Re: [Freedos-devel] Where to find xHarbour?
Hi, On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Ralf A. Quint free...@gmx.net wrote: If the development of FreeDOS keeps sticking to it's original goal of providing a complete, free, 100% MS-DOS compatible operating system (http://www.freedos.org/freedos/about/), then the focus should be on exactly that. And then there isn't much to worry about support everything ever written for DOS. That comes then automatically. IMHO, the prevailing mindset and the actions taken in the last few years are leading more and more away from this basic goal, either by taking shortcuts or ignoring some of the old stuff. That includes ignoring old (but working) compilers, thinking of replacing command.com with 4DOS (instead of having it as an optional choice) or possibly not testing FAT16 stuff to introduce a possible regression in the latest kernel version (which I have not tested myself yet though) as everyone's using FAT32 these days. And don't get me started on a mess like ChkDsk... :-( 4DOS is pretty good but can't recompile (easily? workably?) with hardly anything and has a weird license. I don't actively use it because I don't need it, but it's got some good stuff. It's definitely well-done and a cool piece of software. But hey, FreeCOM is quite good too. FAT16 bugs? Who enjoys bugs? Sure, testing is minimal because volunteers are very few, and you can't (easily) test everything. Don't worry, it will sort itself out, most likely. At worst, just use older kernels if you're paranoid. (Or make plenty of backups!) Re: old freeware compilers, remember that they also often have weird licensing. In particular, you have to freely register with Embarcadero just to download the old Borland tools nowadays, and (last I checked) you weren't allowed to redistribute them! That's not good for a GPL kernel since it makes it hard to recompile. (Granted, most people don't need to recompile the kernel, but see below ) Ubuntu keeps DOSEMU in multiverse. gNewSense doesn't have it at all. Fedora doesn't have it by default (search RPMfind). Debian keeps it somewhere weird (main/contrib? can't remember). The simple truth is that, to them, it uses non-free tools. What are those tools, you ask? DOSEMU is GPL, FreeDOS is GPL, so what's the problem? How could Linux dislike GPL? Well, apparently OSI approved the Sybase v1 (OpenWatcom) license without consulting anyone else. Actually, Sybase was advised to use a better license (BSD), but they refused. In other words, OpenWatcom (to these Linux gurus) is *almost* non-free (not easily rebuildable) and thus taints FreeDOS and thus DOSEMU. No free-r compilers support the compact model, so they just throw out the baby with the bath water. Logical? Not really, but that's life! :-( So Jim isn't *that* big a purist ;-) else he wouldn't suggest using OpenWatcom. Even he knows that such an idea is either infeasible or just plain pointless. (And I've never heard OSI revoke it yet, so ) Yeah, I hate license wars, it's all pointless. People spend more time fuming over that than writing actual code! So extremely pointless! But Jim Hall has made it clear that he wants a free/libre (GPL-compatible) BASE at minimum for FreeDOS. I don't think that's an unreasonable goal, esp. since GPLv2 is the most popular open source license (50% of projects use it). So yeah, it doesn't make sense to keep things incompatible in licensing unless you want people to actively ignore your work. Yeah sure, people still do whatever they want, but at minimum we have to have some sense of freedom to patch and share the base. So that's why things are the way they are. Believe it or not, none of the other (various non-GPL, closed source) DOSes are any better off, and from the looks of it, most of them are quite worse for it!! FreeDOS ain't perfect (nothing is), but overall it's easily the best [citation needed].;-) -- Storage Efficiency Calculator This modeling tool is based on patent-pending intellectual property that has been used successfully in hundreds of IBM storage optimization engage- ments, worldwide. Store less, Store more with what you own, Move data to the right place. Try It Now! http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51427378/ ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] .BAT tricks (%RANDOM%, ANSI escapes in %PROMPT%)
Hi, On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 7:59 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: A better way could definitely be done in a variety of languages (BWBASIC? DEBUG?). Just for completeness, I did whip up a quick 8086 asm snippet for DEBUG. (I actually tried doing a 7-bit ASCII executable version, but it proved too tricky for the moment, so I've shelved that weird idea for now, heh. I could've just used UBE or COMT or whatever tools already exist, or even searched FASM's forum for inspiration, but I guess it's not too important unless somebody didn't already have DEBUG.) P.S. Timo's BAT FAQ wasn't as exhaustive as I thought. The only interesting trick was doing something like echo. exit | command /c prompt set blah=$t, which still would've needed some fiddling with an external tool (esp. one not typically included in DOSes), so I didn't bother too hard thinking about that. But even he often uses sed or awk (or QBASIC) for some tricks. So I still don't think it's a horrible idea to include one (or both!) of those for FD 2.0 (or whatever). @echo off if not exist %0 %0.bat debug %0 goto end n rand4.com rcx 20 a 100 mov ah,2C int 21 xor ax,ax mov al,dl and al,3 inc ax cmp al,0A sbb al,69 das xchg ax,dx mov ah,2 int 21 ret w Q :end -- Storage Efficiency Calculator This modeling tool is based on patent-pending intellectual property that has been used successfully in hundreds of IBM storage optimization engage- ments, worldwide. Store less, Store more with what you own, Move data to the right place. Try It Now! http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51427378/ ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] {Spam?} Re: .BAT tricks (%RANDOM%, ANSI escapes in %PROMPT%)
Op 25-7-2011 23:51, Rugxulo schreef: P.S. Timo's BAT FAQ wasn't as exhaustive as I thought. The only interesting trick was doing something like echo. exit | command /c prompt set blah=$t, which still would've needed some fiddling with an external tool (esp. one not typically included in DOSes), so I didn't bother too hard thinking about that. But even he often uses sed or awk (or QBASIC) for some tricks. So I still don't think it's a horrible idea to include one (or both!) of those for FD 2.0 (or whatever). Actually it was extensive enough! It showed the use of an undocumented MS COMMAND.COM trick to switch drive: add \ to the end of any valid filename. @echo off rem switch to root drive of wherever this file is located: %0\ It's good enough for me. After that I tried starting Setup from CDROM after booting from a Win98 bootdisk. Turns out TRUENAME used on a CD-driveletter assigned by MSCDEX (or maybe even network shares) is listed in a quite odd way. Ah well. Bernd -- Storage Efficiency Calculator This modeling tool is based on patent-pending intellectual property that has been used successfully in hundreds of IBM storage optimization engage- ments, worldwide. Store less, Store more with what you own, Move data to the right place. Try It Now! http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51427378/ ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
Re: [Freedos-devel] {Spam?} Re: .BAT tricks (%RANDOM%, ANSI escapes in %PROMPT%)
Hi,
BTW, I don't know why it says {Spam?} in the topic. Surely you don't
consider either of us spammers. But perhaps your mail reader / service
marked it? (wouldn't be surprised)
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 5:06 PM, Bernd Blaauw bbla...@home.nl wrote:
Op 25-7-2011 23:51, Rugxulo schreef:
P.S. Timo's BAT FAQ wasn't as exhaustive as I thought. The only
interesting trick was doing something like echo. exit | command /c
prompt set blah=$t, which still would've needed some fiddling with an
external tool
Actually it was extensive enough!
It's a pretty huge collection of tips (389 kb!, last updated? 2005). I
wonder if Timo even uses DOS these days. But anyways, I meant it
didn't have tons and tons of generate random number tricks.
There was one guy, back in the day, who wrote a /dev/random clone
(sorta) device driver for DOS. I can't remember if I ever tried it,
but FreeDOS had some other subtle bug regarding read-only CON / char
device or whatever (messed with rot13.sys, sadly, heh ... who says DOS
doesn't have encryption? g).
It showed the use of an undocumented
MS COMMAND.COM trick to switch drive: add \ to the end of any valid
filename.
@echo off
rem switch to root drive of wherever this file is located:
%0\
But does that work under FreeCOM? Or I guess you test which DOS
variant and act accordingly?
It's good enough for me. After that I tried starting Setup from CDROM
after booting from a Win98 bootdisk. Turns out TRUENAME used on a
CD-driveletter assigned by MSCDEX (or maybe even network shares) is
listed in a quite odd way. Ah well.
How so? (Example plz, kthxbai.) Well, isn't TRUENAME undocumented
anyways? (Or did they finally document it?)
P.S. If I do say so, move and deltree (similar to rd /s in
CMD.EXE) would be a proper fit to moving [sic] into FreeCOM. Yeah, I
know I know, future dreaming, have to do it myself, blah blah. But
seriously, move is so redundant by itself (it's just ren or copy +
del, right?). Oh well.
--
Storage Efficiency Calculator
This modeling tool is based on patent-pending intellectual property that
has been used successfully in hundreds of IBM storage optimization engage-
ments, worldwide. Store less, Store more with what you own, Move data to
the right place. Try It Now! http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51427378/
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Re: [Freedos-devel] EXE2BIN
Hi again, On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 3:48 PM, Steve Nickolas lyricalnan...@usotsuki.hoshinet.org wrote: Exe2bin: Not all software uses compilers which create COM directly. PC DOS 2000 doesn't even *have* exe2bin. I'm not sure about MS-DOS 6.22 since I can't find an online listing. (I used to know a site, but alas ) Anyways, EXE2BIN *may* have been moved to the 6.22 Supplemental add-on or even Step-up add-on, not sure. But it seems MS-DOS 5 did have it by default: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/75712 On a semi-related note, I don't think LINK was included after MS-DOS 4. (It's still on MS' FTP, but it's now a 386 PharLap .EXE, which is vaguely weird for a 16-bit only OMF linker. I don't know their licensing and IIRC it seems to be only a upgrade for MS VC 1.52 users, so it's probably only for them. Meh.) In short, I don't think EXE2BIN belongs in BASE for FreeDOS. I don't know of anybody using it. Okay, since Eric mentions it, I can vaguely remember that thinks like MASM did need it, but since we don't include MASM, why do we include EXE2BIN?? We don't include a linker either (as mentioned). So any alleged programmers would still have to add those to their toolset too. A quick check at EXE2BIN included with FreeDOS shows that it's basically just verbatim OpenWatcom 1.5 [sic] EXE2BIN except apparently recompiled with Borland / Turbo C, perhaps for smaller size?? (Latest OW 1.9 is an .EXE of approx. 20 kb, while this one once decompressed [UPX] is like a 13 kb .COM.) The Software List says ramax is the author / maintainer, but considering all the *heavy* mentions of OpenWatcom in the sources and the fact that the help screen is almost identical (at least feature parity) makes me doubt that. In fact, you may find it funny (!) to know that the LICENSE.TXT is bigger than the program!! I know it's not important to mention this. I also know nobody will agree with me, most likely. I'm just saying, seriously, do we need it?? I'm not saying throw it out completely, just get it from OpenWatcom if you really need it (since it's the same!!). Besides, 1.9 1.5, so nyah. ;-) The tool basically only strips the .EXE header but *also* resolves any relocs. So I guess it *could* be useful to someone, but *by itself* it's fairly useless (and redundant) in BASE. So there, is that an exhaustive enough analysis? :-/ -- Magic Quadrant for Content-Aware Data Loss Prevention Research study explores the data loss prevention market. Includes in-depth analysis on the changes within the DLP market, and the criteria used to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these DLP solutions. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51385063/ ___ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
