Hi, On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 10:28 AM, Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 3/20/2018 2:38 AM, Jim Hall wrote: >> >> Yes, HP is one of the computer manufacturers that includes FreeDOS in >> their standard builds. If you go into their laptops and desktops, and search >> for FreeDOS, you'll get a list of devices that can be configured with >> FreeDOS as the default operating system. >> >> For example: HP ProDesk 600 G3 Microtower PC comes with Windows, but you >> can configure it to come with FreeDOS instead. > > Dell is another manufacturer that does that.
Dell also officially supports (Ubuntu?) Linux on many models. > It's just a ruse to circumvent the licensing deal they have with Micro$oft, Are those rules still in effect? I'm sure MS has noticed by now. Could they really not change the terms if they wanted? C'mon, let's not be too naive here. > which gives them a better bulk license deal if they do not sell any computer > without an OS. And they don't want to tick off Redmond by more obviously > promoting Linux as an alternative (which would be for a lot of people a far > more viable option)... I think it's more about endless tech support than anything else. Certainly there are several very popular Linux distros (e.g. Ubuntu or Fedora) that wouldn't be out of the question. Well, maybe LTS (or CentOS or whatever) might be a better idea. I'm just saying, there has to be more to it. This (fairly old, 2009?) Dell laptop has a diagnostics partition which uses "Dell Real Mode Kernel" (DRMK), which is just a reskinned version of DR-DOS. Honestly, I don't know why it wasn't just setup to dual boot as a real DOS, but I guess they were too worried somebody would mess something up, thus (again) requiring lots of annoying tech support calls. Honestly, just for reflashing the BIOS (which obviously is going away and can be done elsewhere in many cases) or similar recovery, I would naively think DOS would be a good choice. But, alas, not everybody appreciates DOS like we do. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
