Hi,
I'd been building and testing PCs using Dos622 with MSCLIENT 3.0, but
kept runing into limitations, conflicts and lack of memory. I tried
Win95 and Win98 boot disks instead, but things got even worse. A brand
new server had >4Gb of memory and Win98's HIMEM and EMM386 didn't like
this at all. The USB memory sticks also conflicted with EMM386.
I was dubious about FreeDOS at first, becuase I've found other
open-source and free projects can be disjointed, with half-finished
websites and close to zero documentation.
At first, I found the FreeDOS site difficult; each link took me to a
different website, some of them were on SourceForge where the
documentation tab was empty. I also found versioning unclear between
different linked FreeDOS sites.
I needed to get a bootable FreeDOS up and running, I downloaded
FDos1440.zip, but found the docs talking about "installing" it to a hard
drive! To me this is a strange concept (unless you're working with
embedded systems or very old hardware). I was then confused by the boot
process of the official download, in that it uses a boot loader together
with a convoluted menu system in FDCONFIG.SYS and FDAUTO.BAT, I then
found a boot image burried inside the boot image!
I extracted the boot sector from there, and copied the kernel, made my
own FDCONFIG.SYS and suddenly it's working. I then got hold of the most
hacked together alpha, beta, CVS or whatever files I could find together
with UMBPCI and made a new build.
I've now tested this on a range of modern hardware including dual XEON
servers with BIOS controlled RAID, AMD with RAID DOS driver, Intel with
BIOS controlled SATA, booting from USB memory sticks and building over
the network.
The result is incredible. I have tons of spare conventional memory, all
my real-mode apps now run properly, and everything is faster than
before. The other nice thing is that many of the FreeDOS facilities are
designed to work with the newer hardware as well as the old.
This is a fantastic operating system.
--
Gerry Hickman (London UK)
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