Re: [Freedos-user] Printers
Freedos doesn't support any printers, but software programs which run on freedos do. For example, if running WordPerfect 6.0, dos version, you will need a Wordperfect driver for that printer, or one which is close enough. HP Laserjets are a good bet, the pre USB ones in particular like the 6P. Any USB based printers are not likely to work in a DOS environment. DOS environments provide no abstraction for the hardware and no protection either. This is hard for programmers which is why Windows NT took over, but older computers that were slow couldn't run Windows NT. Question I have is, are there any emulators that will make any printer Linux can work with function in a freedos environment on a virtual machine? What class of computer are you running Freedos on and what program do you want to print from? Anything from a Pentium 233 on up can run at least a stripped down Linux system and dosbox. If you can run Linux, perhaps even the latest release of pick some distribution, consider using openoffice or another native Linux software program like gnucash. The latest version of Windows always seems to need more computing horsepower than the last one... I suspect this is on purpose to boost computer sales. Someday maybe, ReactOS will fix that problem. Quoting Kenny Emond cheeseylem...@gmail.com: Hey, What type of printer interface/language does FreeDOS support? Does it support PCL ver3? For example, would I be able to use an HP Deskjet 950c ( http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bpd07350cc=usdlc=enlc=enproduct=57835 ) with FreeDOS? Thanks for the help, --- Kenny -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Printers
On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 3:03 AM, Michael C. Robinson plu...@robinson-west.com wrote: The latest version of Windows always seems to need more computing horsepower than the last one... Not just Windows. I run FreeDOS on an old notebook with an 867mhz Transmeta CPU, an IDE 4 HD, and 256MB of RAM (of which 16MB is grabbed off the top by the CPU for code morphing.) It came to me with WinXP SP2 installed, and was frozen snail slow.. I swapped the original 30GB HD for a 40GB from my SO's dead laptop, repartitioned, and looked for Linux distros to install. I wound up with Puppy Linux (intended for lower end HW) an earlier version of Ubuntu, and Win2K Pro SP4. Once I had it properly installed and tuned, Win2K took *less* memory (I got it down to about 80Mb), booted faster, and was quicker in operation than either Linux distro. I suspect this is on purpose to boost computer sales. Nope. *All* new OS releases need more hardware than prior ones, because they are expected to do more, and host larger and more complex applications. Someday maybe, ReactOS will fix that problem. I recommend not holding your breath while waiting. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Printers
Hi, On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 2:36 AM, dmccunney dennis.mccun...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 3:03 AM, Michael C. Robinson plu...@robinson-west.com wrote: The latest version of Windows always seems to need more computing horsepower than the last one... Not just Windows. I run FreeDOS ... Heh, I did have one guy tell me the other day online that FreeDOS was a memory hog. I think he means for his old 186-ish emulator (compared to really ancient MS-DOS 3.3 or whatever). It's funny that we're running FreeDOS which (without extenders) maxes out at 1 MB but most new-fangled OSes nowadays need 1 GB minimum!! on an old notebook with an 867mhz Transmeta CPU, an IDE 4 HD, and 256MB of RAM (of which 16MB is grabbed off the top by the CPU for code morphing.) I still say that's a rare gem you have. It probably belongs in a museum. Definitely quirky, that's for sure. ;-) It came to me with WinXP SP2 installed, and was frozen snail slow.. I swapped the original 30GB HD for a 40GB from my SO's dead laptop, repartitioned, and looked for Linux distros to install. I wound up with Puppy Linux (intended for lower end HW) I run Puppy, but it hasn't been nearly as lean as back in the 2.16 days (or such). Lean for Linux means 128 MB minimum, even with swap, unless you run a no-longer-supported kernel and tools, e.g. old Slackware 11.0 / kernel 2.4.x. (Like I said, OpenSuSE and Red Hat seem to want almost?? 1 GB just to install.) an earlier version of Ubuntu, and Win2K Pro SP4. Once I had it properly installed and tuned, Win2K took *less* memory (I got it down to about 80Mb), booted faster, and was quicker in operation than either Linux distro. Win2k is allegedly leaner than XP. I know CWS (of CWSDPMI) loved it to death. I don't know the details. But I did, for a few months, run an XP machine with only 128 MB of RAM. XP was quite lean (compared to later Windows), e.g. the kernel only seemed to eat about half of that. So I could run DJGPP or Opera but not much else (e.g. no Firefox without major swapping, which was unusable). I suspect this is on purpose to boost computer sales. Nope. Well, if you think they don't purposely delay releases or put features and fixes only in newer products, you're naive. They all definitely have powerful marketing teams, and surely those demand they keep something to advertise as new!. *All* new OS releases need more hardware than prior ones, because they are expected to do more, and host larger and more complex applications. They all seem to, but do they really have to? I doubt it. Though it's unfair to say since it depends on a billion things, I suppose. I read online (Phoronix?) that Win8 supposedly did NOT regress with regards to speed or RAM, which is surprisingly good (and probably took real effort). It supposedly boots up much faster and allegedly can combine 4 kb RAM pages (or whatever) for better memory use (dunno the details beyond that). EDIT: Almost forgot the new MSVC 2k10 is supposedly much better, and I blindly assume the core OS itself was recompiled with it. No idea if that makes a difference, and maybe I'm wrong in guessing that, but that should bring some speedups, in theory, esp. since SSE2 is allegedly targeted by default now. Someday maybe, ReactOS will fix that problem. I recommend not holding your breath while waiting. ReactOS is a difficult task and much more ambitious than it probably should be. I guess it's a success that anything works. Anyways, they did (a while back) actually decrease the RAM requirements a lot, possibly down to 32 MB, dunno, didn't try it (ask Bernd, heh). BTW, I've not heavily tested it, but their MSVCRT.DLL clone does partially work under HX, so that's good for us, at least. ;-) -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Printers
On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 6:47 AM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 2:36 AM, dmccunney dennis.mccun...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 3:03 AM, Michael C. Robinson plu...@robinson-west.com wrote: The latest version of Windows always seems to need more computing horsepower than the last one... Not just Windows. I run FreeDOS ... Heh, I did have one guy tell me the other day online that FreeDOS was a memory hog. I think he means for his old 186-ish emulator (compared to really ancient MS-DOS 3.3 or whatever). I still have my XT Clone sitting on a shelf. It has a replacement mobo with a 10mhz NEC-V20 CPU, 640K of main memory, two 5.25 360K floppies, and two Seagate ST-225 20MB MFM drives. The V20 is 80186 compatible, and has more efficient microcode than a real Intel chip, so you get 5-15% better CPU performance at the same clock speed. It was considered a cheap speedup back in the day. I used a Hercules video card with an amber Amdek monitor, and gave it an AST 6-Pak card with a meg of EMS memory. 256K of the EMS went to a disk cache, 512K went to a RAMdisk, and the other 256K was for whatever might use EMS. I had a freeware utility from Chris (CED) Dunford that could map unused video memory above 640K to DOS. The Hercules card left over 64K, whyich I mapped and got a DOS system that thought it had 704K of main memory. I put frequently used utilitiies like Vern Buerg's LIST on the RAMdisk, loaded from AUTOEXEC.BAT, which also made the RAMdisk the first entry in my DOS PATH. I also the TEMP and TMP tp point to it, so things like archivers that created temp files would do do there. It sped things up a treat. I also used the old MKS Toolkit to give me DOS ports of Unix utilities. The selling point was a working DOS version of the Korn shell, which had everything save asynchronous background processes. Installed in fullest Unix compatibility mode, the Toolkit replaced COMMAND.COM as the boot shell with it's own INIT.EXE. IINT loaded on boot after CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT were processed, and printed Login: message on the screen. Provide an ID and optional password, and INIT called /bin/login, which checked against an /etc/password file. If it found the ID, it changes to what was specified as that ID's home directory, and ran whatever was specified as that ID's shell. I had IDs that ran the MKS Korn shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, 4DOS, and the DesqView environment. Log out of the shell, and control returned to INIT which asked for another Login:. I could change environments without rebooting. Under the Korn shell, I used aliases and functions to make the DOS PRINT command behave like the UNIX lp print spooler. You had to dig a bit to discover you *weren't* on a Unix machine. It's funny that we're running FreeDOS which (without extenders) maxes out at 1 MB but most new-fangled OSes nowadays need 1 GB minimum!! I had a Unix machine before I got a DOS PC. The Unix machine (which I still have) is an ATT 3B1, big brother to their Convergent Technologies designed UNIX-PC. It uses a 10mhz MC68010 CPU, and boots and runs a Convergent port of ATT System V R2 in *1* MB of memory. Give it more (mine has 3.5MB) and it flies. It has a bit-mapped mono monitor and GUI, but you can also attach terminals via serial ports to get a command line Unix interface, or a version of the GUI intended for character mode screens. An old client of mine had one with 2MB of RAM supporting four users on terminals plus one on the console and an attached parallel printer, running a database customized for distribution management. Performance was quite acceptable, thank you. When I got a 386 PC at 33mhz and 8MB of RAM, and compared performance of Win 3.1 on it to my 3B1, I looked in the direction of Redmond and said What are you *doing?* I still do. on an old notebook with an 867mhz Transmeta CPU, an IDE 4 HD, and 256MB of RAM (of which 16MB is grabbed off the top by the CPU for code morphing.) I still say that's a rare gem you have. It probably belongs in a museum. Definitely quirky, that's for sure. ;-) It's been fun to play with. I didn't expect much, given the specs, so I haven't really been disappointed. It came to me with WinXP SP2 installed, and was frozen snail slow.. I swapped the original 30GB HD for a 40GB from my SO's dead laptop, repartitioned, and looked for Linux distros to install. I wound up with Puppy Linux (intended for lower end HW) I run Puppy, but it hasn't been nearly as lean as back in the 2.16 days (or such). Lean for Linux means 128 MB minimum, even with swap, unless you run a no-longer-supported kernel and tools, e.g. old Slackware 11.0 / kernel 2.4.x. (Like I said, OpenSuSE and Red Hat seem to want almost?? 1 GB just to install.) Current distros do, but they make the reasonable assumption that you *have* it. I first tried Ubuntu with the Xubuntu flavor, supposedly for lower end machines, but it crawled. Posters on the
[Freedos-user] Printers
Hey, What type of printer interface/language does FreeDOS support? Does it support PCL ver3? For example, would I be able to use an HP Deskjet 950c ( http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bpd07350cc=usdlc=enlc=enproduct=57835 ) with FreeDOS? Thanks for the help, --- Kenny -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Printers
At 03:55 PM 9/4/2012, Kenny Emond wrote: Hey, What type of printer interface/language does FreeDOS support? Short answer: Any printer on a parallel or serial interface. Does it support PCL ver3? For example, would I be able to use an HP Deskjet 950c ( http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bpd07350cc=usdlc=enlc=enproduct=57835http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bpd07350cc=usdlc=enlc=enproduct=57835 ) with FreeDOS? Thanks for the help, DOS does not have a concept of OS wide drivers, all drivers are application dependent. As far as output from DOS itself goes, it only assumes a printer accepting plain ASCII code... There are a couple of USB drivers that possible allow for a limited number of USB connected printers, but that leaves you still with the printer code restrictions... Ralf -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Printers
On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Kenny Emond cheeseylem...@gmail.com wrote: What type of printer interface/language does FreeDOS support? Does it support PCL ver3? For example, would I be able to use an HP Deskjet 950c ( http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bpd07350cc=usdlc=enlc=enproduct=57835 ) with FreeDOS? Thanks for the help, I don't believe FreeDOS *cares*. It simply passes the print stream to the port the printer is on. The printer sees an arbitrary stream of bytes that may be control code or printable text. If the application you are printing from uses PCL, and your printer supports it, things should work. The question is how the printer hooks up, and whether FreeDOS can see a device there. If the printer hooks up to a parallel or serial port, things should work. If it uses USB, a driver may be needed to establish communications and make the USB port look like a serial or parallel port.. --- Kenny __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
