Hi Dale, > I am trying to use FreeDOS on a weird old electronic message board, > which is driven by a headless 80286 motherboard. My only access is via > a floppy drive, and I do not have the ability to use a normal VGA...
> The standard FreeDOS kernel in FreeDOS 1.0 / fdbasecd.iso doesn't > work on this 286 and hangs during boot. It is a 386+ kernel because you cannot boot a CDROM from pre-386... Bootable CD came around the time of 486/Pentium BIOS, and BTMGR boot loader (which can be run from diskette) can only boot CDROM from 386+. > www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~eric/stuff/soft/by-others/ke2007sep07.zip > As...: bugzilla.freedos.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1755 Hm that bug is about lack of 286 compatibility in 2004... However, newer ways to work on old computers are: > Joris' FreeDOS 1.0 basics for 8086: www.xs4all.nl/~rjoris/freedos.html Joris took 1.0 and put only 8086 compatible files on a single floppy. > Rugxulo's FreeDOS 1.1 basics: http://rugxulo.googlepages.com/ This is a 3 diskette distro with many updates compared to 1.0, because do not have 1.1 on CDROM yet. maybe you could help with the latter? The three disks are: 386+ bootable, 8086 bootable with some extra drivers for 286 users and "with 4dos shell instead of command.com". All three disks are filled with other tools, so if you would install to harddisk, you would copy files from ALL disks after booting from ONE of them :-). > mem /c >> log.txt Mem also has options to show detailled XMS usage info, try that... > SYSTEM 63,360 (62k) 63,360 (62k) 0 (0k) > FDXMS286 1,664 (2k) 1,664 (2k) 0 (0k) > COMMAND 3,296 (3k) 3,296 (3k) 0 (0k) > Free 586,960 (573k) 586,960 (573k) 0 (0k) Please use DOS=HIGH, this lets DOS use the HMA to give you 40k or so of reduced low memory usage, so you get 600k+ instead of 573k free, plus the HMA cannot be recycled to get more XMS space anyway. > Extended (XMS) 2,549K 1,689K 860K > Total memory 3,573K 2,140K 1,433K > I need as much free XMS as possible for the RAM disk. How do I find > out what is using that XMS, and how do I free it all up? Try using MEM /x ... you can also do MEM /c /x to get more info :-). You get a list of handles and sizes for XMS. It might be that your MEM just displayed wrong values because FDXMS286 behaves odd with DOS=LOW, but I do not think that FDXMS286 behaves odd... You may also already have a ramdisk loaded...? Typical XMS usage in a small FreeDOS installation is just 100k (maybe more, but at most 200k) for the FreeCOM command.com XMS swap functionality. This allows our command.com shell to use only a few kilobytes in the first 640k and move the rest to XMS while not needed, avoiding the need to reload data from disk when it is needed again... This is why in your log file COMMAND is listed as taking only 3 kilobytes :-). Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
