To ring in the new year, we've decided to adapt The Update Centre (originally developed by Firmaware for updating The Editor) for updating some of the A-Shell packages. As a first step, we've implemented The Update Centre for the SOSLIB.

Now, instead of waiting for us to generate a new consolidated update, or looking around on the web site for individual updates, you should now be able to simply RUN SOSUPD and it will check for you, and download any new or updated files.

Although there aren't a whole lot of exciting updates for the SOSLIB, you might as well get yourself set up. To get started, you have to manually download the program SOSUPD.RUN[901,2]
(save it in dsk0:[901,2]). Then just RUN SOSUPD.
The first time, it will detect that you don't have the client-side components needed and will ask you to download and save a small zip package. (That only needs to be done once.) Then it will just proceed with the update.

As a test, you can always just erase a few files from the SOSLIB and RUN SOSUPD again.

Note that there are a few limitations and minor problems that we hope to resolve shortly:

1. If you have any files open in VUE which it is trying to update, it will cause the update operation not complete properly. Fortunately, you can just exit and re-run SOSUPD to resolve it.

2. The Update Centre only runs under Windows. (Currently, if you want to install the SOSLIB under UNIX, the best plan is to first install it on your local Windows PC, then use some FTP utility to copy it to your UNIX machine. Or use Samba so that installing it on your local PC makes it available on UNIX directly.) Eventually I'd like to implement a UNIX-compatible version of it.

3. After completing the update, it may say that it is going to restart the SOSLIB. (The Update Center normally expects to be updating the program that is running, leading to the need to restart it, but that doesn't apply here. Just ignore the message; it will be resolved shortly.)

In the near future, we will probably implement a similar strategy for updating A-Shell/Windows and ATE.

Works well, nice! ....roll on a unix version..

Happy New year everyone..

Minor note: the SOSLIB Update Center has been updated with a new version of Steve's ASHVER.SBX (to support the 5.0 version format). Also (after the update), the START.CMD[901,2] will prompt you to enter SOSUPD to check for updates (reducing the problem of forgetting how it is supposed to work.)