[Freedos-user] Arachne PDF viewer failing under FD 1.0
Under FD 0.9 SR2 with critical patches dating to 2-3 months ago, I was running Arachne 1.90JG with the ARA-PDF plug-in (which makes use of a certain distro of GhostScript v7.05) to view PDF files with images. (Very nice!) But this has failed with FD 1.0 and Arachne 1.90J1 (the newest release) and using the same versions of ARA-PDF and GhostScript. And it still fails for me if I drop back to Arachne 1.90JG. On the face it of, the only other things to have changed are the hardware and the version of FreeDOS (and perhaps a few other plug-ins in the successful old installation of Arachne - but that shouldn't matter as far as I know). If anyone would like to try this out, the ingredients are: Arachne v1.90J1 (the FD full CD ISO has the previous release 1.90JG): http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/arachne/a190j1.zip The right version of GhostScript: http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/apm/gs705dos.zip (unzip to C:\GS) The ARA-PDF plug-in: http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/apm/ara-pdf.apm (just open this in Arachne to install) *IF* Arachne is tripping over a FreeDOS component, I don't have a quick-and-easy idea for locating it. I may try creating a FreeDOS 0.9 SR2 boot disk with the updates I was previously using. I should say that the GhostScript error file referenced by Arachne is empty. (Before digging into this further, I'd rather hear that someone else has already identified the problem.) Anyone else successfully or not successfully using Arachne 1.90Jx with ARA-PDF under FreeDOS 1.0? I think it would be helpful if someone knew how to use GhostScript as a freestanding PDF viewer outside of Arachne. (It would also be a nice capability on its own merits!) That may indicate whether the conflict is with GS or Arachne. 1-2 front-ends have been created for doing this in user-friendly fashion, but I haven't gotten either to work with this distro of GS. I see, by the way, that we have included a distribution of GhostScript with the full FD ISO, so I imagine that someone here knows how to use it for something in FD. I don't know if it is the same distribution that Glenn McCorkle offers above. --John Hupp - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Arachne PDF viewer failing under FD 1.0
More on my dealings with this issue. I did create a FD 0.9 SR2 boot disk (as updated in the successful old installation) and still experienced the same problem. I also downloaded a fresh copy of the recommended distro of GhostScript, and that did not help. Eric comments on the edition of GhostScript included in the FreeDOS 1.0 bundle, saying he had the idea that it does not work. Apart from the question of why it was included (what the envisioned usage was) and whether someone knows how to use it as a freestanding PDF viewer, I had earlier considered that on account of PATH, Arachne might be trying to use C:\FDOS\GS rather than the intended C:\GS, so I moved C:\FDOS\GS to C:\GS_FDOS, a location out of the PATH. This did not solve the problem. I have one other idea to test currently: I remember now that the previous successful installation was FAT16 because I had identified a few OpenGEM apps (Doodle, Draw and Paint) that did not work with FD FAT32 at that point. These seem to work now under the current FAT32 installation, but could ARA-PDF and GS be conflicting with a different part of the FD FAT32 implementation? Other than hardware, this is about the only other variable I can think of. --John Hupp - Original Message - From: John Hupp To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 12:37 PM Subject: [Freedos-user] Arachne PDF viewer failing under FD 1.0 Under FD 0.9 SR2 with critical patches dating to 2-3 months ago, I was running Arachne 1.90JG with the ARA-PDF plug-in (which makes use of a certain distro of GhostScript v7.05) to view PDF files with images. (Very nice!) But this has failed with FD 1.0 and Arachne 1.90J1 (the newest release) and using the same versions of ARA-PDF and GhostScript. And it still fails for me if I drop back to Arachne 1.90JG. On the face it of, the only other things to have changed are the hardware and the version of FreeDOS (and perhaps a few other plug-ins in the successful old installation of Arachne - but that shouldn't matter as far as I know). If anyone would like to try this out, the ingredients are: Arachne v1.90J1 (the FD full CD ISO has the previous release 1.90JG): http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/arachne/a190j1.zip The right version of GhostScript: http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/apm/gs705dos.zip (unzip to C:\GS) The ARA-PDF plug-in: http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/apm/ara-pdf.apm (just open this in Arachne to install) *IF* Arachne is tripping over a FreeDOS component, I don't have a quick-and-easy idea for locating it. I may try creating a FreeDOS 0.9 SR2 boot disk with the updates I was previously using. I should say that the GhostScript error file referenced by Arachne is empty. (Before digging into this further, I'd rather hear that someone else has already identified the problem.) Anyone else successfully or not successfully using Arachne 1.90Jx with ARA-PDF under FreeDOS 1.0? I think it would be helpful if someone knew how to use GhostScript as a freestanding PDF viewer outside of Arachne. (It would also be a nice capability on its own merits!) That may indicate whether the conflict is with GS or Arachne. 1-2 front-ends have been created for doing this in user-friendly fashion, but I haven't gotten either to work with this distro of GS. I see, by the way, that we have included a distribution of GhostScript with the full FD ISO, so I imagine that someone here knows how to use it for something in FD. I don't know if it is the same distribution that Glenn McCorkle offers above. --John Hupp - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Arachne PDF viewer failing under FD 1.0
A second follow-up to my own post: I moved everything over to a FAT16 disk, and that did not solve the problem. (So it would seem that the revised FD FAT32 support is still good!) I also discovered that there is a more recent version of ARA-PDF than I was using. One previous version includes the desired GhostScript distro. But I found no combination of ARA-PDF and GS that will now work for me. I am at a loss to explain how this was working before and seemingly cannot be made to work now in any configuration. --John Hupp - Original Message - From: John Hupp To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 2:02 PM Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] Arachne PDF viewer failing under FD 1.0 More on my dealings with this issue. I did create a FD 0.9 SR2 boot disk (as updated in the successful old installation) and still experienced the same problem. I also downloaded a fresh copy of the recommended distro of GhostScript, and that did not help. Eric comments on the edition of GhostScript included in the FreeDOS 1.0 bundle, saying he had the idea that it does not work. Apart from the question of why it was included (what the envisioned usage was) and whether someone knows how to use it as a freestanding PDF viewer, I had earlier considered that on account of PATH, Arachne might be trying to use C:\FDOS\GS rather than the intended C:\GS, so I moved C:\FDOS\GS to C:\GS_FDOS, a location out of the PATH. This did not solve the problem. I have one other idea to test currently: I remember now that the previous successful installation was FAT16 because I had identified a few OpenGEM apps (Doodle, Draw and Paint) that did not work with FD FAT32 at that point. These seem to work now under the current FAT32 installation, but could ARA-PDF and GS be conflicting with a different part of the FD FAT32 implementation? Other than hardware, this is about the only other variable I can think of. --John Hupp - Original Message - From: John Hupp To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 12:37 PM Subject: [Freedos-user] Arachne PDF viewer failing under FD 1.0 Under FD 0.9 SR2 with critical patches dating to 2-3 months ago, I was running Arachne 1.90JG with the ARA-PDF plug-in (which makes use of a certain distro of GhostScript v7.05) to view PDF files with images. (Very nice!) But this has failed with FD 1.0 and Arachne 1.90J1 (the newest release) and using the same versions of ARA-PDF and GhostScript. And it still fails for me if I drop back to Arachne 1.90JG. On the face it of, the only other things to have changed are the hardware and the version of FreeDOS (and perhaps a few other plug-ins in the successful old installation of Arachne - but that shouldn't matter as far as I know). If anyone would like to try this out, the ingredients are: Arachne v1.90J1 (the FD full CD ISO has the previous release 1.90JG): http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/arachne/a190j1.zip The right version of GhostScript: http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/apm/gs705dos.zip (unzip to C:\GS) The ARA-PDF plug-in: http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/apm/ara-pdf.apm (just open this in Arachne to install) *IF* Arachne is tripping over a FreeDOS component, I don't have a quick-and-easy idea for locating it. I may try creating a FreeDOS 0.9 SR2 boot disk with the updates I was previously using. I should say that the GhostScript error file referenced by Arachne is empty. (Before digging into this further, I'd rather hear that someone else has already identified the problem.) Anyone else successfully or not successfully using Arachne 1.90Jx with ARA-PDF under FreeDOS 1.0? I think it would be helpful if someone knew how to use GhostScript as a freestanding PDF viewer outside of Arachne. (It would also be a nice capability on its own merits!) That may indicate whether the conflict is with GS or Arachne. 1-2 front-ends have been created for doing this in user-friendly fashion, but I haven't gotten either to work with this distro of GS. I see, by the way, that we have included a distribution of GhostScript with the full FD ISO, so I imagine that someone here knows how to use it for something in FD. I don't know if it is the same distribution that Glenn McCorkle offers above. --John Hupp - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to
[Freedos-user] XCOPY bugs
While fiddling with the Arachne/ARA-PDF difficulty that I've been reporting on, I found that XCOPY has some lingering problems. The first thing I noticed was a problem copying the C:\GS tree (GhostScript). It has sub-directories named GS.705 and FONTS. XCOPY will only copy C:\GS\*.*. The problem is apparently a rejection of directories with numbered extensions, since it successfully copies other directories elsewhere with letter extensions. The second problem was in the FDOS tree. (In the past, XCOPY refused to copy large chunks of the FDOS tree, but that seems to have been mostly solved.) I tried copying the whole FDOS tree just because of my past experience with the problem there. I found that XCOPY copied the entire tree except for the PACKAGES sub-directory. The only thing remarkable I notice about PACKAGES is that it has 198 sub-directories. --John Hupp - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] XCOPY bugs - and FDPKG wastes disk space
solved.) I tried copying the whole FDOS tree just because of my past experience with the problem there. I found that XCOPY copied the entire tree except for the PACKAGES sub-directory. The only thing remarkable I notice about PACKAGES is that it has 198 sub-directories. XCOPY does not copy EMPTY directories by default, and MANY directories in the package subtree are empty. It would be a VERY useful optimisation if FDPKG could just touch empty FILES to flag package installed, as such files would not consume disk space. Only roughly one third of the packages directories actually contain extra files. Those files can be depends.txt, install,bat, remove,bat or upgrade,bat. Actually I would even recommend to store ALL those files in ONE packages directory as packagename.dep packagename.ins packagename.del and packagename.upd (and then dynamically copy files to some temp,bat to run them, when one wants to install/delete/update a package). This can easily save 6 MB of disk space for a full FreeDOS 1.0 install, so I would strongly recommend to add this feature. Eric - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] XCOPY bugs - and FDPKG wastes disk space
All enemies of bloat and fans of disk usage economy would undoubtedly cheer if FDPKG modified its behavior as you suggest. To follow up on the point about XCOPY bad behavior #2, however, I'll note that I was using the XCOPY /E option, so it should have copied every single sub-directory, empty or not. --John Hupp - Original Message - From: Eric Auer To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 5:57 PM Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] XCOPY bugs - and FDPKG wastes disk space solved.) I tried copying the whole FDOS tree just because of my past experience with the problem there. I found that XCOPY copied the entire tree except for the PACKAGES sub-directory. The only thing remarkable I notice about PACKAGES is that it has 198 sub-directories. XCOPY does not copy EMPTY directories by default, and MANY directories in the package subtree are empty. It would be a VERY useful optimisation if FDPKG could just touch empty FILES to flag package installed, as such files would not consume disk space. Only roughly one third of the packages directories actually contain extra files. Those files can be depends.txt, install,bat, remove,bat or upgrade,bat. Actually I would even recommend to store ALL those files in ONE packages directory as packagename.dep packagename.ins packagename.del and packagename.upd (and then dynamically copy files to some temp,bat to run them, when one wants to install/delete/update a package). This can easily save 6 MB of disk space for a full FreeDOS 1.0 install, so I would strongly recommend to add this feature. Eric - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user - Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.phpp=sourceforgeCID=DEVDEV ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
