Hi! > I never managed to install Freedos on a harddisk via the “live CD 1.3” or 1.2 > version (image).
There are two problems: 1. where the installer expects the packages in terms of drive letters and 2. whether you can partition the disk to create a primary LBA FAT partition, format it and make it bootable. Assuming that DOS is reasonably simple, you could do things manually when the installer fails to do them automatically, so the second one is the more interesting question. There are FDISK and XFDISK and other tools, in various versions. Recently, there was a discussion in the BTTR DOS forum which resulted in fixing some FDISK bugs, but I do not know whether FreeDOS 1.2 or 1.3 already has the corresponding update? You could also use Linux with GPARTED to comfortably do partitioning. > The USB “Problem”: has been discussed in the mailing list recently. > Honestly I don’t consider it an advantage to FreeDos having to boot > a linux system just to get to my DOS-.txt-files from the harddisk In theory, you can often gain access to USB sticks in DOS context by booting from that stick itself. Because some extra BIOS support will be active in that context. Required tools: A bootable DOS on a stick. Not sure how far your attempts in that direction have gone so far? > Printing is still waiting -- haven’t had time to fiddle with that. > It just didn’t work out of the box with my editors (LaserJet & Centronics Such printers do have a tendency to still understand plain text, but you could try whether something like "COPY testfile.ps LPT1" (or the same with a PDF) works for your printer. If yes, you can reduce the problem to having to convert your text to PS or PDF first, which can be done with suitable DOS apps. > Codepage (UTF-8 support? Maybe not possible without a converter program? > »Boček« Editor can save in UTF mode in DOS.) As you already saw, DOS normally only supports 256 character codepages. There are tricks for 512 characters on VGA, but everything above that requires graphics mode which text editors for DOS rarely use. You will have noticed that Blocek indeed uses graphics mode :-) Of course it is a bit annoying when you have German Unicode text which actually uses less than 256 different characters and most DOS apps still fail to display it properly. This is because they all assume that each character is exactly 1 byte "long". As work-around, you can convert the files back and forth before and after editing or viewing: Tools such as RECODE have been ported to DOS. Also, drivers for long file names in DOS have various codepage settings which help you with non-ASCII file names. > Whilst trying to make it work for my needs I get the feeling there is > much discussion about technical (historical?) details, which might be > of interest to some specialists. Yeah but it depends on the mood of the community at specific times :-) > I get the idea that DOS (“Disk Operating System”) is a sealed book for > the initiated and not for ordinary people. This doesn’t comfort me... The nice thing about DOS is that it HAS been very popular decades ago, so you can still find tutorials for many things online. Of course you can also ask here explicitly, but notice how I got criticized this week for explaining something which is considered to be "too well known" so you need some patience and explicitly state your needs until you get the replies adjusted to your preferred knowledge level :-) > if I just want to save my files to a usb stick or print out on paper > a letter, feeling completely stupid after years and years... The stupid part is not you. The problem is that neither USB nor the current generation of printers have existed when DOS was young, so we all have to use creative solutions on modern systems for things in DOS which may look simple for Windows 10 or a modern Linux. That is the downside of keeping DOS deliberately simple and less PnP etc. For example I remember installing a very old Linux 2.0 on a PC with only 16 MB RAM, some of which was shared with the graphics. It worked reasonably back then but would find neither USB nor LAN on a 2021 PC. Also, I think that so far my hardware failures have been limited to a graphics card, power supply, CPU fan and some disks. Luckily, all failures have stayed limited to the respective component and even in the disk cases, thanks to SMART (even DOS apps available for that) I was able to replace the disks before larger amounts of data got lost. > what you CAN’T do with it. (See the questions about sound, viewers, video, > graphics) That is a bit complicated. If you have one app which plays video with sound on modern hardware at high resolution, you could say you CAN do that. But basically all old games will be the same old low resolution as in the past and, having no ISA sound card any more, limited to the PC speaker/beeper unless you use creative solutions or run DOS inside something else which in turn does have drivers for your modern sound. > a working install ( I still have no idea what I did wrong that Freedos > 1.3. live, and Freedos 1.2 standard CDs never worked for me Even that is a bit complicated. DOS used to be rather "manual" in both use and install. So I would be okay with getting dropped to a prompt on booting from CD or USB and then having to use FDISK, FORMAT, SYS, COPY and similar commands to kick DOS to a built-in harddisk, SSD or eMMC. Understandably, the installer tries to make that easier, but fails to cover enough possible situations in which it could end up. For example, Linux installers are able to find and resize existing Windows installs on MBR or GPT partitioned disks to share your computer between Windows and Linux without breaking the existing Windows. The installer simply asks whether it should keep or delete Windows and everything else will happen automatically. That would be way beyond the abilities of FreeDOS. > USB support needs to be solved in a straightforward way The problem is that USB is surprisingly convoluted, in particular the newer and faster versions. Different controller chips also mean that different drivers might be needed. Even once you have those, USB sticks sometimes manage to be too exotic to be covered by general standards for USB storage media. As a modern BIOS almost has to support USB booting and is written for the exact mainboard on which it is installed, your best start for getting a tailor-made driver is to use the one inside your BIOS. Even if that means that you have to boot from the USB stick to gain access to copy files to and from the stick inside DOS, which as I certainly admit is a bit silly. How were your experiences with various existing DOS drivers for USB yet? Bret Johnson or Georg Potthast drivers or classical USBASPI or Cypress DUSE for example? If any of those works for you, then you can avoid the tedious "boot from USB first" method. > Printing: help with setting up a generic printing method Define "generic". In DOS age, printing almost always meant Centronics or sometimes RS232 connected devices which almost always understood plain text with a few escape sequences for font changes and similar. Even today, you still find printers which understand plain text and are connected by Centronics. Some are connected by network, which is actually feasible to use in DOS as long as your PC has a LAN cable. Wireless networks rarely work in DOS, drivers would be very complex and only few very very old Wireless network cards do have DOS drivers. The next generation are printers with ESC/P, Postscript, PDF and other quasi-standard languages. Those also work more or less, depending on whether your DOS app speaks the right language. This is not the job of DOS itself but of the app. You can also get separate converter apps. For example GRAPHICS for FreeDOS (for printing graphics screenshots when you hit a hotkey) can speak ESC/P and Postscript natively. After that, when Windows 95/98 was trending, you got printers which were cheaper by being more dumb. They no longer are able to do much themselves, but need complex Windows drivers to pre-digest content for them before it gets sent to the printer. Similar: Win9x modems. Neither Windows-only printers nor "Winmodems" will work in DOS, as you would need a DOS version of the corresponding Windows drivers which can be rather large. Even for Linux it was probably painful to have to write extra data digestion tools to use such devices. But as said, I am optimistic: CPU power is cheap today and it is, still or again, a quality feature of printers to speak PS or PDF. In a way, even AC97 and HDA sound are in the same family, because those can only output wave audio in hardware, while classic Sound Blaster could also do FM Synthesis (Adlib) in hardware. So games (or drivers) will have to do synthesis in software to have chances to work on modern hardware. In Linux, I can run Timidity to "render" MIDI music into wave audio. Even the main binary of Timidity already is more than 1 MB in size, so you can imagine that simulating some DOS game compatible soundcard will need more than 1 MB of RAM... Regards, Eric PS: Thanks for mentioning https://kolibrios.org/de/download which supports USB (mouse, keyboard, trackpad, storage) in only 1.5 MB. Does it also support your printer and other USB devices? It does remind me of the QNX demo diskette which included a graphical web browser in less than 2 MB, if I remember correctly :-) According to the website, KolibriOS needs 8 MB RAM, can READ NTFS and Linux partitions and supports some common sound, network and graphics: http://wiki.kolibrios.org/wiki/Hardware_Support radeon, i915, VESA, emu10k, es1371, fm801, intel & via ac97, intel hda, sb16, sis7012, 3c59x/450/55x/575/900/905/980, dec21140/virtualpc, nvidia nforce, intel eepro100 & pro/1000, mtd803, pcnet32, r6040, via rhine, rtl8029, rtl8139, rtl8169, sis900, ps/2 mouse, floppy, ide/atapi, usb 1.1/2.0 (uhci, ohci, ehci) with hid (keyboard/mouse), storage (sticks and external disks) and printer. Which ones work for you? Many drivers are for devices simulated by QEMU, Bochs, VMware etc. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
