I've been tracking FreeDOS development on and off for years. I finally had an excuse to install FreeDOS on one of my computers when I found it didn't have enough memory to run many of the newer operating systems. I have a Sony PCG-F540 laptop 500 MHz with 64 MB RAM and a 6 Gig hard disk. It has a Yamaha DS-XG sound card and Conexant 56K modem built in.
I had to run the install CD twice to get FreeDOS installed on the hard drive. The first time, I tried to pick an image on bootup and the system locked up. Second time, I left it as default. I guess I'm not very familiar with the programs that installed with FreeDOS (other than the basic DOS stuff), because I got on and wasn't sure where to get started. I have a large cabinet full of legacy hardware and software, so I decided perhaps I should go back to the programs on DOS I'm most familiar with just to get going. My experience was that about half of the ones i tried on FreeDOS worked. I remember using Procomm Plus on my DOS PCs when I used to want to get my modem working. Tried my old version of Procomm Plus. The setup program works. The actual program fails. Anyone been able to get a version of Procomm Plus or even Procomm working? Any pointers to 'how to' documents on setting up one's modem? Going through my old sound programs, was surprised some of my Sound Blaster stuff worked with this sound card. Hadn't been able to get a lot of those programs working in years. CMF and ROL work really well. I have a couple of really good programs for playing those. Am having trouble with Wave files. Forget to check if there was a wave file player that came installed with FreeDOS. What do others use to play those files? Also, could not play MOD files. My favorite program sound2 (based on SoundTracker), just hangs. Any recommendations on a good mod file player? I couldn't help thinking Timidity++ would be great for playing midi and mod files. It works even without a sound card and has pdcurses and ncurses interfaces. Has anyone had any luck porting Timidity++ to DOS? Was thrilled to see my favorite ABC programs. One thing I don't have to try to convert. Was surprised I didn't see a program like midicomp (http://freepats.zenvoid.org/tools/midicomp/) though. Will have to see if I can get a version to compile. I have a ton of old BASIC programs. Any recommendations on a good BASIC interpreter? I've tried some Open Source ones in the past on other platforms, but they didn't seem to fully support all the commands the programs would need to run. Is there a good way to slow down old DOS games like pinball? I remember trying programs like whoa on years ago and they didn't seem to work well for what I needed. WordPerfect 6.0 appears to work fine. Was very happy to see that. My favorite DOS programming editor (ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/editor/edwin15c.zip) fails and won't run. Has anyone been able to get edwin working on FreeDOS? Is there a PNG viewer for FreeDOS? I tried an old copy of Pictview and it seems to work well on most graphics types but lacked PNG support. Some of my old PC Magazine and Big Blue utilities worked fine, like snapshot and dirmatch. However, the fireworks construction kit on one of my Big Blue disks just gives up and won't run past the intro screen. One last question. Is there a good forum or mailing list for discussing porting/compiling Open Source applications to DOS? There are several command line and a few pdcurses applicatons I like. Would be interested to see how many work on FreeDOS. I'd rather not reinvent the wheel and try to build them if someone's already done it though. Was thinking about trying applications like diffh, starchart, gle, midicomp, lcal, pcal, passwordsafe or pwsafe, diction, sdcv, gsar and a few others if I have the time. Still trying to get my bearings with FreeDOS, so any pointers to documentation, how-to's, etc. greatly appreciated. Thanks. Sincerely Laura http://www.distasis.com/cpp ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a cutting edge operating system for enterprises looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest innovations from Sun and the OpenSource community. Download a copy and enjoy capabilities such as Networking, Storage and Virtualization. Go to: http://p.sf.net/sfu/opensolaris-get _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
