> I wish I could include my two different 3COM drivers. But, I can not. > They have licenses that forbid redistribution.
Would they be included if the licence permitted redistribution? Or must they be open source to get included? > Perhaps someone knows of some open source ones we could include. Or, > maybe even someone could port the open source Linux drivers. But, > no-one has done so yet and we cannot include license restricted > software. There are some closed-source UNDI drivers available - not sure of the licence - but in the past I have successfully used these to boot MS-DOS over PXE (via Memdisk) which allowed me to network boot a number of machines into DOS without them having any physical disks. This worked by having the PXE boot driver leave the PXE stack active after the network boot had finished, so it was available to DOS as a kind of a universal network interface called UNDI, regardless of the manufacturer of the network card. Loading an UNDI packet driver provided packet services which DOS could then use to connect to network drives to run programs that were too large to fit on the boot image. I used this to successfully boot a bunch of machines into DOS and play network games over IPX without any of them having hard drives or floppy drives. While it is probably not possible to get the PXE stack in memory without doing a network boot, the open source Etherboot[1] project provides PXE support for a number of different network cards. They provide ROM images you can burn onto a network card boot ROM or load from a floppy disk to then do a network boot. It might be possible to use their code to add support for more network cards, either via loading a PXE/UNDI stack or hacking the code to provide a packet driver for the devices they support. Cheers, Adam. [1]: http://etherboot.org/wiki/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
