Hi Charles, > Hate to complain, but, you people are letting this initiative get away > from you like what happened to LINUX. Too many bits and pieces > cobbled together from here and there without the code writers knowing > enough about what the bits and pieces all do. And too many > distributions that confuse potential users about which one to use.
DOS is many things: It might be the 3 diskettes from Microsoft with a small set of tools but it can also be a computer full of software collected over many years from many sources. When DOS was young, the current Linux style a la Ubuntu "open the software center and pick any of 43000 free programs to install at a single click" was impossible. There was commercial tools, there were piles of shareware to get from BBS and similar and you sometimes even had to write your own software... FreeDOS is both old and new: Even if you only get a FreeDOS CD image, it already includes way more tools than the "3 disks of MS". Of course this pile of software is from different sources but hey at least it is all truly free and often open software :-) > Don't tell me you have LINUX bits in FreeDos! I've seen some evidence Yes there are GNU things in FreeDOS. Simply because they work well and modern compilers and C libraries (think DJGPP) allow compiling them for DOS. So why reinvent the wheel? For example Info-ZIP exists for Linux, Windows, DOS... It is much better than the old PKZIP for DOS. It is worse than PKZIP for Windows but that costs 30 USD to register while Info-ZIP is free. If we were to re-invent Info-ZIP just to have something exclusive which is not available for Linux, it would probably be much worse than Info-ZIP and not much "more like DOS" anyway... > of this. If you have to borrow from them to write an OS as simple as > DOS then you're not up to the task and shouldn't bother. You're just Do not worry. Something "as simple as DOS" is not borrowed from Linux. There is no Linux at all in kernel.sys and there is no Linux at all in command.com either. But everything else is not necessarily as simple as you may think. If you want, you are of course welcome to create replacements for "Linuxisms" now used in FreeDOS. But to give another example, DOSFSCK just is better than CHKDSK, so why not use it? And actually DOSFSCK in FreeDOS is based on a very old version of the Linux tool, you could make a DOS version from the newest DOSFSCK to get even better features without having to develop them again. Note that dosfstools do not change much over time, so this might be a bad example, but I hope my point is still clear. On the other hand, many of the complex things in a "standard" FreeDOS install are totally from the DOS world, not "stained" by Linux. Think about DEFRAG, EDIT, FORMAT, DEBUG, EMM386 and cousins, those are all exclusive DOS free open software :-) > spoiling the whole initiative, wasting your time and you'll end up > withing nothing better than Windows or LINUX and quite likely > something worse nobody wants. The strength of DOS is not being better or worse but being different, I believe: It uses much less disk space, RAM and CPU while still having SOME comfort. If you would try to give DOS "software which is as strong as LibreOffice, Linux kernel and Firefox", you would be almost forced to make it also as complicated as Linux. But that is not the goal here. On the other hand, if you only want a simple graphical web browser, you can now use DILLO. That is also available for Linux, but because you can also run Dillo in DOS, it works on older computers. Another case where mixing the Linux and DOS world uses a bit of the best of both worlds. You could also use Arachne. This is more "pure DOS" but less "strong" compared to Dillo. Users are free in picking their balance. > Given the above and what I've read in this forum I've kinda > lost interest in FreeDos. That is a pity, but of course it would be interesting to hear what you would like DOS to provide and be. Given that your comment is a reaction to LunDOS, a distro with OpenGEM, I would say that GEM is an example of non-Linux coolness in the DOS world. It is graphical, yes. But there are alas no 1000s of free programs for GEM while Linux would have them. But if fewer are enough, GEM can be nice. Even DOS without anything graphical at all can be nice. Both with or without any (textual) tools which are also known from the Linux or Windows world. Again, the user can decide about the mix :-) Regards, Eric >> I think it's worth mentioning that Bryan Lunduke has a FreeDOS distro, >> called LunDOS, with OpenGEM, a web browser. He uses it to develop >> Linux Tycoon for DOS. He distributes it as VirtualBox images and QEMU >> images. He posted that a 2.0 revamp was coming but nothing turned up >> ... >> <http://lunduke.com/2013/05/30/announcing-lundos/> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CenturyLink Cloud: The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Services. Learn Why More Businesses Are Choosing CenturyLink Cloud For Critical Workloads, Development Environments & Everything In Between. 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