Notes on Arachne ---------------- Arachne is a graphical WWW browser. It requires DOS 3.3 or later, EGA or better video, and a mouse. At least some EMS is strongly recommended. If those requirements are met, Arachne will run on an XT-class system, though it is pretty slow. You do not need to be connected to set it up. There is "experimental" support for CGA, but it doesn't really work. EGA doesn't work all that well either, but it's usable. Arachne will run best if you have an SVGA card capable of 256 colors at at least 640x480 resolution, and higher resolution is preferable (the program does not support more than 256 colors - you get more icons onscreen with higher resolution). Arachne internally supports several SVGA cards, or you can use a VESA driver with it. It is best to use one of Arachne's internal SVGA drivers if they work for you. Arachne will work without EMS or XMS, but it's pretty hopeless without it. I'm assuming you have an XT-class system, so you don't have XMS, but be aware that Arachne will flog the hard drive nearly to death without a disk cache. Hopefully, you have some EMS for that. Of course, if you have SMARTDRV or some other program (and it works on your system), you can use it. You want to enable write-behind caching. I suppose you should leave about 512k EMS free for Arachne to use. Arachne will put its overlays in EMS if available, and it will keep some data in EMS. (If you only have a small amount of EMS available, it is better to use it for a disk cache than for Arachne's overlays.) I use Adcache for EMS hard drive caching with Arachne; you can find it on my site: ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/tvdog/internet/adcsh122.zip The command I use to enable caching before running Arachne is: adcache -a512 -w That uses all but 512k of the available EMS for a disk cache and enables write-behind caching. After exiting Arachne, to unload the cache driver, use this: adcache -u Note: Adcache is incompatible with Bobcat, so if you want to run Bobcat as well as Arachne you need to unload Adcache after running Arachne. Indeed, the best way to use Arachne on an XT-class system is probably as an external browser for Bobcat. In that case, you would load and unload Adcache from inside the HTTP.BAT file in the BOBCAT/EXTERNAL directory (see my notes on Bobcat). Fraser Farrell <fraserf@dove.net.au> notes that defragmenting your hard drive will speed up Arachne significantly, especially if you don't have EMS or XMS RAM. Note that the official minimum configuration for Arachne is a 386 or better with a 512k SVGA card, running DOS 6 or above. Arachne also wants to have some extended RAM available, preferably 2 megabytes or more. I'm assuming that you have an XT-class system, so you don't have a 386 or extended RAM. If you have DOS 5.0 or later and your EMS card can furnish upper memory blocks, you should by all means load as much stuff high as you can - Arachne will need all the conventional RAM it can lay its hands on. Arachne comes as a self-extracting archive. Create a directory for it, then change to that directory and run ARCN14B2.EXE, like this: C:\> mkdir arachne C:\> cd arachne C:\ARACHNE> ..\arcn14b2 You will need a few megabytes of space on your hard drive! After the extraction is finished, copy your registration key (if you have one) into the Arachne directory. I recommend that you set up your packet driver first rather than setting it up from inside Arachne. This will allow you to iron out packet driver problems before you face problems with the application, and you have to set up Arachne this way if you want to use it as an external browser with Bobcat. After you've verified that the packet driver is working (by testing it with a simpler application), you can start to configure Arachne. You don't need to be online for this first part. There are several ways to configure Arachne, but this is the way I do it. In the Arachne directory, there is a file LANTCP.CFG. This is actually WATTCP.CFG by another name, and if you already have a working WATTCP.CFG file from another application, you can just copy that file over this one. Alternately, you could uncomment the "include=" line in LANTCP.CFG and set it to point to the working WATTCP.CFG you already have. Otherwise, load LANTCP.CFG into your favorite text editor. If you have static IP, add the following line at the beginning of the file: my_ip=127.0.0.1 # use your static IP address here Disregard the warning at the top of the file. Uncomment the netmask line and put in: netmask=0.0.0.0 # do *not* use your real netmask! Uncomment the gateway line and put in your gateway: gateway=127.0.0.2 # use your gateway IP address here If you get different gateways, just put in the one you get most often. Uncomment the nameserver line and put in your nameserver: nameserver=127.0.0.3 # use your nameserver IP address here Uncomment the domainslist line and set it to the empty string: domainslist="" Set hostname to your fully-qualified hostname: hostname=mypc.foo.bar.net Set sockdelay to 60: sockdelay=60 Set mss to 512: mss=512 At the bottom of the file, add a line to set a timeout for the name server: domainto=20 Save the file. If you have dynamic IP, see my instructions in the README file in this directory. You need to create files IPADDR.CFG with your IP address, and if your gateway is also dynamic, GATEWAY.CFG with its IP address. The easiest thing to do is just use a global WATTCP.CFG for all your WATTCP applications and make LANTCP.CFG a single include line pointing to it. Otherwise, edit LANTCP.CFG as follows. Add a line at the top of the file: include=e:\internet\ipaddr.cfg Use a full pathname as shown. Uncomment the netmask line and put in: netmask=0.0.0.0 # do *not* use your real netmask! Uncomment the gateway line and put in your gateway: gateway=127.0.0.2 # use your gateway IP address here If your gateway is dynamic, leave the gateway line commented out and do this instead: include=e:\internet\gateway.cfg Again, use a full pathname. Uncomment the nameserver line and put in your nameserver: nameserver=127.0.0.3 # use your nameserver IP address here Uncomment the domainslist line and set it to the empty string: domainslist="" Comment out the hostname line: #hostname=arachne Set sockdelay to 60: sockdelay=60 Set mss to 512: mss=512 At the bottom of the file, add a line to set a timeout for the name server: domainto=20 Save the file. Now type SETUP in the directory where you installed Arachne. You will be asked whether you want to optimize Arachne settings for a fast (Pentium-class) machine. Obviously you don't (say "N"). Next, you'll be asked if you want Arachne optimized for an AT or XT. Say "Y". That will change several settings on the configuration file to improve Arachne's performance on slow machines. Next it ask you whether to use XMS, EMS, or disk, then to select a video driver. Don't select something you don't have! The "Arachne TCP/IP Setup" screen will appear. If you accidentally specified Pentium optimizations, or forgot to specify AT/XT optimizations, you can correct it now by clicking on "ACF Profiles". When the "Profile manager" screen comes up, click on "Browse profiles", then select pc_at.acf. (Change profiles now if you need to - doing it later will overwrite all your custom settings, and you will have to do them over.) Arachne will restart. When you see "Load error", click on "Setup Arachne" to get back to the "Arachne TCP/IP Setup" screen. From the TCP/IP setup screen, select "Resident packet driver". The next screen is "Packet driver TCP/IP setup". You have three choices (if you can't see them all, use the <page down> key or the scrollbar to scroll the screen): "Manual TCP/IP setup", "Configure via BOOTP", or "Use only WATTCP configuration". Select "Use only WATTCP configuration", then click on "OK, save". The next screen that appears is "Arachne Options". There are 4 buttons: "Network settings", "Local settings", "Personal settings", and "Preferences". Go through them one by one, starting with "Network settings". The "Arachne Network Settings" screen appears. Fill in your POP and SMTP servers as given to you by your provider. Email probably will not work if you "Disable HELO protocol", so don't check that. If you are in the U.S., your provider probably doesn't use proxy servers, so just check the boxes marked, "Do not use HTTP proxy server" and "Do not use FTP proxy server". (If you are outside the U.S., especially in some third-world countries, your ISP may provide proxies to compensate for a slow Internet connection. Ask them.) Click on "OK, save". Back on the "Arachne Options" page, click on "Local settings". The "Arachne local settings" screen appears. Fill in your time zone. The printer width should be fine as is. Do *not* change anything else (some people like to put the cache on a RAM disk, but you can try that later - assuming you have enough EMS for one). Scroll to the bottom if you need to and click on "OK, save". When "Arachne Options" comes back, click on "Personal settings". The "Arachne personal settings" screen appears. The "Mail transfer, security, and privacy" settings should all be fine as is - you can uncheck the bottom three boxes if you're a paranoid sort of person, but do *not* check the first box. If you do, you will keep getting the same emails over and over again from your POP server. Fill in "Your e-Mail adress" (sic) and "Your personal name" (your real name, unless you don't want it to appear in your outgoing mail). You can make "Your organization" blank. Fill in your POP username and password as given to you (they are almost always the same as your login ID and password). If you are a registered user, you can change your Signature. Do not change the "Hotlist filename". Change the "Home Page" to "file:home.htm" (minus the quotes, of course). That will give you the Arachne desktop when you start up, which is particularly good if you have EGA, VGA, or low-res SVGA (in which case you don't have as many icons on the top of the screen). Unless your native language is Czech, you probably want to change the "Search Page" to a search engine you like. http://www.dogpile.com/ is a good one. When you're done, click on "OK, save". The "Arachne Options" screen comes back again. Click on "Preferences". The "Arachne preferences" screen appears. This was the stuff that was mainly set when you selected AT/XT optimizations. Under "Look & feel & performance", notice that "Auto download inline images" is unchecked. You might want to leave it that way, because apart from having a good-sized hard drive cache that is the most important speedup for Arachne - but what it means is that Arachne will only display the text on WWW pages, not the pictures (you can display the pictures on a particular page by clicking on the smiley-face icon on the top right - it may also be necessary to reload the page afterwards). On a slow 286, it can take up to 1/2 an hour to render a graphics-heavy page. Arachne makes a fairly decent text-only browser, and unlike Bobcat or Doslynx, it can handle Web pages of arbitrary size. The "Fast JPEGs" setting really doesn't matter much. JPEG's will never be fast enough on a slow PC. You don't need icons or tables, so leave those settings alone. Whether <esc> exits Arachne or not is a personal preference; <alt>-X can always be used. It is probably not a good idea to click the "serious icons" box; in earlier versions of Arachne, that could mess things up so you'd have to reinstall Arachne if you were using an old version of DOS. Frames didn't generally work right in previous versions, but they seem to be working better now, so you probably want to enable them. If your browser doesn't support frames, some sites won't let you in. Set the colors the way you like them. On my grayscale VGA monitor, I have text white, background black, link green on the desktop, and text black, background white, and link green for HTML. I left System colors alone. Virtual screens were disabled when you selected AT/XT setup, and this setting won't make any difference anyway on an old machine, since you don't have the XMS required to do them. One exception is an AT-class 286 with substantial memory (6M or more) and a reasonably fast processor (16MHz or so). In that case, you might want to enable virtual screens (at the most conservative settings) to make frames work better. Note that Arachne requires at least 4M XMS *free* to do virtual screens (EMS doesn't count), so don't give *everything* to your disk cache if you want to use them. "Image refresh period" should be left at the maximum setting. The Scrollbar size seems fine to me, but I like Windows-style scrollbars (with the arrows at the top and bottom). The Screen saver can stay disabled unless you have a need for it, and the "Definition of the <F3> key" is handy as is. You should change "Logo animation" from "disabled" to "slow". The thing is, it is a bad idea to try to interact with Arachne while it's busy downloading and rendering a page. Various problems can occur, from losing data in a form to an outright lockup. The logo animation enables you to determine when Arachne is finished rendering, so if you disable it entirely, you're flying blind. You can come back and adjust the "Font scaling" (or anything else), if you need to, after you've been online. Click on "OK, save". The "Arachne Options" screen comes back again. README.TXT is just the same sort of copyright notices and so forth that you saw when you decompressed the archive. You should check out the online help sometime, but you can wait if you want (the ? icon shows it). Particularly see the icon and hotkey descriptions and the speedup recommendations. Hit <alt>-X to exit Arachne (the X icon doesn't seem to work). There are some things in MIME.CFG that you need to change, so bring that up in your favorite text editor. There are two lines near the beginning that say to comment them out if you have an XT or AT. Do so; JPNG2BMP requires at least a 386 and will crash your machine. PNG's are rare anyway. If you don't have a SoundBlaster-compatible card, here is where you select a different .wav player. Now you can connect to the Internet and start Arachne. As you can see, the program is highly configurable, so feel free to tweak the settings when you get familiar with it. Note: email is problem-prone with Arachne. My problem, which you will have too if you have DOS 3.3, is that you can't mark a message as read or delete it. This problem has been known for a while and is apparently still not fixed. If in spite of that you decide to use Arachne for email, you will either want to upgrade your DOS version (at the cost of 30k valuable RAM) or have to exit Arachne to manually delete messages in the MAIL directory. Since Arachne is by far the slowest mail client for DOS, you are best advised to use something else for general emailing, and only use Arachne's email capability (if it works at all for you) for mailto: links in HTML documents. It is possible to configure Pegasus Mail for external MIME viewers, if you have a need to see an attached image without saving it first (you could probably even configure Arachne as a MIME viewer for HTML). From time to time you need to hit F8 to expire the disk cache. Unlike other browsers, Arachne does not automatically expire old documents in the cache, so it will gradually fill up your hard drive if you don't flush the cache occasionally. A large cache also slows the program down significantly. Michael Polak, the author of Arachne, is running OpenDOS 7 on his machine and is a big booster of it. Some of the commands in MIME.CFG (which Arachne uses to run external helper programs) assume you have OpenDOS too. If you are conversant with DOS batch programming, check out that file and make sure it's compatible with your version. Arachne now supports plug-ins (its own, not Netscape's or IE's). You can find them at the main Arachne site.