Re: Last version of Apple II GEOS?

[labelas@hotmail.com (Labelas Enoreth)]

Hi. Figured I'd let you all know I finally got GEOS to install onto my HD.
Works fine off of a ProDOS partition on my LC with the IIe card, and off
of a 1.4MB disk image in Bernie. Under Bernie (have yet to try it on a
real IIgs since I will need to make it fit onto 2 800k disks and GEOS is a
royal pain [more below] to move around once you install it) it will
occasionally crash into the Monitor if you boot it from GS/OS, but I have
not yet investigated the situation fully. Will also try running it on my
GS when I get around to slapping one of my extra SCSI HDs into a external
case so I will have a HD for my SCSI card. Some of the parts from GEOS
were from a disk image or two I got off of a public FTP, so it is stamped
with a name, however I will look into trying to remove it and/or do the
same with a unstamped version if someone is kind enough to provide it.
As for GEOS itself, currently it is residing on a 20 Mb ProDOS partition,
a 1.4Mb 3.5" ProDOS disk, and a DiskCopy 1.4MB ProDOS disk image. That's
all of GEOS, and it boots fine. Well, you need to run GEOS.SYSTEM from
ProDOS, no automatic booting like from the 5.25s, but that's a small
price, no?
Problems with GEOS...
1>Uses ProDOS filing but breaks all the rules. Much agony to try to do
_anything_ with a disk with GEOS files on it under anything but GEOS.
Gratuitous spaces, etc...so you get lots of file not found, invalid
pathname, I/O error...kind of errors.
2>Only 4 drives available under GEOS. Sucks if you have more than that. It
looks in slot order, I think, but I didn't toy with it too much because it
didn't seem to help anything. It picks from RAM7, 5.25 1&2, 3.5 1&2 and
then anything else, in that order. So if you want to use your SuperDrive
and a SCSI hard drive, and you happen to have a RAM disk set up...well,
you see what I mean...especially since GEOS only wants to boot from 5.25s
(unless somewhere out there is a 3.5 boot disk of it)
3>Anyone out there know of an easy way to make your IIe or IIgs know how
to automatically switch into monochrome rather than having to manually
change it each time (and on a IIe....sigh.) anyway, perhaps this is just a
small point.
4>Is it my mouse, or does GEOS just not let you click-drag? AFAICS, if you
want to use a menu, it's click <on menu name> click <when over menu item>
click <to select menu item>...as a GSOS and MacOS user, this confused me
for a good 5 minutes when I first started using it and tried to use menus.

Pluses...
1>GUI for a IIe...'nuff said.
2>Once you get it onto a better disk format, it's wonderful...the only
things that you run into are when you try to do stuff outside of GEOS.

Oh yeah...also, anyone know if you can run stuff from the GEOS desktop? I
accidentally double clicked a P8 app once, and it gave me a 'ProDOS not
currently available' message or something like that. Is it simply cutely
telling you that you can't use P8 apps from within GEOS, or is there
somewhere you can stick the ProDOS system file and have GEOS run those
too...? (the mind reels with the possibilities)