[arachne] Re: Pocket Arachne 1.85 testing

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Scott,

Is that drive a Fat32 or perhaps even an NTFS ?

The reason I ask this is because it's the only reason I can think of as
to why OpenDos v7.01 is unable to see that drive C: exists and hence
is then giving the RamDrive C:


On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 19:29:17 -0600, Scott Warnick wrote:

> 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.

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

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