My personal comments on Arachne 1.62.
First, the good stuff:
*
The download is smaller.
The SFX extracted easily from floppy to ramdisk without any stupid Wizards
messing it up. It only complained slightly when I wanted to put it in the
root. There aren't that many files in Arachne main and I wanted to shorten
the path. But I let it have it's way and it stayed nicely in text mode
until I selected my video. Some slight hitches after this but not serious.
As advertised, V1.62 takes 9kb less memory. I had 138 [+] offline on the
dialler screen and when it worked, I had 58 [+] green online at Arachne chat.
I couldn't make it behave badly in any way at my regular URLs and I think
this will be my new base version to apply all my personal changes to.
The .acfs have been modified with acceptable waitfor and response defaults.
The shell to DOS function has had the environment problem reasonably fixed.
The size of 512 bytes is written into DOSSHELL.bat instead of as a mime.cfg
entry which would be easier for users to find and change. LD will probably
want more than the default.
There's probably more good stuff but I haven't been there yet. <G>
Now the minor bad stuff:
*
On install, after testing my processor, Arachne went to a screen with URL
file:setup_os.dgi. The screen was blank grey and she didn't go anywhere from
there. I hit altX and ended up in the root dir where I had to CD to restart.
The arachne.cfg value for Com Base is still default. I think that's a major
source of future problems.
The "ESC" option has not been modified. Even "Ignore" might be a better
default than "Exit"
When I exited after checking the initial install, I found a history.lst in
my ROOT directory !-((
Checking mime.cfg, I found that external pop3 and smtp are still defaultly
enabled.
Also in mime.cfg, I found that the last line for Ver1.61, $$...$ character
is missing in mime.cfg for Ver1.62. Is that a mistake ? Or a change ?
Finally,the real bad stuff:
*
The first time I went online with V1.62 on my P90 with 56k modem, it took
3 minutes and 58 seconds to load home.arachne.cz ! You already know I think
there is much wrong with THAT page but here is some proof:
>From there I went to Arachne chat. At that point my DOS memory was down to
only 48kb [!!!] red. As stated above, when on the same page later without
going to home.arachne.cz first, I had 58 [+] green.
I tried to post on Arachne chat and Arachne crashed.
DOS screen: Memory allocation error -
Illegal xSwap operation at line 294 of file HTTP.C !
Trying to deallocate xSwap .... ok
Errorlevel 0 (my debug line)
Press any key to continue ....
I believe this is a problem with page home.arachne.cz - NOT Arachne 1.62.
Anyway, *I* like Ver 1.62. <g>
- Clarence Verge
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- Help stamp out FATWARE. As a start visit: http://home.arachne.cz/
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