[Freedos-user] Packet drivers...
The free crynwr packet driver collection doesn't cover the Netgear FA311 10/100 baseTX network card. Uge! I've been google searching and have found BartPE, but that is a Windows 98 boot disk. I suppose some people like freedos's spotty support for modern network cards, but then how does one update freedos without networking??? Why not an on top of freedos minimal Linux system that you load using say loadlin for the sole purpose of running fdupdate? This linux system can drop back to freedos when it is done. This gets around having to support network cards in freedos for which there isn't any support. Another option is to revive freedos32 and possibly design it so that Linux packet drivers or Windows packet drivers can be used. Yet a third option, install freedos from a minimal bare bones Linux system that supports common network cards which can be extended to support other cards and provide instructions on how to add drivers to the iso image prior to burning it. A fourth solution is to get open source developers to produce dos drivers for modern network cards that came into existence after Microsoft dropped dos support. Without a dos packet driver that works with your network card, forget using Norton Ghost. Syllable seems to have better network card support than freedos does where syllable isn't: Dos based, Windows based, or Linux based. How is that even possible? Too bad there isn't a universal packet driver specification where the high level logic is one piece and the low level runtime is another piece that can be tailored to the OS. Done right, this approach should ease porting network cards to different operating systems that support the specification. The high level piece should provide a specific interface I suppose that can be operated from a single OS specific part. My idea is, write one low level piece and support many high level card specific components using it. For this to work, the drivers need to be open source and care should be taken to allow some flexibility in how the high level piece is compiled on different OSes. I hope packet driver support improves in freedos in the future or perhaps fdupdate should be redesigned for non network use. -- October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135031iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] emm386, himem.sys, config.sys
Hi, I recently discovered Rufus, the DOS boot disk installer, and installed FreeDOS on my thumbdrive. I think it's pretty neat. Other than occasional command-line use in Windows, the last time I probably messed with DOS was probably about 20 years ago. And I was certainly no programmer then. Anyways, what I am wondering is, I had come across PictView and tried viewing some images with it, but it gives an error and says something about not enough memory, will only display the first 54 lines. Then it loads the top 2% or so of the image. I randomly ran across references to emm386.exe. Would loading emm386.exe allow PictView to work? I'm assuming something must, otherwise PictView seems like a pretty useless program (no offense intended). -- October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135031iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] emm386, himem.sys, config.sys
I don't know how RUFUS is setup, but if it is a FreeDOS distro, it should have Jemm, or HimemX. Set one of those up in config.sys. -L On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 7:28 PM, Miguel Garza garz...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I recently discovered Rufus, the DOS boot disk installer, and installed FreeDOS on my thumbdrive. I think it's pretty neat. Other than occasional command-line use in Windows, the last time I probably messed with DOS was probably about 20 years ago. And I was certainly no programmer then. Anyways, what I am wondering is, I had come across PictView and tried viewing some images with it, but it gives an error and says something about not enough memory, will only display the first 54 lines. Then it loads the top 2% or so of the image. I randomly ran across references to emm386.exe. Would loading emm386.exe allow PictView to work? I'm assuming something must, otherwise PictView seems like a pretty useless program (no offense intended). -- October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135031iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135031iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] emm386, himem.sys, config.sys
Hi, On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 9:28 PM, Miguel Garza garz...@gmail.com wrote: I recently discovered Rufus, the DOS boot disk installer, and installed FreeDOS on my thumbdrive. I think it's pretty neat. Yeah, it's cool. Anyways, what I am wondering is, I had come across PictView and tried viewing some images with it, but it gives an error and says something about not enough memory, will only display the first 54 lines. Then it loads the top 2% or so of the image. I randomly ran across references to emm386.exe. Would loading emm386.exe allow PictView to work? I'm assuming something must, otherwise PictView seems like a pretty useless program (no offense intended). PictView wasn't written by anybody here. Or at least, I don't recall ever seeing the author around. The website lists the update (pv194upd.zip) as from 12/1/2000. You could try that if you're still using pictview.zip. I honestly don't anticipate further updates (though one third-party guy said a rumor a few years back ... but I guess that never happened). But if you're really convinced you found a bug, maybe you could ping him. The FAQ says this: PictView is written mainly in assembler and it runs on any 386 machine with at least 1 MB of RAM and a VGA adapter. Though it goes on to mention XMS, which sounds correct (though I admit to only rarely running pictview.exe as I'm no multimedia buff). So no, that's not EMS, so you don't need EMM386 at all, AFAIK. You only need the equivalent of HIMEM.SYS (usually HIMEMX or XMGR or FDXMS or similar). The file jemmex.exe contains himemx.exe + jemm386.exe, but I'm not sure that's what you want either. So yeah, like Louis said, put DEVICE=c:\fdos\himemx.exe or DEVICE=c:\fdos\xmgr.sys in your CONFIG.SYS and try again. But the problem(s) may lie elsewhere. Maybe you don't have enough conventional RAM free, so try it without a lot of other TSRs loaded, if you think that might help. BTW, one bug that seems to bite me is it doesn't always seem to like 80x43, so I first have to manually switch back to good 'ol 80x25 via MODE. There are other image viewers for DOS, but most are old shareware. I'm not sure if there is a single preferred viewer. It probably depends. I don't frequently use a lot of that type of software, but I'm presuming others here can offer better suggestions. But just for completeness, here's what I'm thinking of (besides pictview): display, see, lxpic, paceplay, duglview, vgapaint, ombra, ... etc. etc. etc. http://www.bttr-software.de/freesoft/0grpidx1.htm#graphics http://www.reimagery.com/fsfd/graphics.htm Well, Blocek (graphical text editor) can view images too, but again, I'm not sure that's what you want. Any particular file formats or resolutions you're trying to use? -- October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135031iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Packet drivers...
Hi, On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 3:45 AM, NA plu...@robinson-west.com wrote: The free crynwr packet driver collection doesn't cover the Netgear FA311 10/100 baseTX network card. Blame Netgear. (It's their decision, not ours.) Uge! I've been google searching and have found BartPE, but that is a Windows 98 boot disk. I suppose some people like freedos's spotty support for modern network cards, but then how does one update freedos without networking??? It is my understanding (though I've not personally tested it) that Mateusz created an .iso that can be locally installed (without networking) via FDNPKG. Why not an on top of freedos minimal Linux system that you load using say loadlin for the sole purpose of running fdupdate? This linux system can drop back to freedos when it is done. This gets around having to support network cards in freedos for which there isn't any support. That's what most people already do, just use another host OS to download and manually transport the files. However, if I may make a generalization (though I've not personally tested 300+ distributions) ... there are not many (if any) true minimal distros anymore. Everything for desktop use usually assumes X11, and you're unlikely to even find most kernels for less than i686 and 128 MB RAM. (Feel free to make your own via Linux From Scratch!) You can boot an .iso via DOS using GRUB whatever or Gujin, e.g. PuppyLinux (may have to copy kernel + initrd to host FAT first). Maybe FreeBSD would work as well (though IIRC no [current] DOSEMU available there). The bootonly .iso is only 150 MB or so, and it has lower requirements (probably due to no X11 installed by default): 64 MB, i486 (I think). Another option is to revive freedos32 and possibly design it so that Linux packet drivers or Windows packet drivers can be used. Yet a third option, install freedos from a minimal bare bones Linux system that supports common network cards which can be extended to support other cards and provide instructions on how to add drivers to the iso image prior to burning it. A fourth solution is to get open source developers to produce dos drivers for modern network cards that came into existence after Microsoft dropped dos support. Portable drivers (across x86 OSes) are not impossible. It's been done, but most developers don't bother. I don't know why. Without a dos packet driver that works with your network card, forget using Norton Ghost. Dunno, but they probably (like most) don't develop a DOS version anymore, so it's moot. I would be happy to know they still kept the old DOS version around somewhere, but I'm skeptical about even that! Syllable seems to have better network card support than freedos does where syllable isn't: Dos based, Windows based, or Linux based. How is that even possible? Most of them (e.g. Haiku, FreeBSD) have sponsors or similar funding. Though they also have less legacy stigma to suffer, as well. Too bad there isn't a universal packet driver specification where the high level logic is one piece and the low level runtime is another piece that can be tailored to the OS. Done right, this approach should ease porting network cards to different operating systems that support the specification. The high level piece should provide a specific interface I suppose that can be operated from a single OS specific part. My idea is, write one low level piece and support many high level card specific components using it. For this to work, the drivers need to be open source and care should be taken to allow some flexibility in how the high level piece is compiled on different OSes. Portability is not easy, even for those few who care. It's hard to design (and maintain) something for all targets without any problems. Even if DOS were popular and had lots of volunteers and funding, it still wouldn't be easy. I hope packet driver support improves in freedos in the future or perhaps fdupdate should be redesigned for non network use. I misread this the first time. You explicitly say *non* network use. Like I said, I'm pretty sure that FDNPKG (the official successor to FDUPDATE) is offline aware / friendly. http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=Fdupdate Warning: FDUPDATE is obsolete as of september 2012. It has been replaced by its successor: FDNPKG. -- October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135031iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
