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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user