Hi Carlos, > > I am really against any illusions that NETWORKING would be easier than > > CDROM.
> But do you think it could be done? Supporting NE2000/PCI with DHCP will already support SOME percentage of PCs. You write that QEmu and VMWare have a virtual network card, is it ne2000 compatible? But again: QEmu and VMWare support virtual (and indirectly also real) CD-ROMs anyway, which is much easier driver- wise than doing network install, because BOOTING from CD-ROM allows you to use the ElTorito driver which leaves most work to the BIOS, effectively making it almost hardware-independent. > I don't know really, but maybe it would be nice to see if some programs work > or not in different laptops, BIOSes, motherboards. For sure? I don't know. I am absolutely sure that if a FreeDOS program fails for a given system, then it has to be fixed to become a version which works on ALL systems. Only exception from this is CPU requirements: If a FreeDOS program needs a 386 or better CPU, then it needs a 386 or better CPU, okay, but then still it should run on ALL "PC compatible" hardware which contains any 386 or better CPU. And by "PC compatible" I really do not ask much, just a system where you could run MS DOS 3 in text mode, for example. There have been MS DOS 2.xx versions which were optimized for e.g. Tandy or Sanyo. Those have incomplete BIOS and have graphics RAM in the first 64 kilobytes, so the custom MS DOS contains own BIOS replacements and uses custom memory layout. HOWEVER, you get a chicken egg problem: You cannot compile a custom FreeDOS kernel on a system where the default kernel crashes, so it makes again no sense to ask people to compile a version of the kernel FOR their system ON their system. For all the other software, you need not and cannot do many things to improve Tandy compat- ibility. Note that one user already DID compile a custom Sanyo kernel, which he loads with his own custom BIOS extensions: Sanyo mini-BIOS loads his BIOS to RAM, his BIOS loads FreeDOS at 1000:0, which is possible by adjusting the DOS_PSP variable and the exeflat option during compile and by using the load segment option in SYS (but actually that user does not use a DOS boot sector anyway, as his BIOS extensions load DOS directly). > Could be used with software with restrictive licenses. Okay, I get it. Read: Antivirus stuff and VIDE-CDD. What else? By the way, Bernd just never got a reply from Acer about the driver, but they never said that you cannot put it on CD either. > ... If you ask me, a much BETTER solution for > > this would be a system which shows you the LSMs of all packages which > > got updated since [User Can Enter Date Here] and do the rest manually. > I like that too. Thanks :-) Eric ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration Strategies from IBM. Find simple to follow Roadmaps, straightforward articles, informative Webcasts and more! Get everything you need to get up to speed, fast. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7477&alloc_id=16492&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
