[arachne] Re: Pocket Arachne 1.85 testing

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Bastiaan T.Edelman wrote:

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

Message resent 16th August 2005

How about creating a CD instead of running 2 floppies?
Booting (reading) a floppy is a slow proces and reading 2 floppies is
very slow. Besides: modern computers don't even have a drive for a flop.

I will tackle CD's and USB keys after I get the diskette distribution going. The reason is that
I have the opposite problem--no CD drives. I usually take the CD's out of my oldest machines and
put them in not so old machines. To make use of the oldest machines (200 MHz Pentium II's) I
boot some flavor of DOS from a floppy, get Arachne going from another floppy and then download everything
else I need from the Internet. Result: No CD drive, no burner, nada. Also, my test machines are
old enough that the BIOS won't let me boot from the CD.

I'm hoping once I get the diskette images done and uploaded someone more blessed with CD burning gear than me will be
able to create the CD you request using the diskette image. (I'm also not sure how to create a bootable CD, especially from DOS.)
Like I said, I'm a little CD challenged at present. Also, I've got only one machine with USB ports and its not one that I use for Arachne testing.

<>At least 2 items should be on that self booting CD:
#1 DOS operating system (FreeDOS?)
#2 Arachne
#3 Many other DOS programs are possible

I'm starting to think that the reason I have wierd email problems that go away when I use OpenDOS 7 is an incompatibility
between Arachne's email client and FreeDOS 0.9. (Big frown.) I want to do more testing to confirm this. As you may have
seen from my other posts, email on the enhanced version of OpenDOS 7 from Udo works just fine. I'm using version 7.01.03 WIP.
I think I'm going to stay with that for diskette pa. (it fits).

<>We have a problem though... Pocket Arachne writes to the disk, eg the
configuration files. That is not possible on a CD.

I think we can work around this. Pocket Arachne (henceforth, "pa") writes to copies of configuration files on the ramdisk. Those
get saved to some nonvolatile place (typically the install CD) when pa exits. I think the answer is to create a small directory on
the hard drive and use that for storing configuration information. All DOS/Windows programs that run from a CD without installing
on the hard drive have to do something like that. BTW, this is also true for a diskette distribution as the post-setup installation files
are too big to fit back onto the install floppy. I propose we warn the pa user we are going to sully his hard drive with configuration files,
get his OK, and go for it. The case in which you are going to run pa using a modem and a dailer on someone else's machine and you
don't want to touch the hard drive at all will have to be packaged differently.

Actually I'm overstating a little. You can get arachne.cfg and arachne.pck back onto the install diskette. However, you can't quite
pack all you need to start arachne cleanly onto the diskette because you need too much: packet driver, choice.exe, 20 K of arachne
configuration files, xdel and xcopy.

<>




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