Hi Eric, If Jack Ellis has switched open-source UIDE to closed-source XIDE, what will be for FreeDOS 1.2 or 2.0?
I believe FreeDOS 1.2 or 2.0 has to be open-source? > > I was never able to read a CD or DVD on new computer, SATA drive; > > all I'd get was the title, but file directory never showed. > If you got the title but no content, maybe they were UDF rather > than ISO9660 formatted. Normal MSCDEX style drivers such as our > SHSUCDX do not support that, but I guess there are experimental > drivers for UDF content :-) Note that this is UIDE-unrelated. Now I could retry FreeDOS 1.1 on USB stick to see if it can read CDs or DVDs. I have some I burned, some where I made the iso with mkisofs. There is also an outdated FreeDOS floppy image on the System Rescue CD. I though nonreadability was related to SATA, didn't think of UDF. By the way, Seagate Business Storage DVD is recognized but can't be read by FreeBSD or NetBSD, but can be read by Linux (System Rescue CD) and Haiku R1Alpha4 (November 2012). > > If something like UIDE/XIDE were switched to closed-source in Linux, > > BSD or Haiku, there'd be many other developers to fill in the gap > ... or of course just start with an older still open source UIDE > and help by maintaining your own open source branch. This will be > lower quality than XIDE, but if you need open source, XIDE might > not be an option for you. > > I might also say that if Net-Tamer > > (http://www.nettamer.net/tamer.html) were released to open-source > > instead of languishing with no further update since 1999, there might > > have been potential for development and improvement... > Possible. Luckily there are a few more modern open source browsers > which have been ported to DOS now :-) I can think of Links and Dillo among graphical browsers. > > Switching from MBR partitioning to GPT means I can install FreeDOS > > only to USB stick, and pretty much prevents anything serious with > > ReactOS. > In particular for ReactOS, I would say that adding GPT support is > supposed to be no real problem. Even for DOS I am optimistic. But > maybe ReactOS considers itself to be unstable and therefore does > deliberately avoid being too "brave" in harddisk access? It might > be designed more for being tested and less for taking the risky (?) > step of interacting with your other operating systems & user data. There is the danger what an OS with buggy GPT support will do to the rest of the disk, will it run amok and overrun other OS installations and user data partitions? On running amok and overrunning other partitions, that happened to me in the single-digit days of April 2001 with OS/2 Warp 4 with CHKDSK running automatically on reboot after a system freeze. That was not GPT, and OS/2 Warp 4 was IBM-proprietary. Also OpenBSD, as of their latest release (5.7), did not support GPT, though they might be working on it. FreeDOS FDISK on installation program makes me very nervous, DOS FDISK always made me nervous. I preferred OS/2 FDISK prior to April 2001, subsequently Linux fdisk. Tom ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
