Hi, (I'm late replying again!) On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 3:48 PM, Krys Garnett <krys.garn...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm resurrecting an old desktop for a "distraction free" environment
So? Any updates you can tell us? How has it been going? > and I'm wondering whether it is easier or more useful to use Freedos > or MS DOS 6.22, which I have the original 3.5" disks for. You can install and use (dual boot) both, actually: http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=boot http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=metakern > The system is a Tandon 386SX, 8mb RAM, 512mb HD, 3.5" and 5.25" floppy > drives, no USB, no CD-ROM, but does have an ethernet card. > > With this spec, I'm wondering if the advantages of Freedos (support > for big hard disks and RAM etc.) are meaningful on a low power system, 512 MB is right where I would still use FAT16, but only barely. Anything higher I would suggest using FAT32 (which means MS-DOS 7 or FreeDOS) or splitting it up into two (or more) separate FAT partitions. The cluster waste for, say, 1 GB is too big, IMHO. > and wether or nor it's worth the hassle of trying to install Freedos > via floppy (I understand it's primarily designed for CD-ROM > installation?). Depends on how much you want to install. A small floppy image is easy to make (fdisk, format, sys, kernel, command). The ultra bare minimum (after installation) is kernel and shell. How much more do you need?? :-) > I'm mainly intending to use the system for writing and programming, Programming what? C? Assembly? Pascal? BASIC? http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=devel http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/devel/ Writing to print? Share with others? What does the document have to have, certain kinds of markups? What editing features does the text editor need? What file formats are necessary? (Most proprietary formats aren't worth messing with and can be hard to emulate.) http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=edit Obviously, if it's all for personal use only, you can get away with using pretty much anything. Though there's probably not a ton of "decent" freeware word processors for DOS. You could try Georg's port of Flwriter, but I don't know if that's what you want exactly: https://code.google.com/p/nanox-microwindows-nxlib-fltk-for-dos/wiki/FlWriter There's also GNU Emacs 23.3 for DJGPP, but again, not sure how well that will work, esp. in only 8 MB of RAM. (CWSDPMI supports swapping, but I'm not sure if that's acceptable speed under heavy load on an actual 386.) http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/djgpp/current/v2gnu/em2303b.zip (warning: 43 MB) > but also communications programs like Lynx, Telnet and FTP. 1). Find a working packet driver (and/or a working network card that has such driver). http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=net http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.1/repos/net/ 2). Is Lynx itself ultra important? Or can you live with Links2 or Dillo or Arachne? http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/net/links/ > On that note, I'm not so enamoured with WordPerfect these days, so > looking for any suggestions on alternative WP packages. It's primarily > for academic writing, so decent support for footnotes, endnotes and > tables is useful. I really like the DisplayWrite for DOS interface and > features, but I've yet to find a version that exports into a widely > used format. All suggestions welcome! Ah, see, this is a minefield. You might just have to find a second-hand copy of something from ye olde commercial DOS days on eBay or Amazon or some online site. No idea, I don't use word processors, so I can't help. Some diehards would probably just tell you to use TeX, which has a fairly old DJGPP version. That should support all academic document features, I assume (though I've never used it, sorry). http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/djgpp/current/v2apps/tex/ There are other automated commandline document converters that work in DOS, but they aren't editors, so they aren't user friendly. Basically, you're writing your own documents, with all the markup, strictly by hand, which may be less useful. On a modern machine, somebody might suggest you use Lyx, but that's out of the question for DOS. P.S. Before I forget, here's a nifty util: http://www.penguin.cz/~fojtik/wp2latex/wp2latex.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Meet PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance Requirements with EventLog Analyzer Achieve PCI DSS 3.0 Compliant Status with Out-of-the-box PCI DSS Reports Are you Audit-Ready for PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance? Download White paper Comply to PCI DSS 3.0 Requirement 10 and 11.5 with EventLog Analyzer http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=154622311&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
