Hm... I am a bit skeptic here. Think it the other way. Although we are talking about a GUI here, a GUI is not new these days, in fact this is mostly the rule. What is special about DOS (and bare unixes) TODAY from the point of an average user, is that it is a command line tool and that DOD is single tasking (there are ways to run mure than one tasks though). I do not say that it is good or bad, but from the point of the user interface, these are the main things that define this system.
My personal approach, followed in XDOS, is that no GUI should be used. Programs that have graphics can be run inside dos anyway. From the other side a GUI approach has not be proven to be more stable than the command line but it is faster. Is it...? Try to use the well known commanders of the time. I personally use Volkov commander, it really boosts up DOS using speed in a huge amount, so that a GUI is no longer needed. Using such a commander the only reason I can think of going on GUIs is the feeling of multitasking. DOS has not been designed for multi tasking, but there are some ways to overcome this. Maybe you could investigate these ways in a future version. 2013/1/9, Michael Robinson <plu...@robinson-west.com>: > On Tue, 2013-01-08 at 18:46 +0100, Bernd Blaauw wrote: >> Op 8-1-2013 15:38, KOS schreef: >> > Hello there, do you know when V2.0 of freedos will be available? >> > >> >> I'm not sure there's going to be a V2.0 sometime soon, be there FreeDOS >> roadmaps or not. I'm still quitely working on version 1.2 of the FreeDOS >> distribution whenever I find spare time. >> >> Is there anything that you need but find lacking sofar in the 1.0 and >> 1.1 releases? Or for that matter in the core components like the kernel >> and shell? >> >> Bernd > > There are some programs that require Windows 3.1 or 3.11 which can run > on top of Freedos, but more work on compatibility would not hurt. > > ReactOS may fill the niche of Windows replacement eventually, but not > for a while most likely. Worse, for Windows programs that expect there > to be dos underneath, enough said. > > A protected mode dos like the one under Windows 9x and Windows ME > could be interesting and would justifiably deserve a different name > like Freedos-32. The problem with a dos environment is that there > isn't an operating system taking care of all the hardware and > providing standard calls to use it. Most sound card support > involved adding to your program in most likely a spaghetti fashion > calls to a third party driver, closed source of course. Windows 98 > may have had multitasking, but if that is true, it was more than > just a single thread dos system. Gates made some very bad > assumptions that crippled dos back in the day. Assumption one, > nobody will ever need more than 640k of memory for executable > programs and drivers... I imagine that other bad assumptions > were made as well. > > Actually, there is OS/2 which was supposed to be the competitor to > Windows 9x and I'll bet that IBM is willing to release source code > to it. Maybe the freedos community should get it's hands on OS/2 > and develop it further. > > Aside from taking bugs out of Freedos 1.1, I don't see any major > changes that should be made. Implementation of a Windows 9x clone > is going to be too much work where there is the ReactOS project > that gave up on trying to do that years ago. I'm confident that > ReactOS will work better on old computers than XP does. Granted, > ReactOS is at a very early alpha stage where it is somewhat futile > to predict what the resource requirements will be when it > stabilizes. > > I like FLTK, I like opengem, I like some of the graphical user > interfaces I have seen that are free. Problem though, graphical user > interfaces on top of dos are an afterthought even today. There was no > planning when dos was initially invented that I know of for guis. There > are plenty of MS Dos programs that aren't Windows compatible, because a > Windows compatible programming method wasn't employed. > > What I'd like to see at this point is a focus on debugging and a focus > on deploying Freedos via a rom chip. It should be possible to get write > once 1 meg+ memory chips now. Why not install the freedos kernel, > command.com, etcetera on such a chip? If you can't overwrite the > operating system executable, security is enormously improved. For low > power embedded processors that are say only 8 bit, freedos may be very > useful. A hypervisor that can run dosbox and make modern hardware work > with old dos programs anyone? How about dosbox running on a Pentium 133 > or a Pentium 166 machine with 16 megs of ram? > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Master Java SE, Java EE, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, JavaScript, jQuery > and much more. Keep your Java skills current with LearnJavaNow - > 200+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Java experts. > SALE $49.99 this month only -- learn more at: > http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122612 > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > -- Konstantinos Giannopoulos (SV3ORA) Computer and Telecommunications Engineer Director of the Greek Microwave Group (www.microwave.gr) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Java SE, Java EE, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, JavaScript, jQuery and much more. Keep your Java skills current with LearnJavaNow - 200+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Java experts. 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