Q.  Dear Mr. Know-It-All,

Back in June, you told us how to set up RealPlayer under Odin. I followed your instructions and everything worked great from the command line. Then I added the lines:

to CONFIG.SYS, to make the settings permanent. When I rebooted, nothing would start correctly. What happened?

A.  Mr. Know-It-All made a mistake. When he stated,

it did not occur to Mr. Know-It-All that this could be read as,

or that you would not know that while the CONFIG.SYS settings are similar, they are not exactly the same. The rules for command line statements are often very different than those for CONFIG.SYS statements.

In the PATH statement, the item %PATH% is a substitution variable. It is replaced by the current value of the PATH environment variable. This works from the command line and from batch files. It does not work in CONFIG.SYS.

To make the equivalent change to CONFIG.SYS, insert:

in the PATH statement, separating it from other directories in the statement with a semi-colon. As always, change D: to the correct drive letter for your setup. You should be able to insert the directory reference anywhere in list of directories in the PATH statement. The idea is to place the most used directories closest to the front of the list as long as there are no known ordering dependencies.

It is possible to use the:

statement in CONFIG.SYS, but it is not recommended.

To make the equivalent change to CONFIG.SYS, insert:

in the LIBPATH statement separating it from directories with a semi-colon.

The statement:

is OK as is. You can add it to CONFIG.SYS without changes.

Since June, Odin has continued to progress. The Odin team now recommends using the .wpi installer. See www.netlabs.org for details.

Also, workarounds for some newly discovered install problems have been developed.

• Under some conditions, Open32 support, which Odin requires, will not be installed. If you do not have \os2\dll\pmwinx.dll on your system or regedit2 will not run, this is an indicator of this problem. Use Selective Install to install Open32 support.

• Another problem is with systems that have visible Win9X partitions. Care must be taken to ensure that the Win9X directories do not appear in LIBPATH or PATH before the Odin directories. This will ensure that the Odin DLL's are used when needed.