The first program, I install is an unzipper. There is a lot of these around, so I just went to the Hobbes archive (everybody interested in OS/2 should go there!) and downloaded a utillity named PMZipper. A weird thing is that the unzipper is zipped - you'll need to unzip it before you can use it. Normal WinZip on a windows computer can do that, and then the stuff can be installed.
The next one is a utillity named Dereg. I wrote the thing myself back in 1995 (that long ago?!) and it was uploaded to Hobbes. The utillity can deregister classes from the WorkPlace system, which is fine - if you want to get rid of UltiMail this is almost the only possibility. I also retrieved a small utillity from my old diskettes here that I found, the utillity SHOWINI that can be used to show the variables of any OS/2 *.INI-file. Quite usefull!
The next BIG step is to install Java! I am not interrested in the o-o-old version
of Java that is included in the OS/2 Merling distribution - it's a laugh! Instead, I want something a
bit more modern, and it seems that the German company
Innotek has something to offer.
First of all, I tried DEREG to remove the classes WPJavaRef and WPJavaClass. As DEREG is safe (it
won't deregister really important classes!) then this is a fine step to take. DEREG rejected to
deregister the classes, so nothing here to be done.
Next, I deleted all references in the CONFIG.SYS file to any JAVA-environment. I then tried to install the
Innotek-software. but it complains, sayin that the "InnoTek Runtime not installed". I'll have to find out...
...Aha! I'll have to install a shared Runtime first!
Let's see if this works now (it actually seems so - this is fun!). I am now installing the Java SDK
version 1.4.2_05 (build 60) which is fine by me. The reason for installing Java now is partly because
other application (like Opera and StarOffice) that I want to install later on is using Java for some
of their tasks. The installation took something like 10 minuttes - I then rebooted (for good measures)
and in an OS/2-command window I went to the directory C:\java142\bin and gave the commands
java -version and javac - both worked like they should! The installation
did not fill my CONFIG.SYS with anything naughty, not even a stupid classpath, so I can really
do my own fitting around. Splendid!!
The last thing I want to do tonight is to install StarOffice ver. 5.1 for OS/2. I found my copy from this place on Hobbes and it really took some time to find (yes, I should have looked at Hobbes right away!). The thing about StarOffice as compared to OpenOffice is that I already is using StarOffice in my Windows-environment, so I want something familiary. The installation seems to run smoothly - after this, I'll have myself a bath!