Hi Chris,
where is PA?
> I have several years of formal schooling in programming
> but nothing on the level of operating system coding. I wish I could
> help but haven't coded in a decade or more.
You could always do other things, like test and report bugs, or
update docs or whatever else you want to help with...
> a critical commercial application and will need to support it for at
> least five more years.
It is open source so you can always keep fixing it yourself even
if aliens take away freedos.org in their ufo...
> grief when trying to install it to brand new computers with "clean"
> as in no partitioned hard drives. At least the install tried and di
> so better than some Linux distributions that I've tried.
I guess completely empty disks are pretty exceptional these days.
Basically you will have to partition the disk yourself in such a
case, and probably run "fdisk /mbr" to add a bootable master boot
record. I think you get the same with old MS DOS. Maybe disks had
a pre-installed empty MBR more often 10 years ago?
> The pro: FreeDOS runs my application fine. Even EMM386 behaves
Did you try jemm386 from japheth.de or the experimental jemmex
which combines himem and emm386 in one app? I think jemm386 is
even more well-behaved, but make sure to read the docs because
it has quite a few command line options. Tell us what you think.
> I simply don't have the time to fudge, compile, download files
> from various places to make it all work.
That is not supposed to be necessary. If you download a small
distro like FreeDOS Balder (1 diskette) or the upcoming Rugxulo
"few diskettes" distro, you should be able to install very fast.
Basically you would do just: fdisk-if-needed, reboot, format-if-
needed, reboot, xcopy the disk contents, sys c:, reboot.
> I can load my licensed copies
> of MS-DOS 6.0 and the application software in 20 minutes.
Slow compared to what a "base" FreeDOS cdrom install should be.
The caveat with FreeDOS is that a "full" install will try to
download quite a bit of extra stuff (unless you read the Wiki
and unselect the packages which trigger downloads) which can
be slow. Another slow thing in "full" is when it tries to
mount USB disks during install, for no good reason.
> hours trying to figure out how to make the FreeDOS install work on
> both FAT32 and FAT16 file systems after experimenting and reading FAQ
Well what exactly went wrong?
> and HOWTO's and saw weird problems with some of the external commands
> like "chkdsk" under FAT16 which kept insisting that certain application
> files were more than one hundred times their actual size. "Edit" won't
Try to remind imre.leber THATSIGN telenet.be about the chkdsk problem.
In the meantime, simply use DOSFSCK instead of CHKDSK, they are both
included in the distro and dosfsck even does FAT32, although FAT32 can
need a lot of RAM for the check. You should get the updated version
instead of the version in the 1.0 distro! Version 2.11b is here:
www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~eric/stuff/soft/by-others/ Note that you
can find the download locations of all packages by checking the list:
www.freedos.org/freedos/software/ Several people are working on a big
update for the list, so we can collect updated packages for a new ISO.
> allow you to choose out of saving a text file that you've accidentally
> altered while reading it and you're forced to save the "oopses." The
Hmmm I cannot reproduce that problem. Both edit 0.7d and edit 0.81
("European" and "original American" branch) let me select "No" when
I select either "exit" or "close" and get a dialog which asks me
whether I want to save changes, either by mouse or by keyboard.
> installer wouldn't let me stop loading packages in a graceful
> manner, I had to force my way out.
Where did you want to stop and in what way? It does indeed unzip
everything you selected for install after you select packages,
but that should not cause problems, so there should be no need
to change your mind later and make the installer skip packages.
> Unfortunately, it was just too dangerous and quirky to trust
Which parts are quirky and dangerous? We should probably fix
those parts first...
> too technically oriented will have much trouble with release 1.0.
Depends depends... Users today will have XP already on their PC
and will think that DOS is just a C: prompt in Windows. They will
need some easy to use tool to even squeeze in a FAT partition in
such a situation. Luckily, such tools exist: For example a gparted
bootable cdrom is at least as easy to use as partition magic. Note
that the gparted cdrom is Linux based, so we cannot just add that
to the FreeDOS install cdrom. No real problem, if you ask me.
> include a utility that will make easy writes to CD-RW
> drives... "CDRoast" is way too far out of date ["CDRecord' same]
I recommend using k3b ;-). Really, for all the nifty graphical
user interfaces, you need just that - a system with nifty GUI.
For example Ubuntu ;-). The good things about DOS are at other
places, and a GUI like OpenGEM or "Windows 3 plus calmira.de"
is still raw technology compared to the eye candy of Mac OS X.
Apart from that, I did not follow the doscdroast project, but
in what way is it outdated? Maybe a lack of drivers? There we
have the same problem as Linux - hardware vendors are often
too lazy to make DOS drivers, and there are too few DOS users
and developers to make drivers ourselves, even if the hardware
specs would be available. Luckily DOS can use the BIOS for
many things and lots of the basic hardware is standardized
which helps in providing basic "one size fits all" drivers.
Eric
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