it is not easy to get even "read-only" mode to work when thttpd (a lean http daemon from http://acme.org/ ) is used. this is partly a documentation issue, which, on the twiki side, is apache-centric.

the current thttpd version 2.21b needs a few additional CGI environment variables, such as $SCRIPT_URI etc. this can be easily hacked into thttpd's libhttpd.c, which makes using twiki with gui browsers (i tried opera) possible, but the issue here is the combination of twiki/thttpd/lynx, which is almost exactly what i need. i want a text browser, not only for swift use, but also to enable everybody, including the vision impaired, to collaborate on the web.

there is another text browser, links (http://links.sourceforge.net), and i'm very fond of the links-lua fork of this project. it renderes tables and frames, runs multithreaded, caches aggressively and cooperates with other instances of links via a socket, so bookmarks set in one instance appear instantly in all others, as do buffers filled from web-documents. but: it lacks authorization.

so i'm stuck with lynx and w3m, also very good browsers. here's the problem: when accessing the server with lynx, twiki lets one edit a topic, but lynx hangs after pressing the preview button. could it be a tiny issue with changing the background to the preview bitmap? unfortunately, i don't have the time/incentive to wade through tons of lynx traces, tcpdumps and "ktrace -p `pidof thttpd`" output, and i'm no http/html guru.

let me emphasize again that editing with opera works, i don't have other gui-browsers available, so i can't comment on mozillas and microsof products. i'll discontinue thttpd on my machine in favour of apache, because it's use is documented much better, and first tests show that lynx does cut it in this environment, but i'd really much prefer thttpd or other light-weight http-servers, because we'd have a nice, low impact combination available, which could perform well even on slow/old/cheap machines, if collaboration is the name of the game.

-- ClemensFischer - 17 Jul 2001

You might try setting PREVIEWBGIMAGE in TWikiPreferences to "" to see if that helps. Otherwise, revise the preview.tmpl file to remove the

background="PREVIEWBGIMAGE"

-- DavidLeBlanc - 18 Jul 2001

It would probably be simpler to just put a '#' in front of the Set command for PREVIEWBGIMAGE. As for thttpd and Lynx, I'm not sure if anyone else uses this combination, but there is some experience with using Apache and Lynx (search Codev and Support for Lynx).

Hope this helps.

-- RichardDonkin - 19 Jul 2001

This is not a TWiki bug per se, more a deployment issue. Bug

-- PeterThoeny - 27 Nov 2001

I have had Lynx working fine with Apache and TWiki, apart from attachments.

For fans of Lynx and links (similar text-mode browser mentioned above) - see Elinks, an extended version of links, related to links-lua, that now includes HTTP Authentication.

-- RichardDonkin - 15 Sep 2002