Hi XO, > I plan to buy OLPC XO laptops from One Laptop Per Child project. > 1. There is no standard BIOS on the laptop. > 2. There is no VGA/EGA/CGA display mode on the built-in display > Is it possible to port FreeDOS to this new AMD Geode laptop?
I think the OLPC will run on Linux. And on Linux, you have a very good virtual PC called DOSEMU. Because DOSEMU lets DOS use the real CPU of the computer, it is faster than a "real" virtual PC. But it emulates the BIOS and some hardware, for example a VGA display and SB16 sound. So DOSEMU is exactly what you need to run DOS software on OLPC laptops :-). Alternatively, you could write some sort of DOS loader to run DOS on the real OLPC hardware. Such a loader would be a DOS compatible BIOS which is loaded as if it would be an operating system. DOS itself does not need direct access to any VGA or similar hardware, but fullscreen DOS programs often do expect at least some text mode screen buffer at b800:0, so you may have to write something for your "BIOS" which collects text from that memory area and turns it into something for the OLPC display. Other DOS programs will leave all screen access to the BIOS (or to DOS, which in turn asks the BIOS to do the hardware access). So... Running DOS directly on OLPC hardware means that you will have to write a (minimal) BIOS, but I think it would be a lot easier and more convenient to use DOSEMU, which will let you run DOS in a window while running other Linux things in other windows at the same time :-). Eric PS: AMD Geode is, as far as I remember, x86 compatible, so your "only" problem is that you need a BIOS for I/O devices such as keyboard, mouse, display and disk access. And a good solution is DOSEMU with both a BIOS and even virtual devices which look like classic VGA etc hardware. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
