Swarm 1.3.1 on Windows95/98

[Benedikt Stefansson]

I have some good news and some bug questions.

We are teaching a course on Swarm here at UCLA, and the good news is that
we were successful in installing Swarm on a Windows95 network. The
strategy that worked was to install the Cygwin19 tools on each machine,
but to put Swarm on a network drive. Of course I'm thrilled that you have
now decided not to support Cygwin19 anymore, because we only have 80
machines that need to be reconfigured for Swarm 1.4 (insert smiley here).

Now to the 'bad news'. It seems that students which run the last version
of Windows95 or the current version of Windows98 have problems installing
Cygwin19.  After installation (and a reboot) launching bash from
Start->Programs->Swarm->bash produces a shell window which barfs out error
messages about not being able to find grep, tr and some other stuff. The
shell doesn't crash but also gives errors for any command, such as 'dir'
and is thus unusable.

Fortunately, in all these cases we have been able to fix the problem by
uninstalling/installing repeatedly (sometimes as often as 3-4 times). I
have no idea what it is that changes between the installs, but suddendly
bash starts working.

Also, on these systems, when installing Emacs it seems to be better to use
Explorer to copy the *.tar.gz file from the CD-ROM or the Emacs directory,
rather than to use bash to copy files and run addpm.exe. When we use bash
Emacs launches but crashes if you type anything into the buffer.

On older versions of Windows95 and on Windows NT 4.0 things seem to work
OK both in terms of Cygwin19 and Emacs.

Obviously this is a vague question, but does anybody have an idea what
might have changed between earlier vintages and the last version of
Windows95 and in Windows 98?

Finally, one request for the upcoming 1.4.1 CD-ROM: Please add 'Install
Emacs' and 'Install demo source code' as options on the widget that pops
up when the CD autoboots. This would make life a lot easier for beginners
(and instructors).

-Benedikt

------------------
Benedikt Stefansson                 address@hidden
Department of Economics, UCLA       Fax. (310) 825-9528
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477          Tel. (310) 825-1777



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