On Thu, 29 Apr 2021 at 22:00, Eric Auer <[email protected]> wrote: > > there have been TSR to display a clock or other status in DOS, > at a selectable location or by reserving a whole line on screen.
The clock is a lot easier than the battery level, though... But I guess there are probably standard APM calls to query remaining battery power. I always load POWER.EXE when running PC/MS/DR DOS in VMs, because it makes the CPU usage drop to zero when the VM is idle. I think it (or analog) might support a how-much-charge-is-left call but I don't know. > About your suggestion to show which drives exist at boot: The > installer could use VOL, a FOR loop and testing whether or not > a drive exists to display such information. There also are some > left-over tools from older versions of the distro to check which > drives are CD/DVD, which are FAT12, FAT16 or FAT32, how much > space is free on them and so on. Yup. A simple list would help. > > The output of MEM is so long (shortest style is without /C I think) > that you would not fit much else on the screen. Same for the output > of LBACACHE (when loading, or using the INFO or STAT options later). There's always `mode con lines=43` or `mode con: lines=50` :-) > The good thing about VER /R is that it shows both kernel and command.com > version in 3 lines (plus one empty line before that). As people probably > use UHDD+UDVD2 instead of LBACACHE+?+CDRCACHE, cache info will differ. Well, yes. > What would be the pros and cons relative to the already existing DOS > versions of Ranish, fdisk, xfdisk and spfdisk? Ahh, good point. Like I said, I generally stick to the on-board tools in PC/DR DOS, without 3rd party additions. I wasn't aware of these, except Ranish, which is the only tool I know that can renumber existing partitions in place. I am not sure I've used it this century, though. > > I have long been pondering a very simple, very heavily cut-down, > > text-only Linux whose main purpose was to multitask multiple instances > > of DOSemu > > Too late? ;-) https://cmaiolino.wordpress.com/dosbian/ Well, no, but good find! That's an ARM distro, not x86. It runs DOSbox, a PC emulator, whereas DOSemu runs DOS sessions on the bare metal of x86 machines. DOSbox is mainly aimed at games, whereas DOSemu is intended for productivity apps, and allows reading files on Linux partitions, printing to Linux printers, etc. But conceptually close! -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [email protected] – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
