Subject: Re: Problem with Win95
From: [email-masked] (Glenn Spell)

28 Jan 1999 07:21:37 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
References: <[email-masked]>
Reply-To: [email-masked] (Glenn Spell)
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To: [email-masked], [email-masked]

[email-masked] wrote:
> 
> [email-masked] writes:
> > 
> > > If anyone has a better fix I'd love it.
> > 
> > http://www.cygnus.com/ml/gnu-win32/1999-Jan/0484.html
> > 
> > > I really don't want to got o win98, that would just breat
> > > everything else... 
> > 
> > Absolutely. Until someone can explain to me in *detail* how
> > to remove *all* remnants of Internet Explorer from Win98, I
> > shall *never* *ever* downgrade from Win95B-noMSIE to Win98.
>
> I installed the cygwin binary snapshot which was posted Saturday.
> It also solves the "vfork: no more processes"  [...]

Certainly the latest snapshot also solves the "vfork:" problem as my
patch was derived from changes included in the snapshots.

>  [...] but it changes the way drives are referred to by default
> from e.g. //d/ to d:

I prefer not to try the current snapshots (which are B21) since
registry and mount functions seem to be in a such a state of flux.
For now, I'm a happy camper with B20.1.

> Maybe it's better to use mounts always.

I don't know. I expect mounts will be required for full functionality
at some point in the future.

> It doesn't solve the problems with silent errors in running patch,
> which I usually do across drives.

I have not experienced any problems with patch. I use all text
mounts. Patch sometimes reports "ignoring trailing garbage" but
that doesn't seem to create any problems. I did have to make some
changes to Mumit's patches for egcs-1.1.1 but he clearly warned
not to use WinZip, which I did use, and not to use text mounts,
which I did and do use... and will continue to use. :-)
I attribute these problems to text mounts and not to patch, per se.
I'm hoping that text mounts will be better integrated into
Cygwin sometime in the future. (Yes, I know that's a complex
issue but Cygwin itself is complex and I have faith in those who
toil to develope this fine tool.)

I suggest the use of a dos-to-unix utility that not only deals
with the line endings but also deals with the control-Z issue.

> I found also that bash negotiates sh loops in Makefiles better than
> ash, both on NT and W95.

I've experienced no problems with ash (except the vfork-thing) and
ash is a lot faster than bash. In fact, I have ash installed as
both /bin/sh and /bin/bash on Win95. (Bash is /usr/bin/bash.) I
did update ash from cygwin-debian-0.3.4-2 to cygwin-debian-0.3.4-6
but I don't think that made any difference... it was only part
of my search for a work-around to the vfork-thing.

Maybe ash runs better on B20.1 than on the latest snapshots.

> Now I'm experimenting to see whether using -pipe consistently makes
> any difference.

I intended to do the same but I ran out of time to put into Cygwin.
Please keep us posted on any results.

> Is there any evidence that W98 would work better than W95,  [...]

Circumstantial. Everything I've read states that W98 is more stable.

> other than presumably not requiring the multiple steps to
> re-install with USB after it gets trashed?

My personal experience is that getting rid of IE4 gets rid of the
trashing. Plain and simple... no IE4, no re-installs.

The file included in the latest USB patch that solves some problems
is vmm.vxd (AFAIK), the DOS386 VMM Kernel. I've searched a friends
W98 system and did not find a file named vmm.vxd. So I suspect that
all that stuff is completely rewritten in W98. If anyone knows
different, please correct me.

> Once in a while we do run Encarta, and there's no getting away
> from MSIE there,  [...]

Well... I'm sorry for you. :-(

> but it doesn't get in the way otherwise.

Oh! You mean... you love those re-installs, huh?  :-)

BTW, a kind soul on this list emailed me a heads-up on installing
W98 without IE4. Check out http://www.98lite.net/  I am preparing
to install Win98-noMSIE in order to have a more stable Cygwin.

-glenn

-- 
            Glenn Spell <[email-masked]>
         Fayetteville, North Carolina, U. S. A.
  ____________________________________________________
  ... blue skies ... happy trails ... sweet dreams ...
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