Re: [Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
Hi! XMGR. HIMEMX (AFAICT) has no maintainer (and/or we really need to push out that jmp $+2 fix for old 386s, i.e. unofficial version 3.33, In other words, Japheth took over HIMEMX but does not add the patch? www.freedos.org/software/ To be completely honest, please don't take this the wrong way, but some of those I literally never use (or can't remember how!): * append * assign The idea of BASE is to provide at least clones of all commands that MS DOS users had in their standard installation of MS DOS, while of course not limiting ourself to that list. You are right that some tools are less frequently used but almost everything in your list actually is useful for me... Append / assign: Some old software uses it in startup scripts. Comp: You are right, FC replaces it. Choice: Important for batch scripts. Exe2bin: Not all software uses compilers which create COM directly. Fasthelp: Was meant to work like apropos in Linux, see htmlhelp. Graphics: For ESC/P, HP PCL and Postscript printers, but of course many now make PNG screenshots of their DOS window, no hardcopy. Mirror: Can be sort of replaced by functionality in FORMAT. Nlsfunc: Not really clear for me how to use this and CHCP. Also, neither 2039 nor 2040 support NLSFUNC yet, only unstable 2037. Print: Not really useful with modern printers but some like it. Recover / unformat: Partially also in FORMAT? Share: Apparently useful for Windows and similar software? Tree: How else do you check your directory tree? I use LCD. Undelete: In what way buggy for FAT32? It is just horribly non- user-friendly as far as I remember. I mean, if we want to mirror MS-DOS, we should include BWBasic BWBasic, the Shell-based GWBasic clone? That was pretty painful to use but of course it is much smaller than the cool freebasic. Almost forgot, yeah, I would (personally) add sed, specifically cheap sed, which already is GPL and has a DOS 16-bit binary: http://lvogel.free.fr/sed.htm A lot smaller than the DJGPP GNU SED it seems. I do like SED but if we go that way, I would like EGREP, SORT, UNIQ, WC, XXD etc. www.exactcode.de/site/open_source/minised/ Yet more less sed :-D Perhaps we should include Awk (old Mawk 1.2.2? old 16-bit Gawk 3.0.6?) Awk has awkful syntax, but some people like it... www.gknw.net/mirror/awk/ reminds me, MOVE still needs the +R bug fixed. (And a lot of these should be upgraded to support LFNs, for DOSEMU if nothing else.) Poke the maintainer, although I only give +R any priority at all. Eric -- AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on Lean Startup Secrets Revealed. This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
Hi, On 7/17/11, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote: XMGR. HIMEMX (AFAICT) has no maintainer (and/or we really need to push out that jmp $+2 fix for old 386s, i.e. unofficial version 3.33, In other words, Japheth took over HIMEMX but does not add the patch? No. In fact, he has explicitly said he is *not* maintainer, hence nobody else ever bothered adding the patch. :-( Yeah, I guess I should've done it, but even I never got around to it (round tuit?). www.freedos.org/software/ To be completely honest, please don't take this the wrong way, but some of those I literally never use (or can't remember how!): * append * assign The idea of BASE is to provide at least clones of all commands that MS DOS users had in their standard installation of MS DOS, while of course not limiting ourself to that list. You are right that some tools are less frequently used but almost everything in your list actually is useful for me... It's fine if you have reasons to use them. I'm not disagreeing with the idea, just saying in practice I never, ever, ever use them. I guess that just proves that everybody's tastes, usage, and skills differ. Please don't take it as a command that you must never use them and remove them, that's not my goal. Just saying ... perhaps some things we don't need anymore. Comp: You are right, FC replaces it. Well, yes, I know all (most?) DOSes have both, but FC can do ASCII (default) or binary (/b), so I don't ever use COMP. Choice: Important for batch scripts. Exe2bin: Not all software uses compilers which create COM directly. But, IIRC, this was verbatim the version from OpenWatcom. My point was that people who are developers already have it (or similar). If we're going to include it, we should also include link (like MS-DOS used to). Also, there's no DOSSHELL or BASIC there either, and nobody complained. So some of these things should really be removed. I do really think exe2bin is useless here. Fasthelp: Was meant to work like apropos in Linux, see htmlhelp. But does it work at all?? I can't remember, maybe I'm thinking of DR-DOS (where it's a no-op). Graphics: For ESC/P, HP PCL and Postscript printers, but of course many now make PNG screenshots of their DOS window, no hardcopy. You (should) know I meant no offense by this. And certainly I appreciate all your hard work. But it's still frustrating when hardware just doesn't work. I guess that's a lost battle, there's just too much incompatible stuff out there. :-( Mirror: Can be sort of replaced by functionality in FORMAT. Fine, good, useful in theory, but rare in practice. Nlsfunc: Not really clear for me how to use this and CHCP. Also, neither 2039 nor 2040 support NLSFUNC yet, only unstable 2037. I (very very briefly) booted my i18n floppy yesterday, and I didn't see any obvious errors. int 21h, 6522h apparently still worked (my silly UPPER.COM), NLSFUNC quietly loaded with no problems, and yes I already upgraded to 2040. So who knows. But I of course didn't use CHCP at all. The country data (time, date, currency) seemed to be correctly changed to Greek, so who knows (but perhaps the CONFIG.SYS setting did that, not NLSFUNC.EXE itself, dunno). Oh well, Casino says it ain't urgent, so whatever. Still, I just hope it doesn't affect anybody negatively. Print: Not really useful with modern printers but some like it. If it works, keep it. Unfortunately, I think it doesn't for most people. Hardware-specific things like this that only work for %0.01 of the world should probably not be in BASE. Just MHO, sorry. :-( Recover / unformat: Partially also in FORMAT? Ugh, I'm not sure I've ever used any version of this, but it sounds useless (IIRC). Recover is like 0.1, and it pretty much destroys everything (on floppy??) except raw text data. So I would be very VERY surprised if anyone used this. I'd rather have a real tool like WDE in BASE instead. Share: Apparently useful for Windows and similar software? Yes, which is good and fine, but still rare for most people. Seriously, how many of us use Win3x? I'm not discounting it, just saying, by itself Share is fairly useless (right??). Keep in mind that you can't get Win3x at all anymore except via eBay or perhaps (??) MSDN. Good luck getting it to work on modern hardware!! (I consider bare DOS better than Win3x, but of course it had some advantages, e.g. multitasking.) If Win3x were freeware, I'd agree, but since it's not and never will be Tree: How else do you check your directory tree? I use LCD. Check it for what? I don't use it. If I need to find a file, I use an appropriate tool (or even dir /s). Actually, a real file manager would be more useful here (e.g. Doszip, but that's 386+). Undelete: In what way buggy for FAT32? It is just horribly non- user-friendly as far as I remember. I just meant that you hacked it to (sorta) work but not perfectly. I never heard of anyone heavily using it or testing it. I'd almost prefer if we
Re: [Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
To be completely honest, please don't take this the wrong way, but some of those I literally never use (or can't remember how!): * append * assign [...] The idea of BASE is to provide at least clones of all commands that MS DOS users had in their standard installation of MS DOS, while of course not limiting ourself to that list. You are right that some tools are less frequently used but almost everything in your list actually is useful for me... The important part is that BASE is supposed to replicate the behavior of MSDOS. FreeDOS is a free DOS-compatible operating system for IBM-PC compatible systems. So while you may not use some of the programs in BASE, they are included for a reason: for DOS legacy. We have dropped only a few truly relic commands that were deemed to have no value. For example: Backup/Restore was a moving target in MSDOS anyway, so was not part of FreeDOS. Similarly, Recover dropped was because there are a variety of free disk recovery programs already available. Also, we have allowed some of the command names in BASE to change from their original MSDOS counterparts, but the functionality of the original MSDOS command is still there (often expanded in FreeDOS.) As I've written elsewhere, we need to avoid making dramatic sweeping changes to FreeDOS 1.1. I'm in favor of completely opening up FreeDOS 2.0 for major change - and I think we *should* redefine what a modern DOS should look like in 2.0. But FreeDOS 1.1 needs to be essentially an update of 1.0, using the software list as a guide. -jh -- AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on Lean Startup Secrets Revealed. This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
On Sun, 17 Jul 2011, Rugxulo wrote: Hi, On 7/17/11, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote: Comp: You are right, FC replaces it. Well, yes, I know all (most?) DOSes have both, but FC can do ASCII (default) or binary (/b), so I don't ever use COMP. In DOS 2-4, PC DOS had COMP (which it had since 1.x) and MS-DOS had FC. I think COMP first appears in MS-DOS 3.3; FC doesn't appear in IBM's version until 5. Choice: Important for batch scripts. Exe2bin: Not all software uses compilers which create COM directly. PC DOS 2000 doesn't even *have* exe2bin. But, IIRC, this was verbatim the version from OpenWatcom. My point was that people who are developers already have it (or similar). If we're going to include it, we should also include link (like MS-DOS used to). Also, there's no DOSSHELL or BASIC there either, and nobody complained. So some of these things should really be removed. I do really think exe2bin is useless here. DR DOS never had BASIC, and PC DOS 7 drops it (I *think* 6.x still had basic.com/basica.com on the IBM side, after dropping qbasic). And FreeDOS *does* have a GEM package, right? That covers DOSSHELL - it's more or less an enhanced version of DR DOS's counterpart of it (i.e., ViewMax). -uso. -- AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on Lean Startup Secrets Revealed. This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
But, IIRC, this was verbatim the version from OpenWatcom. My point was that people who are developers already have it (or similar). If we're going to include it, we should also include link (like MS-DOS used to). Also, there's no DOSSHELL or BASIC there either, and nobody complained. So some of these things should really be removed. I do really think exe2bin is useless here. DR DOS never had BASIC, and PC DOS 7 drops it (I *think* 6.x still had basic.com/basica.com on the IBM side, after dropping qbasic). And FreeDOS *does* have a GEM package, right? That covers DOSSHELL - it's more or less an enhanced version of DR DOS's counterpart of it (i.e., ViewMax). We have several implementations of BASIC in the Devel package set (formerly Lang): Basec, BwBasic, FreeBasic, SmallBasic. That seems like plenty. I even wrote a few simple BwBasic programs long ago, I think for one of the FreeDOS Beta releases, just so there'd be some BASIC programs you could experiment with. And yes, OpenGEM is the only graphical package included in the GUI package set. This is basically the same as DRDOS ViewMax, which was a competitor/analogy to MSDOS DOSSHELL. Over the years, we've included other GUI's in FreeDOS, but eventually the developers stopped working on them. OpenGEM is at least stable and works very well. I've emailed Shane many times to talk about his future plans for OpenGEM. I don't know if he is still working on it in 2011. The OpenGEM web site hints that something exciting is coming, but it's been a very long time since he put that message up. -jh -- AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on Lean Startup Secrets Revealed. This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
[Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
Based on discussions with Bernd as we prepare for FreeDOS 1.1, I've done some cleanup on the Software List. The major edits: * COUNTRY: edited to reflect that it is part of KERNEL * DOSFSCK: moved Util - Base * DEVLOAD: moved Util - Base * EMM386: deleted (replaced by JEMM386) * FDSHIELD: moved Base - Util (similar to FDAV, which is already in Util) * HIMEM: deleted (use HIMEMX) * KERNELDEV deleted (use KERNEL) * MTCP: added to Net * UIDE: added to Base (removed GCDROM) * VOL: edited to reflect that is is part of COMMAND * XMGR: added to Base (removed FDXMS, FDXMS286) Please have a look and let me know if I need to update anything else.http://www.freedos.org/software/ Keeping the software list up-to-date is a community effort. If you see anything there that looks out of place, or out of date, etc please let me know. Just send me an email and I'll update it. We use an online tool to edit the software list via a web browser, and several admin folks have the ability to update the software list in this way. You can also contact Pat, Aitor, Eric, Rugxulo, Mateusz, or Jeremy. -jh -- AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on Lean Startup Secrets Revealed. This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
Op 16-7-2011 19:44, Jim Hall schreef: * XMGR: added to Base (removed FDXMS, FDXMS286) I'd keep FDXMS286 if possible, it's the only XMS-driver for 286 machines. Please have a look and let me know if I need to update anything else.http://www.freedos.org/software/ UTIL: you could delete UDMA, XCDROM, XDMA from the software list so people won't download them again except directly from Ibiblio if they happen to stumble upon it. Jack R Ellis opensourced those drivers back then, but all have been replaced by a much more bugfree and functional UIDE driver, acting as CD driver for SATA/IDE drives, meanwhile also providing readcache for IDE/SATA harddisks and those CD drives. Keeping the software list up-to-date is a community effort. If you see anything there that looks out of place, or out of date, etc please let me know. Just send me an email and I'll update it. I'd suggest adding Syslinux (4.04) to the BOOT section, due to its capabilities and the now opensourced ELTORITO driver. Flashrom program could be added as well to UTIL, but it's a dangerous program to mess around with. BIOS chip with wrong contents -- no functioning computer. We use an online tool to edit the software list via a web browser, and several admin folks have the ability to update the software list in this way. You can also contact Pat, Aitor, Eric, Rugxulo, Mateusz, or Jeremy. Mirroring to Ibiblio has to improve still, might want to doublecheck that. Kernel, SHSUCDX and Edlin (what's a binary?) are easy examples of being outdated. Anyone got experience with the watcom port of FreeCOM yet? Or too experimental / work-in-progress? Bernd -- AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on Lean Startup Secrets Revealed. This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Bernd Blaauw bbla...@home.nl wrote: Op 16-7-2011 19:44, Jim Hall schreef: * XMGR: added to Base (removed FDXMS, FDXMS286) I'd keep FDXMS286 if possible, it's the only XMS-driver for 286 machines. Ok, I restored FDXMS286 back on the software list (Base). Please have a look and let me know if I need to update anything else.http://www.freedos.org/software/ UTIL: you could delete UDMA, XCDROM, XDMA from the software list so people won't download them again except directly from Ibiblio if they happen to stumble upon it. Jack R Ellis opensourced those drivers back then, but all have been replaced by a much more bugfree and functional UIDE driver, acting as CD driver for SATA/IDE drives, meanwhile also providing readcache for IDE/SATA harddisks and those CD drives. Thanks, forgot to clean those up. I've removed UDMA/UDMA/XCDROM from the software list. Keeping the software list up-to-date is a community effort. If you see anything there that looks out of place, or out of date, etc please let me know. Just send me an email and I'll update it. I'd suggest adding Syslinux (4.04) to the BOOT section, due to its capabilities and the now opensourced ELTORITO driver. Done! Also mirrored 4.04 to ibiblio. Flashrom program could be added as well to UTIL, but it's a dangerous program to mess around with. BIOS chip with wrong contents -- no functioning computer. I don't want to include this in the software list just yet. It's a very specific tool for a very specific purpose. Let's leave off for 1.1. Mirroring to Ibiblio has to improve still, might want to doublecheck that. Kernel, SHSUCDX and Edlin (what's a binary?) are easy examples of being outdated. Yes, this seems to have been (mostly) ignored while I was away from FreeDOS. Some things were updated, but most items were not. This is next on my to-do list, when I'm not writing updates for Install, or goofing off on the weekend. :-) -- AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on Lean Startup Secrets Revealed. This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
Hi, On 7/16/11, Jim Hall jh...@freedos.org wrote: Based on discussions with Bernd as we prepare for FreeDOS 1.1, I've done some cleanup on the Software List. The major edits: * DOSFSCK: moved Util - Base While I agree this is better, it's still nice to have CHKDSK for 16-bit cpus (since DOSFSCK is DJGPP / 386+). * HIMEM: deleted (use HIMEMX) * XMGR: added to Base (removed FDXMS, FDXMS286) Was this intentional? We don't need two (though it's nice to have both in case one has bugs with something). These days I tend to prefer XMGR. HIMEMX (AFAICT) has no maintainer (and/or we really need to push out that jmp $+2 fix for old 386s, i.e. unofficial version 3.33, been procrastinating that for years!). Please have a look and let me know if I need to update anything else.http://www.freedos.org/software/ To be completely honest, please don't take this the wrong way, but some of those I literally never use (or can't remember how!): * append * assign * comp * choice * edit (but do keep this, I guess, though I prefer others) * exe2bin (really? anybody use that? then where's link? heh) * fasthelp (does this even do anything?) * graphics (apparently my hardware hates it) * lbacache (still good but UIDE makes it and TICKLE and CDRCACHE redundant) * mirror * nlsfunc (broken with 2040??) * print (doesn't work for me) * recover * share * tree * undelete (FAT32 buggy?) * unformat Something I would maybe? add is whats-his-face's Restore, but it's for non-military use, heh, aka not GPL friendly. Then again, that's another rare util I don't personally need. But it's classic BASE, IMHO. I mean, if we want to mirror MS-DOS, we should include BWBasic (or Regina Rexx for similarity to PC-DOS). But I don't figure anybody would agree to that. Heck, if you want to be different, include XPL0 !!;-) Almost forgot, yeah, I would (personally) add sed, specifically cheap sed, which already is GPL and has a DOS 16-bit binary: http://lvogel.free.fr/sed.htm It's basically a cleaned up version of hhsed which was derived from Eric Raymond's version. I also see that even ESR now only points to (other dude's) minised as the proper replacement. Surprisingly, it's still dead simple (!) to compile that (and I tested with DJGPP yesterday), but I haven't built it with OpenWatcom, so I don't know if it's 16-bit friendly. http://www.exactcode.de/site/open_source/minised/ Perhaps we should include Awk (old Mawk 1.2.2? old 16-bit Gawk 3.0.6?) instead? Or maybe you think that's too *nix-y? I don't even grok Awk (heh), just saying, it's at least as useful as sed (though I heavily use sed almost exclusively). Oh, I forgot, one guy tweaked BWK's Awk a few months ago to compile with OW (even for DOS 16-bit). So that would be a good alternative too, if you prefer a more recent (and hopefully less buggy) version. http://www.gknw.net/mirror/awk/ Keeping the software list up-to-date is a community effort. If you see anything there that looks out of place, or out of date, etc please let me know. Just send me an email and I'll update it. I guess I'm one of the updating fiends. But even I've slowed down (somewhat, stupid computer problems). It's hard to find everything, even harder to keep track of versions, what works, what doesn't, etc. We use an online tool to edit the software list via a web browser, and several admin folks have the ability to update the software list in this way. You can also contact Pat, Aitor, Eric, Rugxulo, Mateusz, or Jeremy. No offense, but most of this stuff is unmaintained. In fact, that reminds me, MOVE still needs the +R bug fixed. (And a lot of these should be upgraded to support LFNs, for DOSEMU if nothing else.) Ah well, always more to do. :-/ P.S. I know we're all tired of having to do everything ourselves and also tired of waiting for 1.1 to finally come out. But hey, that's life, everybody's off doing ten different other projects too, even me (barely). Oh well, if we just do a little at a time, we'll get there one day -- AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on Lean Startup Secrets Revealed. This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
Hi, On 7/16/11, Bernd Blaauw bbla...@home.nl wrote: Anyone got experience with the watcom port of FreeCOM yet? Or too experimental / work-in-progress? Bart said it works pretty well, but it's only in SVN (and I don't have a client installed on this machine), so you'll have to grab and build it by yourself. -- AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on Lean Startup Secrets Revealed. This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] Updates to software list
Hi, On 7/16/11, Jim Hall jh...@freedos.org wrote: Mirroring to Ibiblio has to improve still, might want to doublecheck that. Kernel, SHSUCDX and Edlin (what's a binary?) are easy examples of being outdated. Yes, this seems to have been (mostly) ignored while I was away from FreeDOS. Some things were updated, but most items were not. This is next on my to-do list, when I'm not writing updates for Install, or goofing off on the weekend. :-) I did a few updates a month or two ago. But my mistake was blindly assuming that Murphy's Law didn't exist. (Nah, why have ssh key on two computers? This one is brand new. What could go wrong?) Worse is that then I assumed my laptop would work fine ... and while it does, the router doesn't (or at least I haven't barely a clue how to set it up, yet again, and I have to pore over some Dummies books [literally!] one of these days to figure it out!) So unless I want to beg Jim, yet again, to install *yet another* ssh key for me for this computer (not that I have any decent ssh tools, would have to *yet again* install Cygwin), it's not going to happen until I become router-savvy (ugh). And even I (barely) have a life with other junk to do (barely!). Face it, Jim has done a lot for FreeDOS, maybe too much, so when he runs off with real life, sometimes nobody steps up. Hey, they've (almost all) got the real life disease too! Well, ssh, it happens. ;-) -- AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on Lean Startup Secrets Revealed. This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
