Hello everyone and greetings from Southeastern PA!

I discovered your project when looking for newer alternatives to 
MS-DOS.  I have a process control program written in DOS that is used 
for a critical commercial application and will need to support it for at 
least five more years.  My personal experiences go back to MS-DOS 2.11 
and the IBM-XT.  I have several years of formal schooling in programming 
but nothing on the level of operating system coding.  I wish I could 
help but haven't coded in a decade or more.

I hope this project succeeds and grows.  The latest version did give me 
some grief when trying to install it to brand new computers with "clean" 
as in no partitioned hard drives.  At least the install tried and did so 
better than some Linux distributions that I've tried.

The pro:  FreeDOS runs my application fine. Even EMM386.EXE behaves 
itself!  I like the little added touches from old MS-DOS, like the 
ability to easily skip or line-load configuration files at boot without 
pressing F5 or F8 and hoping that you didn't press too late!  That's a 
big help for me!

The con:  I simply don't have the time to fudge, compile, download files 
from various places to make it all work.  I can load my licensed copies 
of MS-DOS 6.0 and the application software in 20 minutes.  I spent two 
hours trying to figure out how to make the FreeDOS install work right on 
both FAT32 and FAT16 file systems after experimenting and reading FAQ's 
and HOWTO's and saw weird problems with some of the external commands 
like "chkdsk" under FAT16 which kept insisting that certain application 
files were more than one hundred times their actual size.  "Edit" won't 
allow you to choose out of saving a text file that you've accidentally 
altered while reading it and you're forced to save the "oopses." The 
installer wouldn't let me stop loading packages in a graceful manner, I 
had to force my way out. 

Otherwise, great job!!!  Polish up the rough edges and this is a high 
flier!  I can imagine how hard it can be when many are working on 
different parts of the same project and I'm sure many are doing this out 
of a labor of love and the cost of their free time.

Unfortunately, it was just too dangerous and quirky to trust to what I 
need it to do so I'm going to patiently wait for a while and try back 
later.  I can understand that those having an interest in DOS but not 
too technically oriented will have much trouble with release 1.0.  This 
is a work in progress and requires some reading and understanding.  For 
really good kudos, include a utility that will make easy writes to CD-RW 
drives... "CDRoast" is way too far out of date and "CDRecord' pretty 
much the same with newer CD-RW drives like the LG drives in my new systems.

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