831059l@aucs.UUCP (Langlois) (12/02/88)
Today I received Smalltalk/V286 and upon receiving it, I was very
excited. My excitment was short lived however. First of all, I had the
hardest time getting it to run properly. It wasn't the fact that my machine
couldn't handle the protected mode to real mode switching thing, it seemed
that it didn't like when I loaded my mouse driver from my config.sys file with
the line device=\msmouse\mouse.sys. After playing around for a little while
I finally realized that this was the problem. The documentation states that
V286 might have problems with Version 3.0 of the mouse driver, but I'm using
Verion 6.02. Oh well, off to a great start.
Once I was up and running I got pretty excited again as I wanted to
see what this new implementation was like and how my application would work
in the new environment. I'll admit that the new interface of V286 is much
better than V and there are many new features which are very good. It seems
faster at everything (maybe it has something to do with protected mode). Just
yesterday I was able to get a simulation running which I had designed. I
installed then code for my objects into V286 and then executed it. Well it
did something, it definitely didn't work, but it did do something. I had
installed the multiproccessing classes and methods as well as semphores from
the Goodies disk Version 1.0 into Smalltalk/V and this is what I did my
original development on and my simulation worked fine. In Smalltalk/V286
the same objects and methods don't work. It looks like it having problems with
the multiproccessing part of things. Objects or processes waiting on semaphores
don't seem to resume properly or at all when they are signalled.
Don't take me wrong here, I'm just I little frustrated I guess. I
was expecting too much I guess when I hoped for direct portability.
Smalltalk/V286 seems very good and is much better than Smalltalk/V, so
if you have a choice, get Smalltalk/V286. Has anyone else experienced
the problems that I have with differences in multiprocessing? If so, any
suggestions or methods you used to solve the problem would be greatly
appreciated. If I find out myself I'll post the results.
Thanks for your time.
Steven Langlois UUCP: {uunet|watmath|utai|garfield}!dalcs!aucs!831059l
Acadia University BITNET: Steven@Acadia
Wolfville, NS Internet: Steven%Acadia.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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