Luca: Just a few suggestions/comments/questions -- don't know if they'll help or not.
Do you really need both IP and NETBIOS? If you don't actually need IP, you might be able to find a packet driver for your network card and install a direct NETBIOS-to-packet driver (I suspect one of those exists, though someone more knowledgeable on the network side could probably tell you for sure). To get to where I needed to be in the network world in the past, I've also needed to sometimes install various shims (depending on the native capabilities of the DOS Ethernet hardware drivers and what OS protocol(s) I needed things to ultimately work with). I really don't think your problem with the installation is a lack of memory (it could be, but I rather doubt it). There's no way there should be insufficient memory with DEVICE instead of DEVICEHIGH, plus it sounds like sometimes you get an error message and sometimes it just crashes, which indicates to me something other than a simple lack of memory resources. For example, DOS network drivers, especially the early ones (OS/2 Warp is an old system), played all kinds of games with the OS kernel. For example, I remember in the early days of Novell networks there were different drivers for each version of the OS (MS-DOS 3, 4, and 5 each had different drivers, IIRC). It's quite possible that the Warp drivers are mistaking FreeDOS for some other (M$?) kernel and doing something they shouldn't do. It's also possible that there's a bug/incompatibility in FreeDOS. For example, I found a bug in earlier versions of FreeDOS (I think it may be fixed in the later versions, but am not 100% sure). In my case, it was a problem while processing CONFIG.SYS where the FreeDOS kernel itself was using memory that wasn't allocated properly. My program was requesting a memory block at a memory location which the kernel itself was using "illegally", and the kernel granted the request to my program when it shouldn't have. Consequently, my program was overwriting part of the kernel code in memory and when my program exited everything crashed. In my case, this occurred while using the INSTALL option in CONFIG.SYS, which allows you to install TSR's while CONFIG.SYS is being processed (CONFIG.SYS normally only allows device drivers to be installed, not TSR's). However, a similar situation could be happening in your case even without using the INSTALL option. Another possibility is for you to try and install (at least some of) the network device drivers in AUTOEXEC.BAT or even manually after CONFIG.SYS has been processed. This may work better than what you're doing now. For this, you can use the FreeDOS program called DEVLOAD, which let's you install device drivers (which can normally only be installed early in the boot process via CONFIG.SYS) at a later time. Just as a caution, however, network drivers in particular tend to do some weird things that "normal" programs don't do, so DEVLOAD may not work very good. But, you can give it a try. There are also at least a couple of other programs out there that provide essentially the same functionality as DEVLOAD, though they are much older and I don't think have any source code. I remember one which had two separate programs, DDL (Device Driver Load) and DDU (Device Driver Unload) which would (sometimes) allow you try to uninstall device drivers if you didn't need them any more (without needing to edit CONFIG.SYS and reboot). It doesn't sound like you'd be very interested in the Unload piece, but it's possible that DDL may work better than DEVLOAD in your particular situation. ____________________________________________________________ Buffett’s New Enemy Buffett just confirmed his worst fear. Click here for his warning. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/5609a245668c222456924st01vuc ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
