CoPilot installation saga

[mtm4@rsvl.unisys.com (Mike McCormick)]

                  INSTALLING GENIE CO-PILOT(tm) ON MY APPLE IIGS
                                 A Cautionary Tale

INTRO: This is the tragic tale of my attempt [so far] to put CoPilot on my
Apple IIGS computer.  CoPilot is a GUI front-end to the GEnie BBS.  (IBM & Mac
users have a "real" front-end called Aladdin.)  If you do not use GEnie on a
Apple computer, the rest of this message is not of interest to you.

DISCLAIMER: Although I am mighty annoyed with these products at the moment,
and may not hide my frustration as well as I ought to below, this message is
NOT an attack against either ProTerm or CoPilot.  Both are actually great
products (if you can ever get them installed) and life as an Apple GEnie
subscriber would be almost unimaginable without them.

1. Some months ago I accepted the offer to "Download a GEnie Navigator" from
the main menu of GEnie's Apple II user roundtable (A2 RTC).  While it is
freeware, the download did cost me connect time $$.  I successfully downloaded
CoPilot at this time.

2. I unShrinked the CoPilot files, and took a peek at the README file.  There
I was told I need ProTerm 3.0 or higher.  I had ProTerm 2.0.

3. With a vague foreboding, I ponied up the $45 for an upgrade to Proterm 3.1.
 A month later it came in the mail from InTrec.

4. I was surprised to discover that Proterm3 is almost a completely different
product than my ProTerm2.  All the menus changed.  Most commands for editor,
scrollback, etc. were different.  The macro language was totally different.  I
began to sense now that getting CoPilot was not going to be as cheap or as
painless as I'd naively hoped.

5. I installed ProTerm 3.1.  It did automatically recover my dialing list
file, but I was expected to reconfigure the modem myself and convert all my
macros.  My cryptic modem init string was not picked up automatically, for
example.  PT3 does include a macro for converting old macro files to the new
macro language, but when I ran my converted GEnie system macros most did not
work anymore.  I had to learn the new macro language, and then fix them by
hand myself.

6. Eventually PT3 (Proterm 3.1) was up and working on my GS.  Alot of time,
effort, and money was already spent for a level of ProTerm that did not seem
to offer me any real advances over good ol' ProTerm 2.0.  But at least I was
ready now to run CoPilot!

7. I installed CoPilot from its Installer program, which created a raft of new
files in the directory on my hard drive where I keep ProTerm.  The
installation seemed to go fine.

8. I fired up CoPilot and then went through all the Setup Menu commands in
order to configure communications, GEnie identifiers, roundtable names (I had
to sign onto GEnie first to find out their page numbers), and lots of other
options to tailor CoPilot.  Again everything seemed to go fine.

9. I tried to go online to GEnie from CoPilot.  But for no explained reason,
it just seemed unable to launch PT3.  "Online & Return" just threw me back to
the CoPilot splash screen.  "Online & Quit" just threw me onto the Finder
desktop.

10. I combed through all the CoPilot documentation again, looking for clues.
I then noticed a mention that "ProTerm seems to have trouble with long path
names".  News to me.  It suggested I keep Proterm in a top-level folder.
Until then, I had always kept it in /HARD2/PROTERM/PROTERM because that is how
it ended up when I followed the original Proterm2 installation instructions.

11. Cursing mightily, I moved the entire contents of /HARD2/PROTERM/PROTERM up
to /HARD2/PROTERM.  I then had to change all the default path names I had
configured in PT3, but once I did that Proterm seemed to run OK in its new
location.

12. CoPilot OTOH no longer works in its new directory.  Apparently it keeps
hard-coded full pathnames in its configuiration.  Frantically I tried to find
where the path names are so I could change them, but I was SOL.

13. Recalling it was the CoPilot INSTALL program that asks for the PT3
pathname, I reasoned I should just re-install CoPilot at its new location.  Of
course, I would have to redo all the CoPilot setup & configuration, so I was
less than ecstatic about this.

14. I re-installed CoPilot since I'd had the foresight to keep the INSTALL
program.  Installer said it was deleting old versions of CoPilot files, then
copying new ones.  Suddenly Installer died because it could not find some
unnamed important file.

15. Although there is no helpful error message to tell me why I couldn't
re-install CoPilot, I brought my Holmesian powers of deduction to bear on the
problem.  I noticed that the executable file itself (GECoPilot) was no longer
anywhere in sight.  The only copy was in /HARD2/PROTERM, and apparently
INSTALL had just deleted it.  And then had the nerve to complain it was
missing! :-(

16. Tonight I sign back on to GEnie to re-download the whole CoPilot file set.
 See Step 1.

                           THE END ?

  _________________________________________
 / Mike McCormick                          \
 | business: mtm4@rsvl.unisys.com          |
 | home:     m.mccormick2@genie.geis.com   |
 |           70714.551@compuserve.com      |
 |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|
 | "Follow your bliss, and doors will open |
 \  where there were no doors before."     /
  -----------------------------------------