[arachne] Re: Pocket Arachne 1.85 testing

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

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

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

Using 1.83 pocket Arachne for a few month now...

> 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.

I don't use a LAN and heve no problems with the telephone modem.

> 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.

I have two HD's with 3 partitions. Only HD 2 is shown, not the more 
important HD 1, also know as C: and D: 

> 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 have my second HD where norton commander and an editor reside.
3 directories are opened om the HD for items I do not want to loose:
DOWNLOAD
MAIL
CACHE
There is not enough room on the floppy to house a huge inbox...

CU, Bastiaan

> 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 --

** This mail was written by a user of the Arachne Browser **
                      ** Version 1.85 **

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

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