On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Clarence Verge wrote:
> The download is smaller.
It is actually 3 KB larger, but you probably got ZIP last time, which is
50% larger than SFX RAR (but I don't want to offer RAR on Arachne
homepage, as few people know what it is). BTW> there will be ZIP of 1.62,
definitely (and .tar.gz for Linux;-) , but I was simply too sleepy when I
released 1.62 SFX, that I went to bed without ZIPping ;-)
> 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 got 143 KB [+] with packet driver for ethernet card...
CORE.EXE without HiColor support will be even less memory hungry - I want
to release it today. And it will be slightly more staticaly linked, so it
will be faster.
> 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.
Thank to Linux for better behaviour: Linux is very picky about memory
exceptions, and everything which used to work in DOS, and "just" caused
some fatal crash some time later, had to be fixed (and it still crashes in
Linux BTW, so some more bugs have to be fixed, unless this is one of bugs
which is caused by sizeof(int)==2 in DOS and ==4 in Linux ...)
> 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.
Ok, but MIME.CFG is loaded in memory (in xSwap) all the time Arachne is
running.. so I want rather to minimize it in future...
> There's probably more good stuff but I haven't been there yet. <G>
Really not much. You noticed almost all changes. I was not working in DOS
this time- I was porting to Linux, and I did just daily ./export to my DOS
partiton and everyday reboot, build in Borland C and short testing if it
really works. This doesn't mean there won't be new features in future,
but there will be some time when I will just try to port everything which
works in DOS to Linux.
> 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.
This is weird :-(
> The arachne.cfg value for Com Base is still default. I think that's a major
> source of future problems.
But setting it differently would make it much more tricky for people who
know what COM port is, but not what Base address is. Note, that for my
COM 3 Irq 4 internal modem it works perdfectly, as well as for modesm on
standard COM 1 and COM 2.
> The "ESC" option has not been modified. Even "Ignore" might be a better
> default than "Exit"
Please let user decide what Esc should really Escape. Personaly, I love
every program which lets me to Escape to some basic level of interaction
(command line, desktop...)
> When I exited after checking the initial install, I found a history.lst in
> my ROOT directory !-((
We should determine what was wrong with your setup_os.dgi: because it
works elsewhere. First: what about your TEMP enviroment variable ?
> Checking mime.cfg, I found that external pop3 and smtp are still defaultly
> enabled.
My mistake, sorry. This is really not wise, especially because I think
that Autodial is disable by default....
> 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 ?
Probably just mistake in MIME.CFG
> 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 believe this is a problem with page home.arachne.cz - NOT Arachne 1.62.
This is bad - this page shouldn't eat any extra memory, of course, and it
doesn't do it for me. There is problem with Arachne, because it is normal
legal HTML, and Arachne shouldn't crash on it.
For now, I suggest you bookmarking text-only version of Arachne homepage.
--
http://arachne.cz/
(Arachne WWW browser for DOS+Linux / Webhosting / MP3streaming)
