Hi, 2011/9/18 Aitor Santamaría <aitor...@gmail.com>: > > 2011/9/13 Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org>: >> In DOS, it would be awesome to have true multitasking > > Pick the smallest Linux distribution that you know.
These days that would probably be MicroCore (aka, TinyCore w/o X11) Linux. It's about a 7 MB .ISO download. I think the RAM usage is pretty low. I haven't tested DOSEMU, but I think nowadays you need Glibc 2.2, kernel 2.6, etc. (which it has, IIRC). So you can't just randomly pick any old Linux, sadly. http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/welcome.html Some people have suggested Debian in the past as a good stable starting point. But I remember DeLi 0.7.2 (uclibc-based) had a DOSEMU package, and that's been resurrected as ConnochaetOS (though I haven't tested it yet): http://www.connochaetos.org/wiki/ > Remove X and anything about graphics. Yes but easier said than done. > Remove any Unix stuff, I guess you mean all the unnecessary POSIX tools. At least substituting Busybox should cover a good deal of it. The barebones stuff is kernel (vmlinuz), initrd.gz, and root system (/bin/sh) etc. (I think), and Gujin is a good boot loader (with DOS version), meant to replace Loadlin / Lilo. > Wouldn't it be great that you'd have several FreeDOSes running > simultaneously? (switch with Ctrl+Alt+Fn). Well, yes, that would be the whole point. But here's a naive question: can a single DOSEMU session use more than 64 MB of memory? (Newer GCCs really eat a lot.) > You wouldn't have the problem of "modern hardware" (Linux does the > part), but then you have quite other disadvantages (I don't know how > good would be the drive mapping process that DOSEMU does. Would be > nice if DOSEMU scanned all the disks and mapped ALL partitions > automatically). Well, the only disadvantage isn't really one at all: it's not perfect (but no DOS environment, or any OS, is). So there are bugs and incompatibilities, just like anything. But overall it works quite well. > In the meantime, yes, at least task switching would be great. Old-style real mode stuff should be easy to swap in and out of memory. (I remember some old swappers from 80xxx snippets, but I don't know how stable they were.) I imagine that it's when you start adding ten bazillion memory managers that things get complex. http://www.filegate.net/pdnasm/ The real problem is trying to determine what apps you want to run. Personally I'd prefer DJGPP (cmdline, textmode) stuff and similar, but even that is probably a bit too complex for a simple memory swapper. Though of course DOSEMU handles DPMI fine. P.S. Actually at one time I wanted to build pcemu under (DOS) Minix 2.04 to be able to fake multitasking, but ACK didn't like the stock sources, and I never fiddled with it further. http://pcemu.sourceforge.net/ http://www.minix3.org/previous-versions/Intel-2.0.4/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-devcon-copy2 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
