I like dos when I have an old computer and some old games that work under dos. Running Windows on a 486 is a pain in general. Even a low end Pentium these days is slow.
As far as web browsing and dos, isn't dos susceptible to almost every single virus on the planet? Another thing, some people want to run dos thinking that it can't browse the Internet. What I don't like about Arachne is that it doesn't have any kind of filtering apparatus built in. Internet Explorer does, but it's too paranoid. Not to mention, IE requires either Windows or Linux running Wine. I also don't like the fact the Arachne tries to integrate email access assuming a pop account. I use imap. There is a desire in some cases to network dos, but what for? Well, some dos games can be played over a network. Freedos can be upgraded over the Internet, though I'd rather build a local repository say on my Linux server and upgrade from that. The most valuable update to freedos that I can think of is one that makes it more compatible with MS-DOS. As far as breaking with MS-DOS, that needs to be carefully considered. In some cases where Freedos is not MS-DOS compatible, it may not be reasonable to make it so. Ideally, as Freedos is seen as a stable dos implementation with compilers and assemblers that are free to use, people will develop software for it specifically. I want to go the Netware route because Netware without special IPX to IP gateway software isn't Internet compatible (at least versions before the switch away from IPX). This seems to be very unpopular though. I'd like to see the MARS netware emulator brought over to freedos and revived. What is the purpose of Freedos? This is something that should be carefully considered as efforts to get a new release out kick into high gear. I see the main purpose of Freedos being to revive old computers that aren't powerful enough to run Windows or Linux and I see it's purpose as being to provide a simple OS for the embedded computing market. Yes Freedos can be run in an emulator, but that isn't my favorite application of it. Something that would be nice would be a modified dhcp client for freedos that through some reasonable trick can accept a different configuration for a particular machine than it would normally get. I'm thinking, an isolated network for freedos with an update repository on that network would be nice. The alternative, given compatible packet drivers for every dos machine, is to manually configure each freedos box that you want to isolate. Yuck! Ideally, dhcp would ask what kind of OS is seeking an IP address and if the answer is a DOS OS, it would put it on a different network than say a Linux or Windows box. Freedos needs to be as clean as possible and as stable as possible. Small is good, there should be a very small footprint base install. Cross dependencies where freedos has so called super packages that are meant to do everything should be broken purposely. Small utilities with very specific purposes are better than monstrous ones that try to do everything in a very constraining manner. One request for freedos is a nice Gem based backup program that can back the system up in part or in entirety to anything from a network share to a local DVD burner or hard disk. I'm thinking a modern and free program with a MyBackup like environment. Freedos is free and useful insofar as it is compatible with MS-DOS when it needs to be to run old software. Freedos is useful if there are applications written specifically for it for those of us who don't have functional MS-DOS software lying around. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
