Hi! > I have had considerable trouble getting emm386 to work with D845PEBT2 > motherboards and other Intel motherboards. A lot of processor dumps. > Is emm386 being debugged for Freedos 1.1?
Yes, replace it by JEMM386 from www.japheth.de - but take care, some of the syntax and defaults changed. If you do find something which works worse than in 1.0, tell Japheth and the list about it... For both JEMM386 and EMM386 you sometimes have to manually avoid UMB etc areas with X... options. Read the docs for details, and if you found that you need manual eXclude options on some computer, you can help Japheth and us by writing about the details. We have tools like PCISLEEP and even special JEMM-related debug things to figure out together with you why the affected area failed to be auto-excluded. Example case could be if you use network or USB, while having things loaded to UMB with loadhigh or devicehigh, DOS or USB starts to mess up. The example would mean "USB controller uses MMIO area in UMB space but BIOS fails to tell DOS about that..." :-p. > How about Bolitare, half the time I can't get it to work. > Same thing with Minesweeper. Dunno, it is not mentioned in the Wiki yet. Who knows more? > Freedos defrag seems slow and the side effects which should > be committed to disk don't seem to be committed, at least > compared with the Symantec > product that was bundled with MS-DOS 6.22. Which side effects? Defrag should be not-so-much-slower than MS DOS defrag, while being potentially safer. Note that our defrag is very slow for FAT32, which MS DOS Symantec defrag does not even try ;-). Our defrag uses XMS/EMS buffers afair. > How about a free scandisk replacement? We had one which only looked nice but got stuck if you told it to do the few things it actually tried to do at all... Current best practice is using DOSFSCK which, like scandisk, gives you interactive choices for how to fix things. Somebody could add the nice looks of a SCANDISK to that, for example with help of the D-FLAT toolkit which is also used in EDIT. DOSFSCK also supports FAT32 and "two pass" operation where a first "simulate changes" pass calculates changes. The second pass then "checkdisks" the "what if..." situation and only if you like the result of that, the changes are actually written to disk. One could modify that to give you some way to write "undo data" to a file, too, similar to classic "MS" SCANDISK. > Supposedly that isn't needed, though it is nice to be able > to map bad sectors and see a graphical representation of > where they are. You can do that with DEFRAG as well, as far as I remember. > Is there a wiki listing dos programs that don't work with freedos? > For starters: Ultima VII doesn't work. Why doesn't Ultima VII work > in freedos? Why doesn't Netware 4.11 installer work in freedos? Ultima: You probably have to get your EMS and XMS drivers right, I believe the Advancemame page has some details on how tough it is to get those and the sound settings right. Netware: Dunno, but our wiki, faq and bug tracking pages had information about experiences with netware and about some workarounds afair. Also have a look at Veder nwdsk. Apps in general: Because DOS users now are Windows users and dosbox is easier to install than a real virtual PC or a real DOS install on harddisk, floppy, USB or DVD, dosbox has a large list of tested DOS programs. However, they simulate the whole DOS, so they are only vaguely similar to FreeDOS. What you can do it use their list for ideas which apps you could check with FreeDOS and which apps might be more complicated than others, so you can check those first ;-). FreeDOS in general does run all "normal" apps for MS DOS very well, though :-). > Netware isn't the only way to go, apparently dhcp can > hand out different information based on the OS of the > system that is requesting a lease. Probably using things like the MAC or the client name or something would be a more intuitive / clear way...? > This said, Microsoft client 3.0 is way out of date and > unmaintained. Is there a free alternative to it? None which gives you DOS drive letters as far as I can remember, but you can use for example the DOS port of Samba smbclient to have "ftp style" access to Windows network drives from DOS, including of course FreeDOS. > Is this a Freedos 2.0 item? Definitely, as it is probably hard to port a Samba client in a way which lets it run in the background and give DOS mscdex / shsucdx style drive letters as well. Plus it can take a lot of RAM so maybe the driver should be JLM style in shape of a plugin for JEMM386 or something similar... > What bugs are being worked on? Good question. I myself think that a few kernel patches would only need more reviewing and testing before we can close a few of the bugs listed in the snapshot of our old bugzilla on our homepage. Some of them had "priority" because they were quite annoying, others simply because they were easy to fix. If patches are already in SVN, as usually mentioned in bugzilla, you can get the kernel of the Rugxulo distro to check if you are happy with them. Background: The Rugxulo.googlepages.com distro uses sort of a "SVN snapshot" kernel, basically the "2038 to be". > How many packages need to be updated for the 1.1 release? Not many in BASE. For FULL, you should ask Geraldo, but for BASE, probably Mateusz is the better person to ask. It would be nice if he could write his opinion about how far we are with BASE in this thread :-). > Will there be a new fancier installer? > Will gem be equipped with an optional graphical > package manager? Not that I know. Also would not make a real difference imho. > A periodic newsletter, say once a month, would be nice. Not sure whether that would help with anything, but maybe Jim can update the status of the 1.1 todo items on top of our start page from time to time, possibly mentioning the time when he last got a status report about them? Thanks to everybody who can help here already :-) Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
