Hi, we got a comment on the FreeDOS spec - "why support only kernel 3.3 but the tools of MS DOS 6?". I replied that our kernel is very MS DOS 5ish now, mostly with respect to being able to use UMBs and HMA. Some other interesting points:
- I think the normal installer does not need to support < 386 CPU. If you need to install on an older system, use a boot floppy manually. Assuming 4 MB or 8 MB of RAM for people who boot from CD-ROM is certainly not overoptimistic. - Jason offered to make a SHSUCDX compile time option for 8086 compatibility, which leaves my caches (could run on 286), ATAPICDD, DOSFSCK (I doubt that you can do FAT32 checking in reasonable runtime on 286), maybe CuteMouse(?), DOSLFN, HIMEM (well, there is FDXMS286) and maybe others as programs which cannot yet be compiled to work on the "mere minimum CPU" (but we will certainly have forgotten to turn off 386 optimizations in some of the other tools as well... in those cases, just recompile for 8086). - it is not clear if MS DOS 5+ config sys MENUing is requested in the spec. We have SOME MENUing already. - some commands / drivers are not (syntax / usage wise) drop in replacements for their MS counterparts. As you know, this has very low priority for me in the case of drivers and interactive tools. Only for pure command line tools syntax compatibility seems to be quite important to me. - the spec should mention NASM and OpenWatcom. Things about the command spec: We un-dropped APPEND. Our COMP is far from /d /a /L /n=... /c, but our FC is good. The EMM386 description is questionable. We dropped FASTOPEN, but I wonder if it would help to improve access speed for huge directories (compared to using "only" a cache). Our EXE2BIN cannot create "fixed load seg" binaries from real EXEs. Our GRAFTABL got kind of dropped: Aitor included the functionality in DISPLAY. The GRAPHICS spec lists the printers which we support, not the ones which MS supported. Nice for me :-). The UNDELETE / MIRROR / RECOVER / UNFORMAT of FreeDOS are somewhat simple. PRINT is far from complete. Having a real SETVER eventually would be nice. How about BASIC? Why not use REXX, PERL or BASH? :-P Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by BEA Weblogic Workshop FREE Java Enterprise J2EE developer tools! Get your free copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 today. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5047&alloc_id=10808&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
