Problems in installing DOS port of AKCL

[yue@maxwell.mmwb.ucsf.EDU (Kaizhi Yue)]

Hi,

 I recently downloaded the beta version of DOS port for AKCL from
math.utexas.edu.  My sincere thanks to the people who did the porting.
I have two major problems in installing and/or running the system. I
would appreciate if any one can shed some light on these.

 First, AKCL will start swapping when we switch to another task, e.g.,
when DEMACS is called from AKCL. This can last 7-8 seconds every time.
I do not know if this is because I got anything wrong in my installation or
this is the way it is. (I understand that DEMACS, also using GO32, faces the
same problem. But it can successfully avoid swapping and calling a
child process costs almost no time.  In invoking DEMACS, one can explicitly
instruct to keep some space for the program itself so that swapping will not
occur that often, but I could not find any way to do this in AKCL.)

  Second, call to COMPILE-FILE gets an error message
"USERc:/local/bin/cat.exe : write error: no such file or directory".
The error is generated from the call to "cat.exe". But it is hard to
figure out what file exactly it is looking for. Possibly related to
this, when loading such compiled file, an error "unexpected end of
file" will result.

  The file I used is "beta2.tar". (In lisp FAQ, the name "beta2.zip" is
mentioned but I could not find it.) There are two programs of "go32.exe".
According to the directory setup suggested in README.DOS, after
unzipping the zip files, one "go32" is in "local/bin/..." and is 129K
in size. The other is in "local/djgpp/bin..." and is only 46K in size.
The latter will crash right away. My result comes from using the
former.
  
  Again porting AKCL to DOS is a tremendous job, I thank the people
who accomplished this. And any ideas about how I can fix the problems
are appreciated.

    Kai Yue