Hi Karen -
Since I am the one who gave a "testimonial" regarding my success with the
USB drivers, I feel the need to chime in.
> i use dos exclusively daily for all my computing.
> and still sometimes get the sense here that freedos does not take itself
> seriously enough for me to consider it for my professional needs.
While I do not use DOS professionally. I spend more time in DOS than any
other OS. I do not use Windows beyond 98SE, but use Linux for my modern
computing "needs"
I have spent the last 6 months testing various (over 200) vintage DOS
applications (mostly in the productivity genre) and have found FreeDOS to
be about 98% compatible. I had two programs that would not run - The Online
Bible and a Collins dictionary add-in TSR for my Core WordPerfect Suite.
The OLB had been a long known bug and Messrs. Auer and Rugxulo addressed
the issue and provided a patch (hopefully it will be permanently
implemented in the updated kernel). The dictionary TSR is all that remains
that will not work and it too seems to be a kernel issue.
I have found that for the relatively few number of people who actually
contribute to the FreeDOS project that the support is quite impressive.
(You should try getting help on the Debian forum sometime) My questions
have been answered in a timely manner, I am taken as seriously as I take
FreeDOS; my only regret is that as much as I love DOS/FreeDOS that I am not
able to contribute beyond testing.
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 7:36 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 2:11 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Karen,
> >
> >> What discouraged me from using freedos was
> >> first the "for legacy games use only," suggestion on the site,
> >
> > That probably was a while ago: Now I would say this is more
> > the target audience of dosbox, in particular for Windows.
>
> I think she's referring to the http://www.freedos.org front page,
> which says this:
>
> "
> What is FreeDOS?
>
> FreeDOS is a free DOS-compatible operating system that can be used to
> play games, run legacy software, or support embedded systems. FreeDOS
> is basically like the old MS-DOS, but better!
> "
>
> Clearly there were many of us who enjoyed a lot of DOS games back in
> the day (mostly '90s), e.g. Doom or Warcraft or King's Quest 6.
> (Windows-only software became more prominent later on, esp. with
> Win95. Hexen 2, for instance, which is Quake-based, had to be
> backported to DOS again.)
>
> Eric is right about "DOSBox" being "only for games", by design, but
> that actually doesn't use FreeDOS (or any real DOS) at all. It's
> strictly a 486 software-only emulator (GPL!) using SDL. It's even
> portable to non-x86 machines. And that is used by many companies
> (Gog.com, id Software, Sierra, and many more) to sell their "classic"
> game compilations for modern systems.
>
> http://www.dosbox.com/
>
> FreeDOS is certainly not "only" for games, but it can still run most
> of them (albeit oftentimes without sound due to modern hardware SB16
> incompatibility).
>
> >> and second, the lack of attention to native things like USB and
> >> networking.
> >
> > A classic for networking is the realtek rtl8139 chipset:
> > If you find no DOS driver for your new network chip, you
> > can always plug a PCI network card with that classic chip.
> >
> > When some modern (gigabit-) network chip is not supported
> > in DOS, all DOS versions are affected, not only FreeDOS.
>
> Blame the hardware engineers. Who else would even know how to write a
> packet driver?? Certainly not me.
>
> FreeDOS is stable, free with sources, and compatible, with many
> available tools and docs. It's not impossibly hard to find out how to
> program for it. But obviously some things are easier than others.
>
> >> Dos is stable, I have been running the package I referenced for many
> >> years, have found packages like ssh2dos for my networking, and now a
> fine
> >> dos usb browser that works.
> >
> > I have been wondering if ssh2dos still is useful - I guess
> > it only supports older protocols and algorithms. I remember
> > Jack complaining that even the browsers of older Windows (!)
> > versions do not support TLS: So as SSL 3 is being phased out
> > for being old and insecure, he can no longer use HTTPS web.
>
> No offense to Jack, but he wouldn't even update his web browser, even
> when several better options exist (for his ancient NT 4.0). I'm not
> totally sure if that would actually fix his problem, but he refused to
> even try (that or anything else). I think he really was naive enough
> to think that SourceForge would "fix their bug". Ugh. So that's the
> end of him.
>
> > I can imagine that ssh2dos and web browsers for DOS have the
> > problem in even more severe ways.
>
> Maybe. But we just don't have enough developers to do much of anything
> anymore. We're lucky anything still works.
>
> >> i use dos exclusively daily for all my computing.
> >> and still sometimes get the sense here that freedos does not take itself
> >> seriously enough for me to consider it for my professional needs.
> >
> > For you yes: The problem is that people often ask questions
> > like "why is there no LibreOffice and Firefox for DOS". You
> > know that there are none.
>
> Thanks to various geniuses (esp. Georg), we do have Flwriter and
> Dillo. Hey, it's far better than nothing, and I don't see anyone
> trying to do any better!
>
>
> https://code.google.com/p/nanox-microwindows-nxlib-fltk-for-dos/wiki/FlWriter
>
> (Eric, you are still a genius too, of course! Not that you need my
> faint praise.)
>
> > They do not, they think there can
> > be a professional DOS which basically is like Win or Linux,
> > just "better" in some unknown, magical DOS way.
>
> If you don't need compatibility (with DOS or anything else), you can
> do anything, but you'll have to do it all from scratch. Obviously part
> of the "problem" with DOS is also the "advantage": extreme
> compatibility and stable APIs.
>
> > For people who really need DOS, freedos is a very nice DOS.
>
> That's a huge understatement, but people don't even appreciate what's
> already here. They just have no imagination. I know I've harped on
> this saying a billion times, but it's true: "A poor carpenter blames
> his tools."
>
>
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