eCS Technical Tips

I am a hardware and software developer and a long time user of OS/2 (since version 2). You can read more about me here. I figure that if I had a few problems then other people might have had the same problems. So here are a few of the problems I had and how I fixed them.

Printers

The eCS printer wizard creates a bad printer object that will not work for all uses, particularly shared network printing. Instead use the printer template to create a printer. Here are some pointers to remember when creating printers.

I have also noticed that the eCS printer wizard did not install the Laserjet printer driver properly. None of the settings such as portrait or landscape would work properly. After re-installing the driver everything is fine. To re-install the printer driver, go to the "Printers" folder, right click on the printer object and select "Properties". Click on the "Printer Driver" tab. Right click on the printer driver you want to re-install, and click on "Install". Find your printer and click the "Install" button. When prompted to to overwrite the already installed driver, answer yes.

The Laserjet driver is the only one I allowed the eCS printer wizard to install and had to re-install. All the other printer drivers that I installed manually work fine.

Problems with the TZ environment string in Config.Sys

The TZ variable should be set to something like this:

SET TZ=PST8PDT

But the eCS clock program sets it to something like:

SET TZ=PST8PDT,3,2,0,7200,11,1,0,7200,3600

The longer format interferes with the way that InfoZip uses the TZ variable. Therefore, with the TZ variable set the way eCS clock wants it, InfoZip will create a zip file with incorrect times in it. To fix this problem, simply correct the "SET TZ=" line in your config.sys file. Then go to the "System setup" folder and open the "Clock" program. Go to the "Control" page and uncheck "Automatically modify CONFIG.SYS".

Note that it is not important whether or not the arguments after "PST8PDT" are correct. The fact that they are there at all is what seems to break zip. This was tested with Info-ZIP version 2.3 and version 2.31

Note that some people (including me) prefer to set the TZ variable to simply "PST8" or "PDT7". I have a utility (syncnist.exe) that does this automatically for me based on the daylight information provided by the internet time server. InfoZIP works fine with this shorter version of the TZ variable.

PDF writer port driver

This is by far the easiest way to create PDF files on OS/2 and eCS. But the eCS printer port installer has trouble finding the port driver even when told exactly where it is.

Ordinarily, you could just type in the directory containing the pdfwrite.pdr file, click "Refresh" and it would find the port driver. But not anymore. You have to copy pdfwrite.pdr to the d:\os2\dll directory. Then use the "Find" button, and have it search d:\os2 for the port driver. It will then find the driver and you can install it. For some reason, making the installer look for the port driver from one directory level up seems to work.

Setting the date format

To make changes made with the Locale object take effect you have to select "Action" from the menu bar and then "Mark as default...".