Under Warp 3 the ET4000
drivers let you change the refresh rate from the System object in
the System Setup folder. Not so in 4.0).
And now DOS sessions have stopped working - I'd usually just open up
a fullscreen DOS session, run VMODE.COM to change the refresh rate,
then run SVGA ON to let PM know about the new settings then reboot.
Instead, I get the dialog telling me that the program file can't be
found, and attempting to run COMMAND.COM from an OS/2 prompt gets
me an out of memory error.
So I use dual-boot to get to DOS, do the VMODE/SVGA thing, reboot,
and no change at all. SVGA did update my SVGADATA.PMI file, so
that isn't the problem.
At any rate, the lockups are still occuring. I'm just lucky I left
a functional (if rather stripped-down) Linux system on this box when
I installed Warp 4.0.
So I'm not at all impressed with 4.0. There actually seems to have been
some functionality *lost* since 3.0 (refresh rates settable in the
System notebook).
Matt
Fubar
ou...@alinga.newcastle.edu.au (MCLEOD M J) wrote:
You might try switching to bog stock VGA (IBM VGA) and trying that.
If it works, then it looks like you're out of luck with Warp 4 and the
Tseng Labs :( At least till they update their drivers.
Cheers,
Craig
Adam James Fitzpatrick
ou...@alinga.newcastle.edu.au (MCLEOD M J) wrote:
[snip]
>I switched from the ET4000/W32i drivers to teh ET4000 drivers (using
>selective install). Rebooted, but now there's no simple way to set the
>refresh rate (I usually run at 640x480 at 72Hz. Under Warp 3 the ET4000
>drivers let you change the refresh rate from the System object in
>the System Setup folder. Not so in 4.0).
>And now DOS sessions have stopped working - I'd usually just open up
>a fullscreen DOS session, run VMODE.COM to change the refresh rate,
>then run SVGA ON to let PM know about the new settings then reboot.
>Instead, I get the dialog telling me that the program file can't be
>found, and attempting to run COMMAND.COM from an OS/2 prompt gets
>me an out of memory error.
I had this problem recently with Warp 3 (odd crashes, SYS0008 when trying
to start DOS sessions), and tracked it down to the presence of
DEVICE=VDSK.SYS in the config.sys file. I also noticed that my
SWAPPER.DAT was considerably smaller than usual. Perhaps installing the
new driver changed CONFIG.SYS somehow.
[snip]
--
Adam Fitzpatrick
"It'd be alright if he actually *washed* it."
Z
>I switched from the ET4000/W32i drivers to teh ET4000 drivers (using
>selective install). Rebooted, but now there's no simple way to set the
>refresh rate (I usually run at 640x480 at 72Hz. Under Warp 3 the ET4000
>drivers let you change the refresh rate from the System object in
>the System Setup folder. Not so in 4.0).
I'm using the drivers from the file tsengw32.zip from Hobbes, and these
seem to run, albeit with a few hitches. Without using these, I could only
get it to run in 640x480x16 mode (yuck!), but now I have it running in
1024x768x256 mode, though not at the refresh rate I'd like because the
screen set up doesn't seem to work properly any more. Still, I'd rather
endure a tiny amount of flicker than 640x480x16 mode.
I'm just crossing my fingers that some new Tseng drivers appear soon...
Z
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