(Granted to all: This feedback for the oZone developer may be a bit
off-topic, unless it reveals any FreeDOS issues. Though I imagine that DOS
GUI's may be of general interest here.)
Flo,
I looked at oZone 0.6 some. My first questions/observations while *running
it on a pure FreeDOS machine with DOSLFN loaded*:
1) I take it that CWSDPMI is not required when FreeDOS EMM386 is loaded and
providing whatever DPMI support it has. True? (I did not notice any
difference when I loaded CWSDPMI first.)
2) It takes a long time to load, about 25 seconds on this Pentium 100 with
16 MB. (DOSSHELL loads in 2-3 seconds.) Should it take that long to load?
3) It is a much more modern and pleasing looking interface than DOSSHELL.
4) The Console did not work for me. The window appeared, but I could not
enter anything.
5) Copy-and-paste would not work for me in Navigateur. I tried to copy a
LFN file from floppy to the C drive. With the file selected, nothing
appeared when I clicked the Edit menu. I right-clicked on the file and got
a popup menu that let me select Copy, but in the folder on C, when I
right-clicked, the popup menu did not show Paste, nor did the Edit menu show
anything.
6) DOSLFN observations (from the command prompt, not in oZone):
a) I entered MD "DOS Games" and successfully created a directory. But
CD "DOS Games" does not work. The directory created is DOS GAME (an
8-character name) and must be referenced that way. DIR /LFN reports the
directory name as DOS GAME, not DOS GAMES. So it seems like DOSLFN does not
support long directory names.
b) I entered EDIT "Flight Of The Amazon Queen.LN" and entered a command
line, saved and exited. When I EDIT "Flight Of The Amazon Queen.LN" again,
it opens the file, so LFN support seems good on that point. But DIR /LFN
displays FLIGHT O.LN, so it fails to report a LFN created under its own
driver.
c) On the other hand, it properly reports a LFN created under Windows XP
and not edited or otherwise operated on under FreeDOS, just doing a DIR /LFN
A: for a floppy where I had copied a LFN file from Win XP.
7) I could not figure out how to create program folders or items from within
oZone, but poked around and found that folders created in OZONE\SYSTEM\MENU
become program folders, and .LN files are program items - simple command
lines as far as I could see.
8) In accord with my observations in (6), "Flight Of The Amazon Queen.LN"
was rendered as a short-name program item named FLIGHT O.
--John Hupp
----- Original Message -----
From: Florian Xaver
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] DOS GUI opinions
Hi,
ok - I see I have to update my website :-)
I am using FreeDOS and Enhanced Dr-DOS with DOSLFN, a very good LFN
driver for DOS (I mean Win32 long file name implementation!). oZone is a
DJGPP program, so it uses LFN if a LFN driver is present. Else it uses
short file names (not tested by me, but I think it will make some
problems (but it should be configurable to use only short file names).
I don't see any reason, why you wouldn't want to use the LFN driver. And
then you can work without problems... copy, rename, move etc. inside of
oZone! It includes a navigator, which is like the "explorer" of Windows.
The test version at my page hasn't a sorted (by name, size etc.) file
list and directory tree, the next version will have a sorted list, so
oZone should be really useable as a file manager.
Sorry for my bad English...
bye
flo
PS: a mouse driver like CTMOUSE needs to be installed!
John Hupp wrote:
> Yes, I see that I need to clarify. This is for a pure FreeDOS system.
> FreeDOS does not have native support for LFN, correct? I could perhaps
> run
> a LFN driver, but I don't know how much native support FreeDOS has for
> LFN.
> If you do some FreeDOS operation on a file that the LFN driver has named
> (move, copy, xcopy, chkdsk), will it strip the LFN? Or worst case, mess
> up
> the file/directory structure trying to interpret what the LFN driver has
> done?
>
> The approach that MS-DOS DOSSHELL takes is to offer long Program Item
> names
> or descriptions that display in the Program Manager, but the underlying
> DOS
> file is untouched. The long name is maintained only in DOSSHELL.INI.
>
> The DOSSHELL approach is fine for my purposes at the moment, but I'd like
> to
> see a more graphical-looking interface.
>
> So that was my question about oZone. When you say that oZone supports
> LFN,
> do you mean the Win32 long file name implementation?
>
> --John Hupp
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Florian Xaver
> To: [email protected]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 11:45 AM
> Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] DOS GUI opinions
>
>
> Hi,
>
> what do you mean with long names for program items? oZone supports LFN
> (long file names), so there should be no problem :-)
>
> bye
> Flo
>
> John Hupp wrote:
>> I couldn't tell from the screen shots or descriptions if the oZone
>> desktop
>> currently supports creating long names for program items. I would like
>> the
>> program manager to display "Flight Of The Amazon Queen", for instance,
>> and
>> not just FOTAQ.
>>
>> --JDH
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Florian Xaver
>> To: [email protected]
>> Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 5:00 PM
>> Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] DOS GUI opinions
>>
>>
>> John Hupp wrote:
>>> I'm looking for opinions on DOS GUI's. I'm familiar with
>>> still-developing
>>> OpenGEM, but I am especially interested in any freeware/open source
>>> GUI's
>>> that provide for long names for program items (like MS-DOS DOSSHELL but
>>> with
>>> a more modern look). Also your judgment of the GUI's file manager,
>>> stability and resource consumption. Task switching is nice, especially
>>> if
>>> stable, but that's a secondary concern.
>> A very cool GUI is oZone ;-)))))) It includes a file manager (navigator)
>> and is a "modern" GUI with Skin support. Feedback is welcome everytime
>> ;-)
>>
>>> An off-hand related thought: Is anyone using Arachne as a primary GUI?
>>> If
>>> so, the same kinds of questions apply about its shell support.
>> I am using as HTML/Help viewer in DOS. The GUI is very good for a
>> browser, but not so good for a general GUI.
>>
>> Bye
>
--
Florian Xaver <http://www.flox.at.tf>
Dr-DOS Wiki <http://www.drdos.org>
oZone-a GUI operating system for DOS,Linux,Win
SWORD-a nice GUI library for DOS/DJGPP
<http://www.flox.at.tf>
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