[arachne] Re: Pocket Arachne 1.85 testing

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On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 11:56:36 -0500, Glenn McCorkle wrote:

> Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

> Scott,

> Is that drive a Fat32 or perhaps even an NTFS ?

The 2 drives not regognised by Pocket Arachne are indeed FAT32.
The regognised one is FAT16.

CU, Bastiaan


> 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
> http://www.delorie.com/listserv/mime/
> http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/
> http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.table.html

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

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                      ** Version 1.85 **

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