[arachne]

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John, all:

I've got a possible bug report with the 'arachne -s' setup
routine in 175 and earlier:

So you type 'arachne -s'. Then you get a text screen letting you 
choose XMS, EMS or Disk.  Then you get similar screen letting you choose
VGA, EGA or CGA.  Now things get tricky -- on my system the graphic
screen that follows shows 'VGA' ticked (as you'd expect given the
choice made in the last text screen), but in the top right of the
screen it says 'VESA detected', which would lead you to think that
the 'VESA' box, *not* the 'VGA' box should be ticked by default.  (Indeed,
since Arachne can detect the card type, the previous text screen seems
to be useless at best, misleading at worst).

Now, given that Arachne has detected VESA, one naturally goes down to
the VESA choices on the right of the screen and picks one --  but unless
you've remembered to move the left hand tick from VGA to VESA, the result
is an error and suggested reboot.  Perhaps there should be no VESA tick
box on the left but a message telling you to pick one of the 
*specific* VESA choices on the right -- that way there is never more
than one box ticked at any one time which should be more idiot proof than
the current setup where two boxes need to be ticked for any given
VESA setup.

So I get the above figured out, tick the VESA box, then tick one of the
VESA specific choices.  Only 640 X 480 works without trouble.  With any
other selection, I get an 'errorlevel 0' message at the top of the screen,
then I press a key and get to a graphical error screen that suggests
a reboot ... even though there is nothing wrong! ... I can hit the
'restart Arachne' button with no problems, or just ignore the message and
continue using Arachne at any resolution I want.  I have an error report 
where there is no error.  This is the sort of thing that could put a
potential new user of Arachne right off.

Furthermore, when one is making a choice in the graphical setup screen,
the white 'VESA compatible card or driver' tag on the left seems to
suggest that only the white choices on the right are available, even 
though they all can be made to work (inspite of the non-error mentioned
above).  Below the 'white' choices on the right are grey choices in 
blue text and grey choices in red text -- what's this all about?

Can anybody confirm my experience? ... perhaps it's just due to my
particular card.  (On my other machine the 8 MB PCI card is detected
as 'trident', so I can't make a fair comparison).  It seems to me
that this part of setup could be better managed -- opinions?


Ray Andrews,
Arachne Sanitary Engineering Ltd.
Vancouver, Canada

-- Arachne V1.73 GPL/B3 :The best in freeware!


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

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