On Tue, 2013-01-08 at 18:46 +0100, Bernd Blaauw wrote: > Op 8-1-2013 15:38, KOS schreef: > > Hello there, do you know when V2.0 of freedos will be available? > > > > I'm not sure there's going to be a V2.0 sometime soon, be there FreeDOS > roadmaps or not. I'm still quitely working on version 1.2 of the FreeDOS > distribution whenever I find spare time. > > Is there anything that you need but find lacking sofar in the 1.0 and > 1.1 releases? Or for that matter in the core components like the kernel > and shell? > > Bernd
There are some programs that require Windows 3.1 or 3.11 which can run on top of Freedos, but more work on compatibility would not hurt. ReactOS may fill the niche of Windows replacement eventually, but not for a while most likely. Worse, for Windows programs that expect there to be dos underneath, enough said. A protected mode dos like the one under Windows 9x and Windows ME could be interesting and would justifiably deserve a different name like Freedos-32. The problem with a dos environment is that there isn't an operating system taking care of all the hardware and providing standard calls to use it. Most sound card support involved adding to your program in most likely a spaghetti fashion calls to a third party driver, closed source of course. Windows 98 may have had multitasking, but if that is true, it was more than just a single thread dos system. Gates made some very bad assumptions that crippled dos back in the day. Assumption one, nobody will ever need more than 640k of memory for executable programs and drivers... I imagine that other bad assumptions were made as well. Actually, there is OS/2 which was supposed to be the competitor to Windows 9x and I'll bet that IBM is willing to release source code to it. Maybe the freedos community should get it's hands on OS/2 and develop it further. Aside from taking bugs out of Freedos 1.1, I don't see any major changes that should be made. Implementation of a Windows 9x clone is going to be too much work where there is the ReactOS project that gave up on trying to do that years ago. I'm confident that ReactOS will work better on old computers than XP does. Granted, ReactOS is at a very early alpha stage where it is somewhat futile to predict what the resource requirements will be when it stabilizes. I like FLTK, I like opengem, I like some of the graphical user interfaces I have seen that are free. Problem though, graphical user interfaces on top of dos are an afterthought even today. There was no planning when dos was initially invented that I know of for guis. There are plenty of MS Dos programs that aren't Windows compatible, because a Windows compatible programming method wasn't employed. What I'd like to see at this point is a focus on debugging and a focus on deploying Freedos via a rom chip. It should be possible to get write once 1 meg+ memory chips now. Why not install the freedos kernel, command.com, etcetera on such a chip? If you can't overwrite the operating system executable, security is enormously improved. For low power embedded processors that are say only 8 bit, freedos may be very useful. A hypervisor that can run dosbox and make modern hardware work with old dos programs anyone? How about dosbox running on a Pentium 133 or a Pentium 166 machine with 16 megs of ram? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Java SE, Java EE, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, JavaScript, jQuery and much more. Keep your Java skills current with LearnJavaNow - 200+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Java experts. SALE $49.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122612 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
