Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 6:39 PM, Louis Santillan  wrote:
>
> IIRC, BasicLinux and other UMSDOS Linuxes would not boot/load with
> EMM386 as they would put the CPU into V86 mode.  After such, loadlin,
> et. al., could not recapture control of the CPU and reload the GDT.

I can't remember if DOS-Minix worked with XMS-only or not. But
certainly it would choke on EMM386. (Actually, it also choked on
modern big-RAM machines unless manually corrected.) Then again, that
was old Minix 2.0.4, not sure if that was ever continued working in
3.x series. (Similarly, UMSDOS has been dropped since Linux 2.6.x, or
so I thought.)

Are there any active distros that still come with Loadlin? For those
that don't use GRUB2, what do they use? Grub Legacy, presumably.

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 5:59 PM, Jose Antonio Senna
 wrote:
>
>  On  2 january Antony Gordon said:
>  > Try Loadlin with no memory managers installed.
>
>  Good idea.  It worked.
>
>   I was using HIMEMX only, no EMM.
>   Removing the line in CONFIG.SYS much reduced available low
>  memory, but allowed Loadlin to boot Linux from DOS prompt.

I may be stating the obvious, but you shouldn't necessarily have to
edit CONFIG.SYS every time.
Either make a separate suitable config menu item (for "clean" boot) or
press F8 and adjust accordingly.

>   Pity that is not possible to test with EMM only,
>  as JEMM386 requires a XMS manager to work.

Never heard of EMS Magic (TSR)? AFAIK, it's "freeware". Although I
wonder if it's really worth trying every obscure setup, but you can do
what you want.   ;-)

http://www.emsmagic.com/

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Louis Santillan]

IIRC, BasicLinux [0] and other UMSDOS Linuxes would not boot/load with
EMM386 as they would put the CPU into V86 mode.  After such, loadlin,
et. al., could not recapture control of the CPU and reload the GDT
[1].


[0] http://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/
[1] http://wiki.osdev.org/GDT_Tutorial

On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 3:59 PM, Jose Antonio Senna
 wrote:
>
>  On  2 january Antony Gordon said:
>  > Try Loadlin with no memory managers installed.
>
>  Good idea.  It worked.
>
>   I was using HIMEMX only, no EMM.
>   Removing the line in CONFIG.SYS much reduced available low
>  memory, but allowed Loadlin to boot Linux from DOS prompt.
>
>   Pity that is not possible to test with EMM only,
>  as JEMM386 requires a XMS manager to work.
>
>  Regards
>  JAS
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Antony Gordon]

Try Loadlin with no memory managers installed.


> On Dec 29, 2016, at 11:49 PM, Ralf Quint  wrote:
> 
> On 12/29/2016 4:00 PM, Jose Antonio Senna wrote:
>> So no, it's not reasonable to expect FreeDOS to work under a
>>> running  Win95. It may be possible in theory (if someone
>>> fixed the bugs), but nobody has done it (yet, AFAIK).
>>   I did not say Win95, I said Win98SE, and I did not try to
>>  run FreeDos under Windows; I tried to start  Windows from
>>  FreeDOS.  This said,  I did not expect that to work, I just
>>  noted what did happen.
> NO version of Windows will start from FreeDOS, not 3.x nor any 9x...
>> 
>>> Dunno, try Gujin (DOS version) instead, it should work
>>> (although I likely only tried like once several years ago):
>>   The point was not how to boot Linux, it was to show another
>>  difference in behaviour between FreeDOS and MSDOS 7.
> There is no MS-DOS 7, despite what people are trying to tell. That "Boot 
> part" if Windows 9x will identify itself as DOS version 7, but never was 
> a standalone version of DOS. The last standalone version of MS-DOS was 
> 6.22 and that is as far as FreeDOS can reasonably take it...
>>  However, it would be nice if loadlin worked under FreeDOS.
> Have you tried to contact the maintainer of loadlin about this?
> 
> Ralf
> 
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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 30 Dec 2016, Ralf Quint wrote:

> On 12/30/2016 6:57 AM, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>> *I* did it, but that was many years ago.  I do remember the VDM didn't
>> work.
> What I remember (granted, getting old LOL) was that someone had 3.0
> starting but then couldn't do much beyond that. Not aware that anyone
> every got it working (beyond a mere bootup) on 3.1 or Enhancded mode due
> to memory manager issues.

As far as memory management goes, Windows comes with its own himem.sys and 
emm386.exe, which should probably be used in lieu of their FreeDOS 
counterparts.

>> Actually, IBM had 3 releases of version 5 (5.0, 5.00.1, 5.02) and the
>> first two were essentially identical to Microsoft's 5.0 and 5.0A.
> Well, yes, but those were as you stated just OEM versions from M$, with
> no IBM specifics beyond what any other OEM had, unlike the later
> versions of PC-DOS. Can't see in PC-DOS 5.02 anything different but the
> renamed IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM either...

The two had been essentially identical since 3.2, though, after MS-DOS was 
made more IBM-like in a late revision of 3.1.  (3.3 and 4.0 were 
apparently developed by IBM rather than Microsoft; this is certainly 
evident on 4.0.)

5.02 actually has one difference from MS-DOS: interlnk, which was 
introduced to MS-DOS 6, was present here as well (along with a couple of 
the tools, like eject, which didn't show up in MS-DOS at all).

-uso.

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Ralf Quint]

On 12/30/2016 6:57 AM, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> *I* did it, but that was many years ago.  I do remember the VDM didn't
> work.
What I remember (granted, getting old LOL) was that someone had 3.0 
starting but then couldn't do much beyond that. Not aware that anyone 
every got it working (beyond a mere bootup) on 3.1 or Enhancded mode due 
to memory manager issues.
>
> Actually, IBM had 3 releases of version 5 (5.0, 5.00.1, 5.02) and the
> first two were essentially identical to Microsoft's 5.0 and 5.0A.
Well, yes, but those were as you stated just OEM versions from M$, with 
no IBM specifics beyond what any other OEM had, unlike the later 
versions of PC-DOS. Can't see in PC-DOS 5.02 anything different but the 
renamed IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM either...

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Tom Ehlert]

> Maybe I'm
> the wrong one to still be talking about this since I don't know the
> gory details.

yep.

Tom


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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Bret Johnson]

> There is no MS-DOS 7, despite what people are trying to tell. That
> "Boot part" if Windows 9x will identify itself as DOS version 7,
> but never was a standalone version of DOS.

Actually, with a little bit of tweaking, it can be -- I do it all of the time.  
The two main things you need to do are to edit MSDOS.SYS (which is simply a 
text-based configuration file, not an executable file like it was in earlier 
versions of MS-DOS), and to "hide" (move or rename) a few files in the 
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND subdirectory.  IIRC, those files are IFSHLP.SYS, HIMEM.SYS, 
and EMM386.EXE.  The OS tries to install those programs automatically even if 
you don't want them (they are sort of like "hidden" lines in CONFIG.SYS, and 
are required to be installed if you actually run Windows 9x).

Also, I personally like to "mix and match" the MS-DOS utilities and the FreeDOS 
(and other non-MS) equivalent utilities.  Sometimes I prefer the MS ones and 
other times I prefer one of the alternatives.  I don't use Win 9x any more at 
all, but I use MS-DOS 7.x almost every day.

Warning: Don't Use Probiotics Before You See This
Gundry MD
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/586684722e1854722d71st51vuc

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 6:00 PM, Jose Antonio Senna
 wrote:
>  Rugxulo said:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 6:16 PM, Jose Antonio Senna
>>  wrote:
>
>>>  I booted FreeDOS kernel 2042 from a floppy in a W98SE
>>> machine, and it seems to run OK.
>
>> So no, it's not reasonable to expect FreeDOS to work under a
>> running  Win95. It may be possible in theory (if someone
>> fixed the bugs), but nobody has done it (yet, AFAIK).
>
>   I did not say Win95, I said Win98SE,

Okay, but generally speaking, I'm referring to what limited rumor I've
heard about "Win9x", not uniquely specific to "Win95", per se. AFAIK,
all of the Win9x family share the same design (minus maybe WinME,
which is somewhat different about bootup or whatever).

I don't know the details first-hand, so I can't say for sure, just
that it's not expected to work with other DOSes. I'm pretty sure even
OpenDOS and EDR-DOS don't have the necessary fixes to run Win95, and I
don't think DR-DOS 7.03 does either. They lost a lot of money (and
maybe gave up) due to that incompatibility (although they did win a
lawsuit later on). At best, all you can do with DR-DOS 7.03 (by
default) is dual boot with Win95. Actually, I think explicitly the
rumor was that Novell gave up entirely on Novell DOS 7 once it was
announced that Win95 would come bundled with MS-DOS. Hence the
changing of ownership (yet again). You'd have to ask someone more
familiar with it (Matthias Paul?), but perhaps even he isn't
interested in discussing it.

The point is that none of the existing developers needed or wanted it
badly enough to "fix" it for FreeDOS, and such fixes are far from
obvious because it was not well-documented by MS (on purpose).

To be honest, since MS-DOS comes bundled with Win9x and (more or less)
works the same way, I don't see any disadvantage in just using that. I
don't understand the appeal of trying to run Win9x (of any kind) atop
FreeDOS (beyond morbid curiosity).

Maybe some kernel devs here can expound upon this further. Maybe I'm
the wrong one to still be talking about this since I don't know the
gory details.

>  and I did not try to
>  run FreeDos under Windows; I tried to start  Windows from
>  FreeDOS.  This said,  I did not expect that to work, I just
>  noted what did happen.

Same difference, that's what I really meant: to combine running DOS
and Win9x together, they are basically inseparable.

>> Dunno, try Gujin (DOS version) instead, it should work
>
>   The point was not how to boot Linux, it was to show another
>  difference in behaviour between FreeDOS and MSDOS 7.
>  However, it would be nice if loadlin worked under FreeDOS.

Great, but lack of proper Loadlin functionality atop DOS is very low
priority. Very few people in Linux "want" a DOS install to boot from,
much less "need" it.

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 30 Dec 2016, Ralf Quint wrote:

> On 12/29/2016 8:52 PM, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>>
>>> NO version of Windows will start from FreeDOS, not 3.x nor any 9x...
>> I know 3.1 did in the past, with provisos, did that regress?
> Sorry  but I am not aware that anyone has successfully been able to do
> that...

*I* did it, but that was many years ago.  I do remember the VDM didn't 
work.

>>> There is no MS-DOS 7, despite what people are trying to tell. That "Boot
>>> part" if Windows 9x will identify itself as DOS version 7, but never was
>>> a standalone version of DOS. The last standalone version of MS-DOS was
>>> 6.22 and that is as far as FreeDOS can reasonably take it...
>> There's PC DOS 7 but that's another story for another day. ;)
> Indeed. IBM's PC-DOS 7 is a completely different animal. IBM and MS-DOS
> parted ways after MS/PC-DOS 4.x. IBM never had a v5, skipped straight to
> 6.1. And IBM was always "a number ahead" ever since (until the last
> release of IBM DOS, which was PC-DOS 2000)

Actually, IBM had 3 releases of version 5 (5.0, 5.00.1, 5.02) and the 
first two were essentially identical to Microsoft's 5.0 and 5.0A.

-uso.

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Ralf Quint]

On 12/29/2016 8:52 PM, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>
>> NO version of Windows will start from FreeDOS, not 3.x nor any 9x...
> I know 3.1 did in the past, with provisos, did that regress?
Sorry  but I am not aware that anyone has successfully been able to do 
that...
>
>> There is no MS-DOS 7, despite what people are trying to tell. That "Boot
>> part" if Windows 9x will identify itself as DOS version 7, but never was
>> a standalone version of DOS. The last standalone version of MS-DOS was
>> 6.22 and that is as far as FreeDOS can reasonably take it...
> There's PC DOS 7 but that's another story for another day. ;)
Indeed. IBM's PC-DOS 7 is a completely different animal. IBM and MS-DOS 
parted ways after MS/PC-DOS 4.x. IBM never had a v5, skipped straight to 
6.1. And IBM was always "a number ahead" ever since (until the last 
release of IBM DOS, which was PC-DOS 2000)
>
>>>However, it would be nice if loadlin worked under FreeDOS.;
>> Have you tried to contact the maintainer of loadlin about this?
> Is there still a maintainer of loadlin?
Don't know, haven't had time to check yet. But if not, that might be a 
reason why it might not work with FreeDOS... ;-)
Well, there is (supposed to be)
> Hans Lermen got retired, so I took maintainship of loadlin.  Here you can find
> old revisions, as well as the newer 1.6f which should work with nowadays 
> kernel
> (or else please mail samuel.thiba...@ens-lyon.org)
>
> loadlin.hg is a mercurial repository, you can clone it:
>
> hg clone static-http://youpibouh.thefreecat.org/loadlin/loadlin.hg/
The last version mentioned above is from September 2012...

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Steve Nickolas]

On Thu, 29 Dec 2016, Ralf Quint wrote:

> On 12/29/2016 4:00 PM, Jose Antonio Senna wrote:
>> So no, it's not reasonable to expect FreeDOS to work under a
>>> running  Win95. It may be possible in theory (if someone
>>> fixed the bugs), but nobody has done it (yet, AFAIK).
>>I did not say Win95, I said Win98SE, and I did not try to
>>   run FreeDos under Windows; I tried to start  Windows from
>>   FreeDOS.  This said,  I did not expect that to work, I just
>>   noted what did happen.
> NO version of Windows will start from FreeDOS, not 3.x nor any 9x...

I know 3.1 did in the past, with provisos, did that regress?

>>
>>> Dunno, try Gujin (DOS version) instead, it should work
>>> (although I likely only tried like once several years ago):
>>The point was not how to boot Linux, it was to show another
>>   difference in behaviour between FreeDOS and MSDOS 7.
> There is no MS-DOS 7, despite what people are trying to tell. That "Boot
> part" if Windows 9x will identify itself as DOS version 7, but never was
> a standalone version of DOS. The last standalone version of MS-DOS was
> 6.22 and that is as far as FreeDOS can reasonably take it...

There's PC DOS 7 but that's another story for another day. ;)

>>   However, it would be nice if loadlin worked under FreeDOS.
> Have you tried to contact the maintainer of loadlin about this?

Is there still a maintainer of loadlin?

-uso.

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Re: [Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

[Ralf Quint]

On 12/29/2016 4:00 PM, Jose Antonio Senna wrote:
> So no, it's not reasonable to expect FreeDOS to work under a
>> running  Win95. It may be possible in theory (if someone
>> fixed the bugs), but nobody has done it (yet, AFAIK).
>I did not say Win95, I said Win98SE, and I did not try to
>   run FreeDos under Windows; I tried to start  Windows from
>   FreeDOS.  This said,  I did not expect that to work, I just
>   noted what did happen.
NO version of Windows will start from FreeDOS, not 3.x nor any 9x...
>
>> Dunno, try Gujin (DOS version) instead, it should work
>> (although I likely only tried like once several years ago):
>The point was not how to boot Linux, it was to show another
>   difference in behaviour between FreeDOS and MSDOS 7.
There is no MS-DOS 7, despite what people are trying to tell. That "Boot 
part" if Windows 9x will identify itself as DOS version 7, but never was 
a standalone version of DOS. The last standalone version of MS-DOS was 
6.22 and that is as far as FreeDOS can reasonably take it...
>   However, it would be nice if loadlin worked under FreeDOS.
Have you tried to contact the maintainer of loadlin about this?

Ralf

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