Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

144
EGINNER BASICS
ease help Out an Amiga beginner
with Workbench. Some of these
questions are probably stupid but I
have worked through the manual,
plus two Bruce Smith books, without
finding the answers and I'm getting desperate.
I have a plain Al200 with an external
drive and a Cannon BS 10sx, and I have no
hard drive.
1. I am customising my WB 3 disk, and
although I can drag the goodies in from the
Extras disk, I am unsure of the destination
drawer. For instance, I have put the Init
Printer in Preis and double-click it every time
I boot the machine. There must be a way to
run 'nit Printer automatically on boot up?
Also, where should the other items in the
Tools drawer be placed on the WB3 disk - is
there some rule that I have missed?
2. My printer setup works on readme and
doc files, but every so often I get a 'Cannot
open your tool much more'.
3. What are these libraries and where do
they live on the WB3 disk? I have seen that
PD libraries offer disks containing extra
libraries - do I need them?
4. When I access the Tools menu the only
item is WB Setup. Where are the user-startup
and startup-sequence that I am supposed to
use?
5. Why do I get 'checksum error on block
1703' when I try to copy my working copy of
WB3? All my blank disks cannot be faulty,
perhaps this is a protection problem?
6. New programs seems to need more than
2Mb. How much do you recommend I add
to keep ahead of the trend?
Dorerie Cox, Essex
1. I hope you are using copies of
, your original Workbench disks
because if you destroy one of
them it is a real nuisance try-
I
' ing to get hold of replacement
\ copies. When coping programs
across . to your Workbench disk it does not
matter . where you place them. It is gener-
ally expected that you would put them in
either the Tools or Utility drawer, and if it
gets to the stage where you have quite a
few programs cluttering these drawers you
might want to consider creating further
sub-directories and move the appropriate
programs into these.
If you want a program to run automatically
from Workbench 2 you can drag it
into the WBStartup draw. Each time
Workbench starts all the programs in this
drawer are executed, saving you the trouble
of having to run them all yourself.
There are a couple of things I would query
about what you are doing. Firstly I do not
think it is necessary to run the !nit Printer
program because when you turn on your
machine or your machine resets it sends
the same message to your printer.
The other thing I must say is why copy
these programs off the other Workbench
disks? You have a second drive so why not
just insert the disks in there and run them
off their original disks?
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Helping you to sleep easier at night,
ACAS will soothe all your troubles away
2. Either I am the one getting a little
confused or you are confusing the things
you are doing. Normally you only get the
'cannot open your tool blardy War' when
you double-click on a filers icon that is not
setup correctly for your computer. This has
nothing to do with how your printer is
setup, and is to do with how Workbench
tries to run programs and the tools
specified by icons.
In the case of MuchMore, this is a tool
used to read text files, If you click on the
icon and select Information from the
Workbench menu, you pop up the icon
information requester. In the default tool
gadget there will be the text MuchMore. If
you edit this to just read More or
MultiView and press save, when you double-click
the icon you will be able to view
the file using the program More.
This sort of thing is a constant pain for
Amiga users. Because there are so many
different text readers around you invariably
end up with the 'cannot open your
tool blardy blar' requester. There are a
couple of ways around this. You can either
use a tool alias program that allows you to
substitute programs such as MuchMore for
another program you have, or you can use
Toolmanger - it was part of our beginne
coverdisks on our January issue - whi
allows you to place an Applcon on t
Workbench that you can drop files into.
you do this with Multiview you will
able to view text, sound, graphics a
even animation files of any Datatype
have installed.
3. Another source of constant probl
for beginners and experienced users a
the Amiga's libraries. In fact, the Amiga's
entire operating system, called Kickstart
is made up of shared run time libraries
which contain program routines that
allow programmers to open windows,
screens and do other jiggery puckery. They
are called shared because many programs
can use them at once, and they are rut
time as they are only loaded into memo
when necessary.
Amiga libraries can exist both on yo
Amiga's ROM and on disks, and allow n
or updated libraries to be added at a lateri
date. Normally, as in the case of your
Workbench disk, they are stored in th
Libs drawer on the root of yo
Workbench disk.
You can find this by selecting Show all
files from the Workbench window menu.
Generally if you get a program that needs
extra libraries other than the standard
Amiga libraries, they will be supplied with
the program archive or on the same disk.
The only exceptions to this are the MUI
libraries as they are too big.
In day to day use the only really vital
third-party library that you should have is
called ReoTools. This has been around for
a long time and as such is used by a fair
few programs, but again it is fairly small -
about 40k - and is normally supplied with
any program that uses it.
4. I take it you are talking about the
Workbench tools menu, in which case
there is only meant to be the one entry.
There are programs Out there that allow
you to add your own programs to the
tools menu - Toolmanager being one but,