[arachne] Pocket Arachne 1.85 testing

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Inspired by the promise the a powerful internet suite on a single floppy, I tried Pocket Arachne 1.85. Here are the results.

1. The first part of the install goes fine: the ramdisk is created, everything is transferred to it and the Arachne installs starts.
2. The video selection goes fine too.
3. Arachne informs me that I am running on a 486+ fast optimized computer. I click on OK to approve of the configuration option.

The install program then hangs with a gray screen of death in a vain attempt to load file://cfgwiz.dgi. I have confirmed that
it is a true hang as I have been writing this email for 30 minutes and NOTHING has happened to my DOS machine where pocket arachne
is trying to install.

My configuration:
Pentium II
48K RAM
Big disk (1 gig, 660 meg of free space)
Direct LAN connection via cable modem
I use arachne.cfg to set the TCP/IP parameters.

My preliminary diagnosis is that the configuration wizard can't deal with a LAN connection if the packet driver hasn't been loaded.

Other problems (at least I think they are problems)
1. Only the RAM disk and the diskette drive are visible. The ramdisk gets relabeled as C: and the real C: becomes invisible.This may or may not be a problem depending on the desired use of pocket Arachne. I would much prefer to be able to see the hard drive and use pocket Arachne as a fast way to set up tests
of new releases.
2. Given problem/feature 1, the distribution really needs to include a small (meaning tiny) editor at least in a developer edition
so that the user can alter autoexec.bat and troubleshoot the problem. I put tiny emacs (tm.com) on the distribution disk after I
had created it. It takes up only 4kbytes and does the job. However, given that many people despise the emacs keymappings
others might prefer another choice.

I found that I was terribly constrained by the need to get everything on a 1.44 Mb floppy so I lifted that requirement on myself
and did the following things:
1. I downloaded xmsdsk.exe and used that intead of the OpenDOS vdisk tool.
2. I bagged vchgdrv because (1) There is no documentation at hand for the utility and (2) it does what I consider to be the wrong thing.
3. I created a new, non-bootable diskette and copied the interesting part of the pocket arachne diskette (namely autoexec.bat and the self-extractor) to it.
4. I renamed autoexec.bat to install.bat and hacked away.
Results:
1. Given a freedos boot (which loads cute mouse and the packet driver) the installation goes fine. You can even skip the installation by
copying a working arachne.cfg to the arachne directory of the distribution diskette and commenting out the call on setup.
2. Email seems to have some real problems. It won't stay set up--it keeps losing the ability to find the dgi files. However, this is not a problem with 1.85 or with
pocket arachne as I just had the same problem with my 1.83 setup on the c: drive. I set everything up and had it working, then I worked with
pocket arachne with no changes to the original c:\arachne 1.83 distribution. When I went back to c:\arachne, I kept getting the skull page everytime
I try to use a mail folder: inbox, outbox, mail folders, anything. I have checked arachne.cfg and it is both correct and unchanged from what I had
working before.








Arachne at FreeLists
-- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --

Other related posts: