LinkRight 1.1G Demo This is a demo and there are some restrictions. One file can be transferred at a time. No directories or subdirectories can be transferred. The file to be transferred must be less than 1.2 megabytes in size. Files larger than 1.2 megabytes won't be transferred. There is no LRCLONER.EXE included. This is the OS/2 command line version of LinkRight. Other than those restrictions, this is the full package. The shrink wrapped package does not have these restrictions. If you like this demo and would like the full package, contact Indelible Blue at (800) 776-8284 or (919) 834-7005 or OS/2 Express at (800) 672-5945 and (612) 823-6255. The street price is about $70 without cables and $99 with cables. Distributor sales by Micro Central. For more information, contact Rightware Inc. (301) 762-1151 FAX (301) 762-1185. Also available: LinkRight for LANs. It works much like the serial and parallel port product, but over a network. Look for the demo which is available. Street price for this product is about $79 for a 10 user license, $249 for a 100 user license and $995 for a 1000 user license. Installation You don't need to copy to a floppy to install. Just install it to a different directory from the one where you unzipped it. Make sure the install program (INSTALL.EXE) knows the directory where you're installing from and to. Ignore where the install program says it is copying LRCLONER.EXE. It's just copying a stub because I didn't want to change the install program for the demo. New for 1.1G Not much is new. The only thing with 1.1G is a new LRCOM.SYS and LRPAR.SYS. These drivers will only work with version 1.1F or 1.1G of the executables. A couple of new options have been added as parameters for the drivers. The complete list of options for LRPAR.SYS are DEVICE=LRPAR.SYS /Q:7 /P /A:3BC /M /C:3 /D where: /Q:7 uses IRQ7 or /Q:5 uses IRQ5. These are the only IRQs supported. Interupt driven mode can only be used if PRINT01.SYS or PRINT02.SYS also uses the same interupt. If no /Q option is selected, polled is assumed. /P is for polled. This is a useless option, since it is the default. /A:3BC or /A:378 or /A:278 select the address of the LPT port for LinkRight to use. If this parameter is used, only one address can be specified. Then, when you select Connect from the LinkRight menu, no matter which LPT port you select, either LPT1, LPT2 or LPT3, LinkRight will use the address specified. If this parameter is not included, LinkRight reads the BIOS info at bootup time to get the LPT addresses. /M is to specify MicroChannel machines. For some MicroChannel systems when booted from bootable floppies, LinkRight would not see that it was MicroChannel and would assume an ISA bus. This caused the driver to fail. So if you boot your MicroChannel system from floppies and the LinkRight driver displays a message at bootup time saying an ISA bus was found, use this parameter to fix the problem. /C:X is used to tell the driver what type of system is being used. If the driver does not load properly, use this parameter and the driver will skip it's own test for type of system used and will accept the entered parameter as the system type. /C:1 is for a 386 SX system. /C:2 is for a 386 DX system. /C:3 is for a 486 DX system. /C:4 is for a 486 DX2 system. /C:5 is for a 486 DX4 system. /C:6 is for a Pentium system. /C:7 is for a faster than Pentium system. /D is to add a driver delay for parallel port access. Use this parameter if you are having problems transferring lots of files. The sympton of the problem is that you establish a connection, transfer a megabyte or 2 megabytes but then LinkRight just locks up. It is most common with ThinkPads and other portable systems. This problem is different from the Retry Warning Delay and you should not include this parameter until you've tried bumping up the Retry Warning Delay to 8 or 9 and the problem persists. The preferred and suggested mode of use is no parameters on the LRPAR.SYS line in CONFIG.SYS. You can add parameters if there are any problems. The complete list of options for LRCOM.SYS are DEVICE=LRCOM.SYS (1, 03F8, 4) /C:3 /C:X is used to tell the driver what type of system is being used. If the driver does not load properly, use this parameter and the driver will skip it's own test for type of system used and will accept the entered parameter as the system type. /C:1 is for a 386 SX system. /C:2 is for a 386 DX system. /C:3 is for a 486 DX system. /C:4 is for a 486 DX2 system. /C:5 is for a 486 DX4 system. /C:6 is for a Pentium system. /C:7 is for a faster than Pentium system. (COM, ADDR, IRQ) where COM is which COM Port to use, ADDR is the address of the COM port, and IRQ is the interupt to use. The format is similar to what the standard COM.SYS driver of SIO.SYS driver uses. The preferred and suggested mode of use is no parameters on the LRCOM.SYS line in CONFIG.SYS. You can add parameters if there are any problems. New for LRDOS.EXE D is a new parameter that you can specify on the DOS command line. It adds a driver delay for parallel port access. Use this parameter if you are having problems transferring lots of files. The sympton of the problem is that you establish a connection, transfer a megabyte or 2 megabytes but then LinkRight just locks up. It is most common with ThinkPads and other portable systems. This problem is different from the Retry Warning Delay and you should not include this parameter until you've tried bumping up the Retry Warning Delay to 8 or 9 and the problem persists. Another symptom of this problem is extremely slow transfers. I have one user who would transfer a one megabyte file and it took two minutes to complete. After using this fix, it only took 12 seconds to complete the same transfer. This was on a ThinkPad 750. For example: LRDOS LPT1 D Bootable Floppies Warp bootable floppies should be built slightly differently. From the OS/2 System folder, select System Setup. From there, select Create Utility Diskettes. Build the 3 diskettes. Boot the system from those 3 diskettes, make sure it works OK, then start the modifications. REM out the config.sys line for memman=noswap. Add lines: MEMMAN=SWAP,PROTECT SWAPPATH=C:\TEMPSWAP Make sure you have about 8 Meg of disk space available for swapper. REM out protectonly=yes Add PROTECTONLY=NO Add LIBPATH=\;A:\;A:; At the end of config.sys, add DEVICE=A:\LRPAR.SYS Copy LRPAR.SYS to Utility diskette 2. Copy NLS.DLL to Utility diskette 2. You may also need VIOCALLS.DLL and DOSCALL1.DLL (I think, I'm not sure about these). Obviously, I skipped a couple of steps for partitioning, formatting, making c:\tempswap, making c:\temp and putting LRCLONER.EXE in there. You don't need CMD.EXE or EAUTIL.EXE in the C:\TEMP directory if you're using version 1.1E or greater of LinkRight. Ignore the statements in the manual saying you do need to do this. On Utility diskette 3 you'll find things like format.com fdisk.com, and the important file sysinstx.com. Other than that, diskette 3 is not used. New for 1.1F The biggest difference is improved serial port speed. Now, you can reliably do 115.2 kbps. Note the new driver, LRCOM.SYS, is required for 57.6 kbps or 115.2 kbps. This driver does not interfere with your normal com drivers (either com.sys or sio.sys). Limitations Faster serial speed comes at a price. If you have a serial mouse, you'll find that running LinkRight at 115 kbps or 57 kbps changes your system to a single tasking system. If you have a PS/2 mouse or bus mouse using a high interupt, you can probably continue to use your system while transferring files. This limitation will be fixed in a future version. 1.1F was created in a couple of weeks and is a quick and dirty version for faster serial support. Some niceties were sacrificed so it could be released sooner. Bug fixes A couple of bugs have been fixed. Some users reportedly could not change directories to certain directories. This bug was reported many months ago, but I was never able to duplicate it. During final testing of 1.1F, I saw this bug occur on one of the four systems I use for testing. About 5 directories out of 200 failed. After I duplicated the problem, it was fairly easy to fix, though I still can't understand why it happened and why it happened on only some systems and only on some directories. Options The patch file deletes your current options. When you start the new version of LinkRight, it will start with the default options, so you'll have to set things up the way you want them. If you copy the files to another system, be sure to delete the LINKRGHT.CFG file, and have it start with no old configuration file. ****IMPORTANT****** The MOST common user error for those using LRCLONER is starting a clone operation and having the files transferred to C:\TEMP. Some users try to fix this by starting LRCLONER from the root directory of C:. This only causes other problems. The proper method of cloning is to start LRCLONER from the C:\TEMP directory. Once a connection is established, from the Local system change directories on the Remote system by double clicking on the line with ".." (you also have to change directories on the Local system to get to the root). Now you can start transferring files and they will go to the proper location. ******************* Turbomode (in the Options menu of LinkRight when in Local mode) should be turned off initially. Also, Turbomode is read and set once when you establish a connection. To change Turbomode, change the option, disconnect if you are currently connected, and do a re-connect. If you have no trouble with Turbomode off, you can try Turbomode on and get a speed boost. The LinkRight parallel port driver can now be used in interupt driven mode or polled mode. The default is polled, which matches the default of PRINT01.SYS in OS/2 Warp 3.0. Interupt driven mode has some problems. I've had some of my test systems lock up completely when used in Turbomode with interupt mode. The same system does not lock up when Turbomode is off. None of my test systems have any problems when using polled mode. Many gigabytes transferred successfully!! Obviously, we suggest you use polled mode. For LRCLONER, you no longer need EAUTIL.EXE and CMD.EXE in the C:\TEMP directory. This should make cloning easier. You still need the temp directoy and LRCLONER.EXE should be started from this directory. Although I said this for 1.1D it turned out not to be true. I really mean it this time!! Serial mice and slow systems are a problem when using the parallel port. Bump the packet size down to 128 bytes and turn Idle time transfers on and it may improve response with the mouse. PS/2 style mice are not a problem. If you find responsiveness is a problem and you are willing to work with me, I'll create a special driver for your particular systems to improve mouse responsiveness. It may take a few tries to get it right, so patience would be required. Obviously, when I get it working well on your systems, I'll incorporate it into the full LinkRight product. Bump up the Retry Warning Delay option to 9 and you will not get any of those annoying Retry Warnings. LinkRight will try forever if this value is 9. Of course, you won't know if there is a problem either. One user complained about updating the Remote system screen just to display a "dot". I didn't see any problem on my systems, and it looked like a minor nit. But during final testing of this version, I grabbed my slowest system, turned the hardware turbo switch off on it, and watched for about a second for it to refresh the screen. Very annoying. There is a workaround available, though. From an OS/2 command prompt, run LRCLONER T LPT1 on the Remote system. You won't lose any functionality and won't be annoyed by the slow screen refresh. For cloning systems, run LRCLONER with no parameters to check the proper usage. You should comment out any network stuff in your config.sys on the Source system so no files are locked at bootup. I've been told you have to do it this way if you're using COMM manager or Extended Services. After that, you can run the full PM version of LinkRight on the Source system and copy everything. Running LRCLONER from the Source system to clone an entire system doesn't work (till I fix it), so use full PM version on the Source system. As you can see, LinkRight is up to version 1.1G. A new version has been appearing about once a month. I would encourage all users to check for a new version occasionally because a new version with features you want or bugs fixed could be available. If you have used most of the various versions of LinkRight, you have seen substantial improvements in all the new releases. Expect such improvements to continue. Good luck and happy computing!! Jeff Tremble President Rightware Inc.