On Sat, Mar 23, 2024 at 6:23 AM Danilo Pecher via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Neofetch is a good way to give you a quick overview of the machine's > parameters. It's perhaps more of a gimmick under DOS, but in a unix > environment it can be a godsent. When I was database administrator at > Infineon I had to work with about 3000 different machines running > either Linux, Solaris, AIX or HP-UX. So you have 3000 different > hostnames to ssh into. Some you visit almost daily, but some test > servers or legacy systems you only visit once in a very long while. > > In that case it is more than helpful to have the most pertinent > parameters at a glance right after login. >
Definitely neofetch (or similar .. there were other programs like that before it) is useful when you're managing a network of servers that have different specs. But as you wrote, I'm not sure that a program that just collects and prints system info is particularly useful to install by default on a DOS machine in 2024. So while I think it's great to write a new program for FreeDOS, I'm not very excited about including FETCH4FD in the FreeDOS install, unless there's some other useful feature (for example, command line tests that could run silently to automate BAT files depending on the system type, or free disk, or available memory - such as FETCH4FD /TEST /MEM=16 returns 0 [success] if the system has at least 16MB of memory, or /TEST /FREE=100 returns 0 [success] if the current drive has 100MB or more of free disk space.) In the original DOS era, there were lots of programs that did this. One obvious example was Norton's SI (System Info) utility. And years ago, we used to include COMPINFO in a previous FreeDOS distribution, but I don't remember why we stopped including it. If I had to guess, probably it was the same question of "usefulness." I'm also not sure FETCH4FD is the best name, but that's entirely my personal preference. To me, "Fetch" implies it's going to retrieve a file or some other resource over a network. As in "to go for and then bring back something for someone." Also, FETCH4FD is difficult for me to type because of the "4" in there. To me, more obvious (and easier to type) names include DOSINFO or SYSINFO. Jim _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
