Bruce, My Win98 computer had a hard disk failure last year and I upgraded it to Win2K. However, I have another 98 running at home. But I don't have the lastest Ifeffit there. So I just tried this with 1.0074. I will try a latest version later. I don't recall anything about the 'out of memory' problem when installing on my office 98. But this time I do. After changing config.sys. It was gone. And from my experience here, the answer to the first question below is YES. I click the icon on desktop, a DOS shell window (minimized) showed up and the 'too many parameters' information given. Then, well, nothing happened then. I tired put quote on 'C:\Program Files\Ifeffit' in the .bat file. It did not help. And I tried put double quotes on "C:\Program Files\Ifeffit". It helps sovle the 'too many parameter' problem. But it seems introduced another problem. An error message 'bad side "": must be top, bottom, left, or right at Tk/Widget.pm line 1053' showed and quit. The last thing I did was changing it to C:\Progra~1\Ifeffit. And it worked. Putting single or double (' or ") around it would not work again. And the answer to the second question is YES, if the icons here mean the '.exe' file. NO for '.bat' file. It was also a NO if I tried to run them from 'Start-->Programs-->Ifeffit-->Athena(or anyother)'. I believe this means the icons on the desktop point to the correct files (.bat file). And the only problem is the bat file could not set up the path. This won't be a problem if the path is sort of a normal DOS path, say shorter than 8 characters and contains no space. Zhan
Zhan: I have the exact opposite question. Was changing the path to have the tilde rather than the space required to get the desktop icons to work? And do the programs run without editing if you click on the icons in the C:\Program Files\Ifeffit folder?
Perhaps someone who is python-savvy and has access to a Win98 machine can help out by doing some tests and figuring out what the make_bats.py needs to be in order to work correctly on Win9x *as well as* the later Windows systems. There are some hints in the README.TXT file in the build_setup folder for how make_bats and the installer builder all work.
-- Zhan Zhang Northwestern University Argonne National Laboratory Materials Science & Engineering Department Environmental Research Division MLSB 2017 Building 203, C-137 2225 N. Campus Dr 9700 Cass Ave Evanston, IL 60208 Argonne, IL 60439 Tel: (630) 252-8629 Fax: (630) 252-5498 zhanzhang@northwestern.edu