[Freedos-user] PCI parlallel port card....

[Roderick Klein via Freedos-user]

Hello,

Are there any PCI cards that live at IO adress 378 so they are 
compatible with DOS ?


Thanks,

Roderick


___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] SNMP agent for DOS?

[Roderick Klein via Freedos-user]

On  7-01-24 21:28, Anton Gustafsson via Freedos-user wrote:

Hi Roderick! I agree, in this case it is mostly to satisfy my
supervisor's need to follow protocol.


I can understand following but at a certain moment it feels like it 
becomes a bureaucracy,


Do a quick search for SNMP DOS agent. I assume you did that already :-)
http://www.dmhsoftware.com/dosbased.php
Disclaimer I have no clue how you can get an SNMP agenet on a DOS system


All machines in the network are
supposed monitored (load, mem, swap etc) using a software called Zabbix
which has the ability to use either their own agent, ICMP or SNMP.

It is possible to use Zabbix without an agent, and for example only
check availability over ICMP pings. It is a slight workaround, since the
actual frontend on Zabbix shows hosts as unavailable when not using an
agent, though they it is possible to configure the system not to send
"host_down"-emails. There seem to be disagreements within the Zabbix
developer community whether this is a bug or a feature.

Anyway it feels a bit redundant since these machines are custom hardware
controllers and are integrated in the rest of the process system, and
the control room interacts with these machines continuously.


I was suspecting why these machines where not virtualized as they are 
controlling some custom hardware. Let me guess they use an old ISA card 
:-) And VM's do not have ISA passthrue option :-)



We happen to have a OS/2 machine in production as well, and it did not
have supervision either. If you are interested in monitoring, I found
this the last week: "IBM SystemView Agent v1.4.3 for OS/2". It is
available free on the internet. It is running well, however I haven't
had the time read up on configuration, so it is only in "default" mode,
showing that host is up.


I used to work on the eComStation project at Mensys up until 2012 and 
was working on OS/2 daily... I did look at the that IBM Systemview 
agent. I think it supports SNMP, but no clue...


If you are BTW looking for a update OS/2 version. A company from the US 
called Arca Noae LLC sells an OEM version of OS/2 called ArcaOS.
Version 5.1.0. now even runs on UEFI hardware. OS/2 has a pretty decend 
DOS support build in. How that would work with special controller cards 
under DOS is another question. I just mention this because as time moves 
forward even getting machines that still have a legacy BIOS is getting 
somewhat of a problem...


Roderick



___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] SNMP agent for DOS?

[Roderick Klein via Freedos-user]

On  6-01-24 18:24, Anton Gustafsson via Freedos-user wrote:

Hi!

We have a few network connected FreeDOS machines, running on an isolated
network using MSClient. I have been instructed that all our machines on
the network should be monitored, by either SNMP or a Zabbix agent, and
not ICMP ping only.

I havn't been able to find anything on the internet. I guess that DOS
wasn't designed to run in such a way that more advanced monitoring was
necessary? Have any of you guys heard of an SNMP agent for DOS?


Never really heard of it But even if you have an SNMP agent what 
should the SNMP agent report on DOS ?


I am not expert what so ever. However the SNMP protocol is pretty 
generic. It can be used to monitor a UPS for servers or monitor a 
printer. But can use SNMTP.


So even if you have SNMP client what should it monitor on thr FreeDOS 
system ? Disc space ? DOS programs being started ?


Myself I use ArcaOS (OS/2 clone) and it does not have an SNMP client 
build in (not that I am aware of at least).


Roderick



___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] failing to create bootable install media (or at least boot from it)

[Roderick Klein]

On 13-12-22 21:41, Björn Morell wrote:

I think GRUB boot loader could help as it is an UEFI application. SD
with one nix partition and one FAT partition for FreeDos 2 Gb or less.


The problem is tha when you can load DOS on a UEFI system. What BIOS 
services does FreeDOS talk to ?


Roderick



___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] failing to create bootable install media (or at least boot from it)

[Roderick Klein]

On 13-12-22 17:26, Jerome Shidel wrote:

Are you certain that the machine you are trying to install FreeDOS is not UEFI 
only and supports BIOS (Legacy) boot? And, that is enabled in the BIOS settings?

Most modern Linux installers can boot both ways. Unfortunately, UEFI is not an 
option for FreeDOS at present.


Well will it ever be an option possible to implement UEFI for FreeDOS?

I personally think its not possible The issue is that UEFI is mostly the 
same as a BIOS. But one of the issue's is that during boot a UEFI loader 
calls ExitFromBootServices() if you could keep these services active... 
 But that is not possible I think. FreeDOS depends on a lot of BIOS calls.


You MIGHT be able to write a UEFI loader that provides BIOS services to 
FreeDOS with SeaBIOS. But there is much code involved. You would 
effectively write half a VM more or less...


Roderick





___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] Super Charging Windows 3.1 ?

[Roderick Klein]

He Martin,

Small world. I have also been looking for websites on that topic.
I have also not been able to find any information for fixes for Windows 
3.1 Microsoft released.


I do not know if Microsoft released patched for Windows 3.1 and Y2k 
compability. I think IBM for WIN/OS2 did.


Roderick

On  9-06-22 16:02, Martin Iturbide wrote:

Hello

I was wondering if you know some links, articles, hints about all the
software and fixes that can be installed on Windows 3.1 .Like if someone
did the exercise on how he will tune/pimp his own Windows 3.1 today.

There are many articles on how to install Windows 3.1 plain and check
what that OS offered at that time, but I can not find someone that
recommends what patches and software to install today on it, or what was
the awesome software for Windows 3.1 that we used to have in the past.
Like if someone will try to bring the 16bit Windows to the max.

Any ideas?

Regards

--
Martín Itúrbide
http://www.os2world.com
mar...@os2world.com 
martiniturb...@gmail.com 
Quito - Ecuador




___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user





___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] PCI Express Network Adapter Board for FreeDos

[Roderick Klein]

I have seen this happen on OS/2 with porting Linux and FreeBSD NIC 
drivers. The issue is that a small chip next to the main chips seems to 
be wired up differently or different chip. You get NO DHCP lease on LAN. 
Or when you set it to static no data traffic comes in out and out. The 
realtek cards have a lot revisions of the harware and still the same 
vendor and chipset ID. I have seen this happen more often.


So if the DOS binary is older then the Windows drivers that might 
explain what is happen.


Roderick

On  7-11-20 14:12, Marv wrote:

Thanks, Tom - unfortunately, the motherboard I have available only has a
PCI Express slot (no PCI slots). I know Startech has a PCIe to PCI
adapter for $40, but then I would still need to buy a suitable PCI
network card. I don't really want to invest that much in this project.
I've looked at a lot of PCIe network cards, but haven't found one that
supports DOS type drivers.

At present, I'm still fooling around with the onboard Realtek 8111/8168B
network adapter. It has me baffled. The NDIS driver and associated files
load ok on boot with no errors, but every network program I try to run
times out with no connection. I know the hardware is ok, because I
booted to Linux on a USB stick and the network works just fine.

On Sat, Nov 7, 2020 at 6:29 AM tom ehlert mailto:t...@drivesnapshot.de>> wrote:


 > Can anyone suggest a PCIe network adapter for FreeDos? One that I
 > can get a packet driver or NDIS driver for. My FreeDos computer
 > doesn't have a regular PCI slot and I've given up trying to getve
the onboard network adapter to work.

while it's MSDOS based, this https://www.netbootdisk.com/cards.htm
has NDIS drivers for 98 cards.

unfortunately FreeDOS is mostly ignoring network stuff.

Tom



___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user





___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user





___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] Which DOS is "better/best" as the underlying DOS oper. sys. for Win FW 3.1.1. in a mult-boot PC ?

[Roderick Klein]

A simple google search gives you an answer.

Search for windows 3.1 freedos in Google.

Presto:

http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Windows

On  2-11-20 00:28, TheBigBlue Guard wrote:

Hello FreeDOSers,

How was your Halloween ? Mine was okay... No tricks yet !

My Q and Problem :

I understand you need a DOS oper sys underlying Win For Workgroups 3.1.1
OS in a mult-boot native environment (no boxes / no emulators).Which
DOS  OS do you strongly recommend ? and why ?  I have MS-DOS 7.1 install
CD and was told NOT to rely on it for Win FW 3.1.1. - is this accurate
and correct ?  Can you use FreeDOS as the underlying  OS ?

Big Blue




___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user





___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] qt and DOs?

[Roderick Klein]

On 26-01-20 17:27, Eric Auer wrote:


Hi Roderick,


I am the chairman of the Dutch OS/2 VOICE organisation. On OS/2 we had
the port of QT 4.78 for OS/2. A port of QT 5.13 took about 12 months by
on person working 40 hours a week. So a 32 bit platform is supported by QT.

https://github.com/bitwiseworks/qt5-os2


That is valuable information, thank you!


I also do not know if you would need a GCC compiler for DOS ?


There is DJGPP (by Delorie) which is GCC / G++ for DOS and comes
with a nice 32-bit DPMI oriented GNU C library. So ports of text
oriented tools such as dosfsck are smooth if one is a bit lucky.

Depending on how far OS/2 is from DOS in the areas needed by QT,
the next step of porting, from OS/2 to DOS, might be ... easier?


While a lot of of OS/2 API's look like DOS API names, that is whre the 
simularities end...


In terms of memory management its not like Windows 9x/ME. Its a true 
protected mode OS with its own network NDIS stack, graphical subsystem, 
multimedia sub system (MMOS/2).


Porting QT from DOS to OS/2 is not something that will help as DOS is 
lacking a lot of these features.


A company from the US (Arca Noae LLC) even has OS/2 running on metal 
with UEFI mode switched on the BIOS (product is called ArcaOS, based on 
OS/2 from IBM). OS/2 is by far not as depended on the  BIOS as DOS is.


Roderick Klein



___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] qt and DOs?

[Roderick Klein]

On 26-01-20 07:50, TK Chia wrote:

Hello Karen Lewellen,

 >> But meanwhile, forget Calibre under DOS.  If you really want to use
 >> it, run Linux.

 > the question is, if a compile of  Calibre is possible for dos...you know
 > the focus of this list? smiles.
 > The qt idea came from  a member of the calibre forum at mobileread.

Well, it seems to me too that it will take quite a good while to happen,
if it happens at all.

I see the Calibre source code requires a number of dependency projects
to build and run --- not just Qt, but also Python, and SQLite, and
perhaps others.

So one will either need to get all these dependencies working under
MS-DOS --- and these are rather huge dependencies, not small pieces of
code --- or, at least, to find suitable replacements for some of them.

It seems that there is a port of Python 2.4.2 to MS-DOS on 32-bit
systems (http://www.caddit.net/pythond/), so that _might_ be a place to
start for porting the software over.  But even then, there will still be
a lot of work left to do.  As far as I know, Qt does not yet support
MS-DOS (for either 16-bit or 32-bit systems).


I am the chairman of the Dutch OS/2 VOICE organisation. On OS/2 we had 
the port of QT 4.78 for OS/2. A port of QT 5.13 took about 12 months by 
on person working 40 hours a week. So a 32 bit platform is supported by QT.


https://github.com/bitwiseworks/qt5-os2

I am an extremely low skilled developer. But I do not know if its not 
going to be an extremely large amount of work to get QT ported to DOS. 
But that also depends off how much of the QT libraries you need.


I also do not know if you would need a GCC compiler for DOS ?

My estimate is that this is starting to sound like a mission impossible. 
But I hope I am wrong.


Roderick



___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS Internet Security Protocols and Graphical Interface

[Roderick Klein]

On  8-01-19 23:15, Ralf Quint wrote:

On 1/8/2019 12:13 PM, Thomas Vetere wrote:


Hello FreeDOS community,

I have an old IBM Thinkpad 600e that I am trying to refurbish for fun.
With a Pentium 2 processor and 256 MB of RAM, I am considering using
FreeDOS. I would like for this computer to be able to connect to the
Internet via Wifi, but after browsing the FreeDOS wiki pages, I saw
that FreeDOS Wifi only supports WEP, which is now outdated and not
safe. My question is that will there be any plans to support something
like WPA2 on FreeDOS?


Not likely. You need to remember that DOS was around well before there
was any Internet. So there is only minimal support specially for
wireless networking. I am not aware that there is any "FreeDOS WiFi", so
you might have to check with with whatever author has created the WiFi
driver, beside that there is fairly limited to no support for up to date
web technologies.


My other question relates to a Graphical Interface. I did some
research and found OpenGEM as the most popular graphical interface to
put over FreeDOS. However, the Thinkpad 600e supports 24-bit color and
OpenGEM is only 16-bit color. I was wondering if there were any more
sophisticated graphical interfaces for FreeDOS that are 24-bit color.


Short answer: No. OpenGEM would be as good as it gets. There used to be
a few attempts to create "a new and shiny ultimate GUI" for DOS in the
past, but I don't think that any of them got really anywhere.

Honestly, if you want to use that laptop for web browsing, you're better
off trying to install a Linux distro that still works with such old
hardware, and if you find one, you might have the very same issues of
finding up to date browser and WiFi drivers for that one. The oldest one
that I ever got to run with wireless (and only 16bit color IIRC) was an
old Pentium 4M based HP with 256MB of RAM. A couple of classes above
what you are trying to utilize. Until that one died by heatstroke a year
ago, I was using Q4OS (https://q4os.org/) on it, which was kind of
usable. antiX s**ked, didn't around anymore to try Linux Lite
(https://www.linuxliteos.com/index.html), though I heard from some
reliable folks that it would work quite nicely on older hardware as well.


If you want run DOS applciations you could consider installing OS/2 
which has DOS and Windows 3.1 build in. A company exists that developes 
and sells an updated OS/2 version called ArcaOS in Arca Noae LLC.
But I am very much afraid that the browser that is included (Firefox) is 
way to heavy for a Thinkpad 600E (www.arcanoae.com).

But its a commercial product so a Linux distribition might be a better pick.

Roderick



___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS Internet Security Protocols and Graphical Interface

[Roderick Klein]

On  8-01-19 21:13, Thomas Vetere wrote:

Hello FreeDOS community,

I have an old IBM Thinkpad 600e that I am trying to refurbish for fun.
With a Pentium 2 processor and 256 MB of RAM, I am considering using
FreeDOS. I would like for this computer to be able to connect to the
Internet via Wifi, but after browsing the FreeDOS wiki pages, I saw that
FreeDOS Wifi only supports WEP, which is now outdated and not safe. My
question is that will there be any plans to support something like WPA2
on FreeDOS? My other question relates to a Graphical Interface. I did
some research and found OpenGEM as the most popular graphical interface
to put over FreeDOS. However, the Thinkpad 600e supports 24-bit color
and OpenGEM is only 16-bit color. I was wondering if there were any more
sophisticated graphical interfaces for FreeDOS that are 24-bit color.

Thank you for your help and support!


One thing I use with OS/2 is an ethernet adapater and this little Wifi 
adapter.


https://www.tp-link.com/nl/products/details/cat-9_TL-WR802N.html

It can also be purchased in the US this model number.
The adapter connects to a wifi network and has a small DHCP server build 
in and you plug the ethernet cable in a PCMCIA network card. You can 
then access the network via WPA-2 connection.


Roderick Klein



___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

[Freedos-user] UEFI and FreeDOS...

[Roderick Klein]

While the suggestion is frequently made that for machines that no longer 
have a CSM module build into the BIOS you can run FreeDOS in a a VM. Can 
you not make a UEFI loader that loads SeaBios layer ?


I bumped into this thread:
https://communities.intel.com/thread/51481?start=0=0

I do not know what is possible in this regard ?

Roderick

--
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most
engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot
___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user