[Idle-dev] No network card, no IDLE

[Bruce Sherwood]

Some more data:

At the suggestion of David Scherer, I ran Idlefork at a DOS prompt on the 
Win2000 laptop with the network card removed and saw a message to the 
effect that it was not possible to use a socket (and Idle doesn't start 
up). It would seem more appropriate behavior (even if bizarre) for Idle to 
start up and give the error message in a dialog box, rather than silently 
not come up at all.

He also had me do this:

--On Wednesday, August 29, 2001 5:19 PM -0400 David Scherer 
<dscherer@vysics.com> wrote:

>> > (2) What does the following DOS command do in the same situation?
>> >
>> > ping 127.0.0.1
>>
>> "PING: transmit failed, error code 10043."
>>
>> "Packets" Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)"
>
> 10043: "The requested protocol has not been configured into the system,
> or no implementation for it exists."
>
> For whatever reason, your machine is incapable of doing TCP/IP without
> its network card.  I don't think this is normal behavior!

I've also had reports from students using the Scherer Idle (which is 
functionally the same as Idlefork, and used with VPython) that they can 
edit but when they press F5 to run nothing happens. A colleague Matt 
Kohlmyer is able to reproduce this behavior (though perhaps there are other 
possible causes). He downloaded a free program from www.zonealarm.com which 
allows you to specify which applications are allowed internet access. If he 
turns internet access off, F5 does nothing in Idle.

Again, at the very least Idle should explain the situation in a dialog box 
rather than be silent.

Bruce Sherwood