date:20120918

At 10:10 AM 9/18/2012, Louis Santillan wrote:
There's only 13K upper mem free according to mem/c. I believe it is 
in one block. And, iirc, all that most apps need is to be able to 
swap a 4k page at a time. My guess is that jemmex doesn't implement 
ems in a way that fps fbpro expects which is why it finds 0k free ems.
Sorry, but that is not correct, you would need a full 64KB segment 
for the EMS page frame for anything that is EMS 3.x/LIM compatible. 
EMS 4.0 allowed for smaller page frame size, but I don't know right 
now if anything below 16KB was possible, as that is the size of the 
logical EMS pages, there's also the requirement that a page frame 
starts at a 16K boundary.

If jemmex the culprit should be easy to find out by testing with 
another EMS manager to see if they would be able to set up EMS 
memory, but with only a 13KB block available, I doubt it...

Ralf 


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[Freedos-user] FreeDOS Boot Disc

 OK, a friend had a box of new, still sealed floppies, and I was
successful making a boot disc.

http://imagebin.org/228865

 I am an official idiot because I forgot that I had another old machine
laying around with a 3.5 inch floppy on it. The power supply has some
bad capacitors, and it's really flaky (sometimes it just reboots all on
its own!), so I wrote it off a few years ago, but I tried it, and it
booted.

 I don't think this is actually booting FreeDOS though, I think it is a
version of MSDOS because I had to name the files config.sys and
autoexec.bat for them to be recognized. Either way, it saw BOTH CD
drives in the machine.

 So now I should be able to resurrect that older Pentium 90 box that I
have in storage.

 Would someone please remind me about why there isn't a boot floppy
image in the FreeDOS web site that actually has FreeDOS on it? Seems
like it would be a really easy thing to do, and for that small
percentage of people who want to bring life to an old machine that can't
boot from CD, it would be super helpful.

 Rich...


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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS Boot Disc

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Ricardus Vincente
wizardofg...@gmail.com wrote:

Would someone please remind me about why there isn't a boot floppy
image in the FreeDOS web site that actually has FreeDOS on it? Seems
like it would be a really easy thing to do, and for that small
percentage of people who want to bring life to an old machine that can't
boot from CD, it would be super helpful.

1). Most people don't use floppies anymore. Either their machines lack
the drive or they lack floppy disks or their favorite OS doesn't
support USB floppy drives or they prefer booting CD-R (EDIT: why
didn't you try Smart Boot Manager???) or USB drives or they can't be
bothered or

2). Really easy ... sure, but keeping it up-to-date is a bit more
tedious, esp. for little gain. It's really easy to whip up something
crappy, a bit harder to do it right where it covers everything
(various floppy sizes, cpus, RAM requirements, peripherals, docs,
sources, etc).

3). Small percentage ... literally almost nobody has complained so
far! Keep in mind that volunteers are extremely low, which is why it
took so long for FD 1.1 to come out (thanks, Bernd!). Most of us
prefer contributing to other things.

4). There ARE floppy images, as mentioned, just slightly moldy. Most
of us make do with old stuff and manually install. :o)

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/balder/balder10.img

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/odin/odin060/fdodin06.8088.zip

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/floppy/img/base/install.img

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img

https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/BARE_DOS.ZIP?attredirects=0

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS Boot Disc

2012-09-18 Thread Mateusz Viste

On 09/18/2012 09:11 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
 4). There ARE floppy images, as mentioned, just slightly moldy. Most
 of us make do with old stuff and manually install.   :o)

 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/balder/balder10.img
 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/odin/odin060/fdodin06.8088.zip
 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/floppy/img/base/install.img
 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img
 https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/BARE_DOS.ZIP?attredirects=0

Maybe it would be a good idea to take one of these, and put a link right 
on the FreeDOS website, in the download section at 
http://www.freedos.org/download/ with a little note 'if you need to 
bring alive an old and rusty pc with only a floppy drive onboard, take 
this 1.44M bootable image' ?

Even if it's only for 0.0001% of the user base, it's still nice.. plus, 
the fact that there would a floppy image available for download is also 
a message 'FreeDOS cares about old systems'.

just my $0.03. :)

Mateusz


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Re: [Freedos-user] Problem running a DOS game requiring EMS inside of VirtualBox

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Ralf A. Quint free...@gmx.net wrote:
 At 10:10 AM 9/18/2012, Louis Santillan wrote:
There's only 13K upper mem free according to mem/c. I believe it is
in one block. And, iirc, all that most apps need is to be able to
swap a 4k page at a time. My guess is that jemmex doesn't implement
ems in a way that fps fbpro expects which is why it finds 0k free ems.

 Sorry, but that is not correct, you would need a full 64KB segment
 for the EMS page frame for anything that is EMS 3.x/LIM compatible.
 EMS 4.0 allowed for smaller page frame size, but I don't know right
 now if anything below 16KB was possible, as that is the size of the
 logical EMS pages, there's also the requirement that a page frame
 starts at a 16K boundary.

 If jemmex the culprit should be easy to find out by testing with
 another EMS manager to see if they would be able to set up EMS
 memory, but with only a 13KB block available, I doubt it...

I know this sounds like an advertisement almost, but it's relevant.
Try EMSMAGIC.  http://www.emsmagic.com/

--
EMS Magic is an expanded memory (EMS) emulator that installs as a
removable TSR and runs under DOS and Windows 9x/NTx, including XP and
Vista. It provides a complete implementation of the
Lotus-Intel-Microsoft (LIM) 4.0 EMS specification, including a
contiguous 64K page frame. EMS Magic can also extend the NTVDM
extended memory manager (XMM) to support XMS 3.0 functions.

Unlike EMM386 and NTVDM's EMM, EMS Magic will create the page frame
wherever there is room, including lower memory if necessary. This
allows it to provide EMS on systems where other expanded memory
managers fail.

EMS Magic is available free of charge for personal, non-commercial
use only. If this is your intended use, you may download from the
links below.

http://www.emsmagic.com/files/emsmagic21_personal.zip

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Re: [Freedos-user] my account has been compromised, please watch out for false content!

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 5:22 AM, Mark Brown eufdp...@yahoo.com wrote:
 my account has been compromised, please watch out for false content!

I think a lot of Yahoo! accounts got hacked recently. Dunno more
beyond that, sorry. I got actual spam from two real friends / people /
correspondents within 24 hours a few weeks ago, so I immediately
contacted both of them to warn them.

Sad, really, that we live in such a cruel world. I suggest changing
your password (if not already) and/or creating another email account
with a different provider (e.g. Gmail). Not foolproof but better than
nothing.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS Boot Disc

On Tue, 2012-09-18 at 14:11 -0500, Rugxulo wrote:

Then link to the sites that have reliable boot images this way people
don't have to spend too much time looking.

Rich...

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Ricardus Vincente
wizardofg...@gmail.com wrote:

4). There ARE floppy images, as mentioned, just slightly moldy. Most
of us make do with old stuff and manually install. :o)

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/balder/balder10.img

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/odin/odin060/fdodin06.8088.zip

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/floppy/img/base/install.img

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img

https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/BARE_DOS.ZIP?attredirects=0

Re: [Freedos-user] Survey of available DOSes

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 8:24 PM,  cordat...@aol.com wrote:

 The talk about different versions of DOS reminds me that I've been doing
 research recently about which DOS operating systems are available.

 Here is how I see it:

 FreeDOS
 MS-DOS 6.22
 Win9x (MS-DOS 7.1)
 DR-DOS  7.03
 Enhanced DR-DOS
 Datalight ROM-DOS
 PTS-DOS / PTS-DOS 32

 I suppose there are a couple of other DOS OS available,
 but I'm not sure those are worth investigating.

 Any comments?

If you need DOS for some specific application, whichever one is
closest at hand (and works for you, of course) is the best. Most
people don't reinstall but instead prefer to keep existing stuff
as-is.

Anyways, I would add a few to the list:

* Win2k / WinXP (NTVDM is fake but it still mostly works) ... and
no, I don't count Vista or 7, too buggy!   :-(
* DOSBox ... sure, it's only for games and is really its own fake
DOS, but it sorta works and is free/libre, popular, and easy to find
binaries.
* IBM PC-DOS 2000 ... harder to find but indeed a separate version
with good compatibility (or so I've heard).

I wouldn't specifically include DOSEMU because it needs a real DOS,
so including FreeDOS already covers that. Same for VirtualBox or QEMU
or similar. They can be useful in their own right, though.

There are various others, but I have basically nil experience with
them (e.g. RDOS, TSX-Lite, Real/32 or whatever, dunno).

Long story short:  FreeDOS is very very good (IMHO), free/libre, and
has potential to be improved ad infinitum. Unfortunately, there
aren't a lot of developers nor volunteers, but overall, it's probably
our last best hope for keeping DOS compatibility alive.

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Re: [Freedos-user] my account has been compromised, please watch out for false content!

2012-09-18 Thread dmccunney

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 5:22 AM, Mark Brown eufdp...@yahoo.com wrote:
 my account has been compromised, please watch out for false content!

 I think a lot of Yahoo! accounts got hacked recently. Dunno more

They did.

 beyond that, sorry. I got actual spam from two real friends / people /
 correspondents within 24 hours a few weeks ago, so I immediately
 contacted both of them to warn them.

I got spam from Yahoo account holding friends, too.

 Sad, really, that we live in such a cruel world. I suggest changing
 your password (if not already) and/or creating another email account
 with a different provider (e.g. Gmail). Not foolproof but better than
 nothing.

I have a Yahoo account, but it's essentially unused.  I use GMail as
my primary email account, and it polls various others so all mail
appears in my GMail Inbox.  (GMail is set so that replies I make to
mail harvested from other accounts appears to come *from* those
accounts.)  The Yahoo account exists solely for the occasion when I
need to send an executable as an attachment, which GMail has forbidden
from its inception as a security measure.  (There are ways around it,
but they are a PITA for both sides.)

GMail is fanatically anti-spam, and has changed the way I think about
it.  I no longer *care*, because I almost never see it.  GMail has the
best spam filters I've seen, and perhaps one spam message every two
weeks hits my Inbox.  Click Report Spam, and I don't see it *again*.
I prefer the web interface, so while I *could* set GMail to deliver
via POP and read it locally, I don't bother.  I don't need a local
copy of 99.9% of the mail I get, and if I need one it's trivial to
get.  GMail also implements viewers for most common file types, so I
can look at attachments online without having to download them.  This
is another security feature, as email attachments are the single
biggest vector for viruses.  The attachments generally live on
Google's servers, and never reach my machine.

And GMail's two-phase authentication makes it unlikely that account
will be hacked.
__
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

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Re: [Freedos-user] Survey of available DOSes


 * DOSBox ... sure, it's only for games and is really its own fake
 DOS, but it sorta works and is free/libre, popular, and easy to find
 binaries.

 I wouldn't specifically include DOSEMU because it needs a real DOS,

DOSBox can also boot an actual DOS version (like dosemu always does),  
which improves DOSBox's compatibility a lot (eg testing function calls  
that are not supported by DOSBox won't immediately exit the emulation).

Unfortunately, at least as far as known to me, DOSBox's FS redirector is  
only available with the built-in DOS, not when booting a DOS inside it.  
For that usage, dosemu is better because it provides its MFS-based  
redirector for the booted DOS (using the lredir program).

Regards,
Chris

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS Boot Disc

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 2:29 PM, Ricardus Vincente
wizardofg...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, 2012-09-18 at 14:11 -0500, Rugxulo wrote:

  Then link to the sites that have reliable boot images this way people
 don't have to spend too much time looking.

Here's another one that sounds promising:

http://schierlm.users.sourceforge.net/bootdisk/

And still another older one that sounds interesting:

http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/cdrom/

...

In short, there is no shortage, just no obvious (exclusive) solution
for 100% of all situations. There is maybe too much hardware and
software to cover it all, hence why people don't use floppies much
anymore (not enough room!).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS Boot Disc

On Tue, 2012-09-18 at 21:19 +0200, Mateusz Viste wrote:

 Maybe it would be a good idea to take one of these, and put a link right 
 on the FreeDOS website, in the download section at 
 http://www.freedos.org/download/ with a little note 'if you need to 
 bring alive an old and rusty pc with only a floppy drive onboard, take 
 this 1.44M bootable image' ?
 
 Even if it's only for 0.0001% of the user base, it's still nice.. plus, 
 the fact that there would a floppy image available for download is also 
 a message 'FreeDOS cares about old systems'.
 
 just my $0.03. :)
 
 Mateusz

 Exactly my point. Thank you.



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Re: [Freedos-user] Survey of available DOSes

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 2:46 PM, C. Masloch c...@bttr-software.de wrote:

 * DOSBox ... sure, it's only for games and is really its own fake
 DOS, but it sorta works and is free/libre, popular, and easy to find
 binaries.

 I wouldn't specifically include DOSEMU because it needs a real DOS,

 DOSBox can also boot an actual DOS version (like dosemu always does),
 which improves DOSBox's compatibility a lot (eg testing function calls
 that are not supported by DOSBox won't immediately exit the emulation).

 Unfortunately, at least as far as known to me, DOSBox's FS redirector is
 only available with the built-in DOS, not when booting a DOS inside it.
 For that usage, dosemu is better because it provides its MFS-based
 redirector for the booted DOS (using the lredir program).

Yes, that's why things like WinXP and DOSEMU are popular:  easy access
to host OS files. (But for VMware see Eduardo's VMSMOUNT.)

Actually, WinXP and DOSEMU have another advantage over DOSBox: LFNs.
You'd be surprised (or maybe not, heh) at how many projects just
assume LFNs are available. DOSBox doesn't support LFNs, and while I
can't remember, I don't think DOSLFN worked there anyways. Like I
said, DOSBox is very good at what it does (sound, gfx), but it's
officially only for games. Yes, its cpu emulation is good, but it's
not directly meant to boot other OSes.

Another drawback of DOSBox is that it's limited to max 64 MB (without
recompiling) and only defaults to 16 MB. Even DOSEMU (default 20 MB
DPMI, blech) or Vista SP1 and Win7 (default 32 MB DPMI, blech) can be
configured beyond that, which is crucial for lots of things (e.g.
DJGPP). Though in DOSBox's case, it may be more about saving host OS
RAM or maybe old game compatibility (where they'd choke on seeing
more), etc.

So there are a lot of things to consider when choosing a DOS. But for
average, simple stuff, almost anything will do.

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Re: [Freedos-user] about lfn...?

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 10:57 PM, Karen Lewellen
klewel...@shellworld.net wrote:

 indeed they are referring to doslfn, but as I am  not sure, I have written
 to ask just what edition.  Also which of freedos.
 they sent me the line they are loading...thoughts?

 LH DOSLFN /Z:C:\DOS71\CP437UNI.TBL

 I feel sure they are not running what is current, and as their complaint
 is that the line does not work, it may not be by choice.

Recent versions did fix bugs regarding /Z , see below:


Version 0.41a (1/2012)
- command line was corrupted by variables (prevented -z from working)

Version 0.41b (2/2012)
- fixed -z loading a DBCS file to XMS when resident


So your friend can try grabbing latest to see if it fixes his/her problem:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/doslfn/0.41/doslfn041b.zip
  (300 kb)

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 9:21 PM, Ralf A. Quint free...@gmx.net wrote:
 At 04:48 PM 9/17/2012, Karen Lewellen wrote:

Granted, I am a media professional, so facts especially n the Internet
are important.
the fact is ms dos 7.1 under wind 98 had fat 32, even Dr dos in 99 has it.

 The fact is that there never was a MS-DOS 7.1, it just happened
 that the underlying DOS mode of Windows 95B intensified itself with
 that version. As mentioned, MS-DOS 6.22 was the last official version
 of MS-DOS.

(I hate legalese, so I dislike bringing this up, but ...)

Again, this was purely marketing, not technical, as MS wanted to
exclusively bundle their DOS with Windows. With (very creaky) shims,
DR-DOS was said to be able to boot Win95 (and proved such in court),
but no such patches were ever officially released. MS didn't really
want to encourage competitor DOSes to run Windows.

On a semi-related note, I think you can boot Win 3.x inside DOSEMU,
DOSBox, etc. Even Mike Chambers' Fake86 can (mostly) boot it. There
may even be some experimental support on some of those for booting
Win9x, but since that's uninteresting to me, I've never delved deeper.

(While I don't personally care for Windows, I do wish FreeDOS had 100%
Windows-friendly internals compatibility, but it's not the end of the
world, I guess. We'd need more developers to test anyways, and old
Windows aren't exactly easily found [or worth the money, perhaps].)

 And DR-DOS never officially supported FAT32 either, the last version
 of DR-DOS was 6.0, released in 1991, followed by Novell DOS 7.0 in
 December 1993.
 Any FAT32 support for it only exists in some 3party support for an
 unofficially maintained version of the later Caldera OpenDOS 7.x...

Caldera / Lineo / DeviceLogics / DR-DOS Inc. were the ones selling
7.03 (finalized circa late 1998, early 1999), which I bought online
some years ago. Indeed, it lacked any kernel functionality regarding
LFNs or FAT32, hence you were limited to 8 GB (four primary FAT16
partitions of 2 GB each). And BTW, IIRC that would be 16 kb clusters,
which is incredibly wasteful, blech.

MS-DOS / Win9x forced you to install in the very beginning of the hard
drive. DR-DOS can install in subsequent partitions but has some weird
limit regarding mounting and seeing previous partitions. FreeDOS is
the most flexible in that it can see and use anything. (But I've not
tested all the billions of other DOS variants!) So it's not like
MS-DOS is perfect, but obviously it was the target most people wrote
for in ye olde days.

Different DOSes also have different speed and overall RAM
requirements, among billions of other details (mostly inconsequential
unless you're a trivia buff), though I admit I don't have any concrete
details offhand.   ;-)

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

 On a semi-related note, I think you can boot Win 3.x inside DOSEMU,
 DOSBox, etc. Even Mike Chambers' Fake86 can (mostly) boot it. There
 may even be some experimental support on some of those for booting
 Win9x, but since that's uninteresting to me, I've never delved deeper.

This is irrelevant to DOS compatibility when booting a DOS inside any of  
them. It'd only be interesting whether DOSBox's built-in DOS is able to  
load (any) MS Windows.

 MS-DOS / Win9x forced you to install in the very beginning of the hard
 drive. DR-DOS can install in subsequent partitions but has some weird
 limit regarding mounting and seeing previous partitions. FreeDOS is
 the most flexible in that it can see and use anything.

I don't think the FreeDOS kernel does properly boot from (or install in)  
file systems inside extended partitions. Even if you manage to boot it  
(possibly using GRUB), the kernel probably won't correctly determine the  
boot drive.

Regards,
Chris

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:36 PM, C. Masloch c...@bttr-software.de wrote:
 On a semi-related note, I think you can boot Win 3.x inside DOSEMU,
 DOSBox, etc.

 This is irrelevant to DOS compatibility when booting a DOS inside any of
 them.

I was referring mainly to the fact that DOSBox somehow managed to code
up the missing (undocumented) compatibility bits that FreeDOS (maybe?)
lacks (standard mode only) re: Win16. Nobody outside of MS-DOS 7.x
[sic] was ever intended to run the main portion (GUI, drivers, etc) of
the main OS (MS Win95), hence the inherent technical difficulty.

 It'd only be interesting whether DOSBox's built-in DOS is able to
 load (any) MS Windows.

It can, allegedly, but I've never tried. I don't have lots of legacy
Win16 apps that I run (though many old things still exist on Simtel,
etc), and most of my interest is cmdline stuff. Being proprietary also
makes me less interested because it's less useful to most other
people.

 I don't think the FreeDOS kernel does properly boot from (or install in)
 file systems inside extended partitions. Even if you manage to boot it
 (possibly using GRUB), the kernel probably won't correctly determine the
 boot drive.

I didn't mean extended partitions but instead a primary partition that
isn't first on the hard drive. You can have up to four primary
partitions, but only the first is bootable by MS-DOS.

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Bret Johnson bretj...@juno.com wrote:

 The are only a few practical differences between Windows 9x
 and similar DOS applications.  The first is that Windows 9x comes
 with a version of DOS that has special enhancements the Windows
 application requires to operate properly.  But, it is still a general
 purpose DOS that other applications can use -- it isn't a special
 version that only works with Windows 9x.

Right, but MS was trying to start anew with Win95, esp. after the 1991
split from IBM re: OS/2, hence the new (proprietary) native Win32 API
for both console and GUI. (Win32s previously existed but only for
limited GUI stuff. DOS was still the console in the older Win 16-bit
days.) So it was clearly legacy (as NT took too much RAM, which most
people didn't have). Win95 could allegedly run (slowly) on a 4 MB 386
box (though I think most brand new computers at the time were
Pentium/60s with 16 MB or similar).

A lot of DOS software still worked with Win95, but most people (e.g.
id Software, Raven Software) soon switched to Win32 for various
reasons (better drivers, esp. networking), not counting the advantage
of avoiding NTVDM bugs (e.g. Quake). And MS was clearly pushing Win32
compilers.

While it's true that DOS compilers were still being developed and
worked on (e.g. DJGPP v2 in 1996), once Win2k (FAT32, DOS LFNs) and
WinXP became ubiquitous (circa 2002), NTVDM was the best you could
get, which meant buggy but overall good enough. And even that got
worse and worse with even succeeding Windows version, if you were
crazy enough to not upgrade to the clearly superior Win32 (via
Cygwin or its offshoot MinGW or otherwise, which eventually eclipsed
DJGPP in users).

So yeah, people wanted flashier features, easier compatibility,
followed latest trends, hence DOS support got weaker and weaker
(despite ongoing work with DJGPP and OpenWatcom). Most other DOS
compilers gave up the ghost as the API wasn't considered a first-class
citizen (or even second-class) anymore (esp. with demand for Unicode
support on the rise).

I know all that seems off-topic, but that's the real reason that MS
dropped DOS support in lieu of Win32. They wanted to control the
standard (to paraphrase Gordon Letwin).

 The second is the OS (DOS) is set up to automatically load
 the Windows application.  But, you can easily change this
 by simply adding a BootGUI=0 line to the MSDOS.SYS text
 configuration file.  You can then boot straight to a DOS
 command prompt, and run all kinds of DOS applications
 other than Windows 9x.  If you then decide you want to run
 the DOS application called Windows 9x, you can simply type
 WIN at a DOS command prompt (just like you do with earlier
 versions of Windows).

This was only until older apps could migrate to the newer API.
Similarly with Win2k Ex APIs or .NET or Win64 or WinRT or whatever
they're pushing nowadays. Back in 1995, not nearly as many Win32 apps
existed, so compatibility was important. Similarly with AMD64, there
are already efforts to imply that 32-bit is obsolete and that 64-bit
is the (exclusive) future, even if it does (for now) support backwards
compatibility.

 The last significant difference is that you can't just exit Windows
 9x and go back to regular DOS again without rebooting.  In that
 sense, it's a poorly designed application.

Most well-behaved apps (esp. DPMI) ran both ways. Only ones that
needed real mode or VCPI or similar would have to use raw DOS.

 Basically, owning Windows 9x also means you own DOS 7.x,
 and you don't need to ever run the Windows application if you
 don't want to.  They are separate and distinct.  Overall, I think
 I agree with Karen's assessment.

I still have Win95 on 18 (overformatted, 1.6 MB, DMF?) or so floppies.
But I doubt it works with my USB floppy drive (at least not in most
OSes). But I don't care, I don't want it, I'll just use FreeDOS.
;-)

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

At 01:29 PM 9/18/2012, Rugxulo wrote:
(I hate legalese, so I dislike bringing this up, but ...)

Again, this was purely marketing, not technical, as MS wanted to
exclusively bundle their DOS with Windows. With (very creaky) shims,
DR-DOS was said to be able to boot Win95 (and proved such in court),

Where and when was that? This lawsuit was never brought to trial in 
the first place...
If there were indeed technical reasons or not, Windows 9x/ME used the 
DOS it was started from just for the bootstrap process as well as in 
the command prompt window once booted. No other part of the OS is 
otherwise using any of the underlying DOS, it is all handled by the 
Win32 system. So Windows 9x/ME is in fact an OS in it's own right, 
just like Netware is/was an OS in it's own right, regardless of it 
being booted from DOS in the initial phase as well...

Caldera / Lineo / DeviceLogics / DR-DOS Inc. were the ones selling
7.03 (finalized circa late 1998, early 1999), which I bought online
some years ago. Indeed, it lacked any kernel functionality regarding
LFNs or FAT32, hence you were limited to 8 GB (four primary FAT16
partitions of 2 GB each). And BTW, IIRC that would be 16 kb clusters,
which is incredibly wasteful, blech.

Well, 2GB partitions would require 32KB cluster size... (65524 x 32KB 
= 2096768KB = approx. 2GB)

But certainly does no officially released DR-DOS/Novell 
DOS/OpenDOS/Caldera DR-DOS does support FAT32.

As mentioned, this is only possible by using the driver/patch/release of the 

The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project


(http://www.drdosprojects.de/) and that in turn is subject to the 
license agreement of the original (not so) OpenDOS 7.01 sources...

Ralf 


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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Ralf A. Quint free...@gmx.net wrote:
 At 01:29 PM 9/18/2012, Rugxulo wrote:

Again, this was purely marketing, not technical, as MS wanted to
exclusively bundle their DOS with Windows. With (very creaky) shims,
DR-DOS was said to be able to boot Win95 (and proved such in court),

 Where and when was that? This lawsuit was never brought to trial in
 the first place...

I don't know all the details, barely any actually. You'd have to ask
Matthias Paul, the expert. All I read was that he worked on WinBolt
(or whatever) that patched a few things that made it finally boot atop
DR-DOS.

Whether it went to trial or not, I don't know. I know there was lots
of testimony back in the day, perhaps in the monopoly /
anti-competition trial. And Caldera (or whatever was left) did receive
a big cash settlement eventually. But I'm no lawyer and don't really
actively research legal stuff, so maybe I'm somewhat confused
(probably!).

 If there were indeed technical reasons or not, Windows 9x/ME used the
 DOS it was started from just for the bootstrap process as well as in
 the command prompt window once booted. No other part of the OS is
 otherwise using any of the underlying DOS, it is all handled by the
 Win32 system. So Windows 9x/ME is in fact an OS in it's own right,
 just like Netware is/was an OS in it's own right, regardless of it
 being booted from DOS in the initial phase as well...

I think it still did use DOS file system calls, but I could be wrong.
DOS was not just a glorified boot loader here, it was way more
interwoven and a hard requirement for this particular OS. You really
couldn't (AFAICT) run Win95 without DOS, at least without rewriting
the whole thing. But that's beyond my understanding, so you'd have to
ask someone more technically inclined (Geoff Chappell ??).

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[Freedos-user] Dual boot

2012-09-18 Thread Marcos Favero Florence de Barros

Hi,

I have a couple of friends who would like to run DataPerfect
databases in their Linux and Windows computers.


   -- Linux: I tried DosEmu, but could not make it work
  correctly with the accents (diacritics) of the Portuguese
  language. Don't know if the problem is keyboard- or
  display-related. I experimented a lot with the DosEmu
  configuration file and FDConfig.sys, but with no results
  so far.

  Is DosEmu actually capable of working with Portuguese
  diacritics and supporting a standard Brazilian keyboard in
  the first place?

  And if DosEmu can't do it, would dual boot (Grub) be a
  good idea? I read the announcement in July that Grub 2.00
  supports FreeDOS.


   -- Windows: Has the same problem with diacritics. I suppose
  there is a way of configuring that, but I'm not overly
  anxious to start struggling with Windows.

  Again, would dual boot be a good idea? If so, what could I
  use? Metakern?


My personal preference would be dual boot, but I wonder whether
it would bring its own problems. Those are other people's
computers, which I don't want to mess up.

Marcos


--
Marcos Fávero Florence de Barros
Campinas, Brazil




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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

 I think it still did use DOS file system calls, but I could be wrong.

It circumvented DOS for higher performance if no DOS software was  
intercepting or handling the FS and block device functions (from DOS Int21  
API through DOS block device down to ROM-BIOS Int13 API), at Windows  
start-up. If it detected any such interception, it would indeed run the  
affected FS in some sort of compatibility mode where it used the  
underlying V86 APIs (block devices, Int13) instead of its own ones. This  
incidentally disabled its LFN functionality for the affected FS.

Regards,
Chris

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

At 02:25 PM 9/18/2012, Rugxulo wrote:
 Again, this was purely marketing, not technical, as MS wanted to
 exclusively bundle their DOS with Windows. With (very creaky) shims,
 DR-DOS was said to be able to boot Win95 (and proved such in court),
 
  Where and when was that? This lawsuit was never brought to trial in
  the first place...

I don't know all the details, barely any actually.

So why keep spreading such rumors? :-\

I think it still did use DOS file system calls, but I could be wrong.
DOS was not just a glorified boot loader here, it was way more
interwoven and a hard requirement for this particular OS. You really
couldn't (AFAICT) run Win95 without DOS, at least without rewriting
the whole thing. But that's beyond my understanding, so you'd have to
ask someone more technically inclined (Geoff Chappell ??).

May I suggest a closer study of works like Windows 95 Internals by 
Michael Podanoffsky (out of print though according to Amazon, ) or 
any other in-depth document about Win32?

Why do you think that back in the early days of Windows 95, the 
16bit thunking was such a big deal? That wouldn't have been at all 
necessary if Win32 and the old 16bit stuff weren't in effect two 
discrete entities...

Ralf 


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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual boot

   Is DosEmu actually capable of working with Portuguese
   diacritics and supporting a standard Brazilian keyboard in
   the first place?

It's probably possible, but it might require configuring dosemu more, or  
maybe even patching dosemu's source.

   And if DosEmu can't do it, would dual boot (Grub) be a
   good idea? I read the announcement in July that Grub 2.00
   supports FreeDOS.

GRUB 2 indeed supports loading FreeDOS, which just means you can directly  
specify the kernel.sys file to load instead if needing to chainload a  
FreeDOS boot sector. With the current kernel and current GRUB versions,  
you still need to install FreeDOS into a primary partition, though.

   Again, would dual boot be a good idea? If so, what could I
   use? Metakern?

GRUB is possible, too.

 My personal preference would be dual boot, but I wonder whether
 it would bring its own problems. Those are other people's
 computers, which I don't want to mess up.

In older PCs, idling was not regarded as necessary; with 1990s and more  
recent (powerful) CPUs proper idling is important.

Therefore you should enable the idlehalt= setting in the FreeDOS kernel's  
config, and/or load FDAPM with some setting. [One of them might suffice,  
but using both shouldn't be particularly harmful even if unnecessary.]  
fdapm apmdos (optionally prepend lh ) should result in the highest  
savings (though it might decrease performance a bit).

Failure to enable proper idling will cause one CPU (that is at least one  
core on multi-core CPUs) to permanently be 100% loaded in polling loops,  
wasting energy and heating up the CPU a lot. Even with FDAPM and such,  
some applications' polling loops disable idling - custom patching might be  
necessary to implement proper idling then.

Regards,
Chris

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

 Again, this was purely marketing, not technical, as MS wanted to
 exclusively bundle their DOS with Windows. With (very creaky) shims,
 DR-DOS was said to be able to boot Win95 (and proved such in court),
 
  Where and when was that? This lawsuit was never brought to trial in
  the first place...

 I don't know all the details, barely any actually.

 So why keep spreading such rumors? :-\

Sources specified in the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS :

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/1996865/cebit-caldera-windows-dr-dos-denying-ms-claims
http://www.seattleweekly.com/1998-09-16/news/the-mouse-that-roared/  
(second page)

 Why do you think that back in the early days of Windows 95, the
 16bit thunking was such a big deal? That wouldn't have been at all
 necessary if Win32 and the old 16bit stuff weren't in effect two
 discrete entities...

Thunking is just API translation because of different pointer conventions  
and such. Arguably the existence and usage of Windows-4-style thunking  
between 32-bit and 16-bit components illustratively shows that Windows 4  
is close to its Windows 3 roots.

In x86 Windows NT, 16-bit subsystems known as NTVDM and WOW are enabled by  
default, but they seem to be separated more clearly from the main (32-bit)  
system.

Regards,
Chris

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

Hi again,:-)

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Ralf A. Quint free...@gmx.net wrote:
 At 02:25 PM 9/18/2012, Rugxulo wrote:

 Again, this was purely marketing, not technical, as MS wanted to
 exclusively bundle their DOS with Windows. With (very creaky) shims,
 DR-DOS was said to be able to boot Win95 (and proved such in court),
 
  Where and when was that? This lawsuit was never brought to trial in
  the first place...

I don't know all the details, barely any actually.

 So why keep spreading such rumors? :-\

It's not rumors. It's well known (at least to me) that Matthias Paul
has done a lot over the years, and he's added a lot of info to various
Wikipedia articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS


Gross also hired Andrew Schulman (who had been, with Geoff Chappell,
instrumental in identifying the AARD code in 1992) to work as a
consultant and, in Andover, join Paul in his work on WinGlue, a
secret project to create a version of DR-DOS compatible with Windows
95, 98 and 98 SE and replace its MS-DOS 7.xx component.[17] This was
demonstrated at CeBIT in March 1998,[17] and later, in a small team,
developed into WinBolt, both versions of DR-DOS, which remained
unreleased as of 2011, but played an important role in the court
case.[18]


So it's WinGlue I was thinking of, I suppose. Again, you'd have to ask
the relevant dudes, not me, for more details. But this particular info
is not public knowledge as no public code examples have shown up
(AFAIK).

I think it still did use DOS file system calls, but I could be wrong.
DOS was not just a glorified boot loader here, it was way more
interwoven and a hard requirement for this particular OS. You really
couldn't (AFAICT) run Win95 without DOS, at least without rewriting
the whole thing. But that's beyond my understanding, so you'd have to
ask someone more technically inclined (Geoff Chappell ??).

 May I suggest a closer study of works like Windows 95 Internals by
 Michael Podanoffsky (out of print though according to Amazon, ) or
 any other in-depth document about Win32?

For someone interested, sure, that would be great. To me, it's a bit
moot as I don't care enough to buy the book just for that. (I actually
hate buying books, but a few months I did go ahead and finally get
Pat's book out of completeness, even though I have no intention of
hacking on the kernel).

 Why do you think that back in the early days of Windows 95, the
 16bit thunking was such a big deal? That wouldn't have been at all
 necessary if Win32 and the old 16bit stuff weren't in effect two
 discrete entities...

16-bit real mode and 16-bit pmode and 32-bit pmode are all heavily
different things, disregarding PAE and all the various additional
changes over the years. So yes, it's going to be somewhat different,
even under V86, per design. Win 3.0 was the big change with DPMI,
which was the underlying basis for Win16 protected mode apps. Win 3.1
wouldn't even run on anything older than a 286, and VCPI was only
supported in 286 standard mode. With Win 3.11, they went 386+, so of
course, tack on Win32s, and you're halfway to Win95 already.

I know you know this, and I don't claim to perfectly understand it,
just saying ... yes, there's a lot going on, but DOS is still there
for good reason, both technically and for compatibility, at least
until the 32-bit NT was extended to target home users with WinXP.

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

I think what you're all forgetting is that Apple developed all of this
technology, and will be suing all parties involved, very soon.  :-)

 Rich...


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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 5:26 PM, C. Masloch c...@bttr-software.de wrote:

 In x86 Windows NT, 16-bit subsystems known as NTVDM and WOW are enabled by
 default, but they seem to be separated more clearly from the main (32-bit)
 system.

NT was supposedly designed to be portable (and 32-bit, i.e. no real
DOS) from the ground up, headed by Dave Cutler, former VMS dude. It
ran on various architectures initially, but that later wound down to
only x86 and Itanium and later x86-64, probably due to economic and
marketing reasons.

NTVDM was one of many subsystems (OS/2, POSIX, etc) that were supposed
to be supported, but obviously it bitrotted quite badly over the years
and had many bugs unfixed and even regressions.

Honestly, MS actually claims VirtualPC (and the associated WinXP
Mode) for 64-bit is too wimpy for home users, i.e. no decent graphics
support, hence it's only available to business licenses and such.
(Plus it doubles your hardware requirements.) Or maybe they expect us
to migrate to Hyper-V in Win8 (64-bit), who knows.

Clearly they have little interest in DOS or Win16 or OS/2
compatibility. They don't want to make the same mistake (eh?) that
OS/2 did, being too compatible (with DOS and Win16) for its own
survival. (Yes, eCS still exists but in limited form, and it's not
chiefly supported by IBM since a long time.) They do nowadays support
C++ and HTML5 and Javascript as first-class citizens, but it's clear
that others are more preferred (C# and pals).

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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual boot

On 2012-09-18 18:32 (GMT-0300) Marcos Favero Florence de Barros composed:

And if DosEmu can't do it, would dual boot (Grub) be a
good idea? I read the announcement in July that Grub 2.00
supports FreeDOS.

So does Grub Legacy, which is much simpler to install, configure and 
maintain. It requires minimal space, no scripts, and doesn't harrass you if 
you want to keep compatible legacy code on your MBR. Don't go out of your way 
to get Grub2, just accept it along with your Linux distro if it gives you no 
choice. The main people who need what Grub Legacy does not support are those 
requiring EFI boot, using HDs  2TB, or using RAID.

Again, would dual boot be a good idea?

I've been multibooting about 20 years, with DOS on a 1st HD primary included 
in most cases. It's really not difficult to set up or use any DOS version via 
multiboot.
-- 
The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive. Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual boot

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Felix Miata mrma...@earthlink.net wrote:
Again, would dual boot be a good idea?

 I've been multibooting about 20 years, with DOS on a 1st HD primary included
 in most cases. It's really not difficult to set up or use any DOS version via
 multiboot.

Vista and 7 let you resize the native NTFS partition (which typically
uses the whole physical drive). But they changed the boot manager, so
you'd have to grab (third-party, freeware-ish) EasyBCD or similar to
configure it (if and only if you've backed up your data and installed
others properly).

It might be easier to just set up a VM. Or find out why DOSEMU doesn't
work with KEYB (dunno).

You have to be very careful not to overwrite the MBR or mess up the
partition table. Dual boot (etc) is easiest with a clean computer
and physical install media (CD-ROM, floppy, etc).

Oops, almost forgot Rufus, you can install FreeDOS (or MS-DOS) to USB
and boot that:

http://rufus.akeo.ie/

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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual boot

 I read the announcement in July that Grub 2.00 supports FreeDOS.

 So does Grub Legacy, [...]

As opposed to GRUB 2, it additionally needs setting up the correct boot  
sector file (to be chainloaded from GRUB for loading the kernel), which is  
possible using FreeDOS's SYS.

There's a fork called GRUB4DOS which includes easier FreeDOS kernel  
loading similar to GRUB 2.

Regards,
Chris

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

At 03:26 PM 9/18/2012, C. Masloch wrote:
  Again, this was purely marketing, not technical, as MS wanted to
  exclusively bundle their DOS with Windows. With (very creaky) shims,
  DR-DOS was said to be able to boot Win95 (and proved such in court),
  
   Where and when was that? This lawsuit was never brought to trial in
   the first place...
 
  I don't know all the details, barely any actually.
 
  So why keep spreading such rumors? :-\

Sources specified in the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS :

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/1996865/cebit-caldera-windows-dr-dos-denying-ms-claims
http://www.seattleweekly.com/1998-09-16/news/the-mouse-that-roared/
(second page)

Where neither source mentioned that there was anything proved in 
court, as there was never a trial on that matter.
There was an out-of-court settlement before it came to a trial, which 
beside apparently putting some money in Caldera's robs us now to 
actual see what was claimed and what in fact the ties between Windows 
95 and DOS at that point was...

  Why do you think that back in the early days of Windows 95, the
  16bit thunking was such a big deal? That wouldn't have been at all
  necessary if Win32 and the old 16bit stuff weren't in effect two
  discrete entities...

Thunking is just API translation because of different pointer conventions
and such.

Sorry, but that isn't the only kind of translation that needs/might 
have to be done...

  Arguably the existence and usage of Windows-4-style thunking
between 32-bit and 16-bit components illustratively shows that Windows 4
is close to its Windows 3 roots.

Rather to the contrary, if it would be that close, thunking should 
not be necessary in the first place (or to a far lesser extend). And 
the issue of 16 bit thunking in Windows 95 ran itself out after 
more and more programs where specifically written for Win32 instead 
of relying on old Windows 3.x 16bit code/DLLs.


In x86 Windows NT, 16-bit subsystems known as NTVDM and WOW are enabled by
default, but they seem to be separated more clearly from the main (32-bit)
system.

Well, as it is a new OS written from scratch, NTVDM was/is simply a 
replacement for the previously existed DOS at boot time. There is no 
need for NTVDM for anything but old 16bit DOS/Windows 3.x code and 
the command prompt for doing shell stuff in NT is not relying on any 
old 16bit stuff. That's why it is by default invoked by the 32bit 
cmd.exe instead of the for compatibility's sake still existing 16bit 
command.com.

Ralf 


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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual boot

On 2012-09-19 00:58 (GMT+0200) C. Masloch composed:

 I read the announcement in July that Grub 2.00 supports FreeDOS.

 So does Grub Legacy, [...]

 As opposed to GRUB 2, it additionally needs setting up the correct boot
 sector file (to be chainloaded from GRUB for loading the kernel)

grub root (hd0,0)
grub setup (hd0,0)
grub quit

Oh so difficult, as opposed to the shenanigans, and 5-10 times the HD space 
sprawled across several directories and/or partitions, required to make Grub2 
work. Not knowing more about specific user requirements, Grub2 to boot DOS is 
a classical example of gross overkill.
-- 
The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive. Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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Re: [Freedos-user] false info on the freedos home page?

Where neither source mentioned that there was anything proved in
court, as there was never a trial on that matter.

Right, it wasn't. So the rumour part was _only_ the mention of proved in
court, which it didn't quite reach. But it isn't a rumour at all that
MS-DOS 7 and 8 were unnecessarily tied to MS Windows 4.

Regarding that, more of the sources specify in detail that Caldera showed
(and even some of Microsoft's developers that worked on MS Windows 4 and
MS-DOS 7 explained/agreed) that both of them could very easily have been
separated:

http://www.maxframe.com/DR/Info/fullstory/tech.html (lots of details)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/600488.stm (mentions settlement that
instead happened, and Caldera was able to demonstrate publicly Windows 95
running with DR-DOS, and it was thought unlikely that Microsoft would
win because of the strength of the evidence that Caldera had partially
disclosed)

There was an out-of-court settlement before it came to a trial, which
beside apparently putting some money in Caldera's

It is right that the settlement occurred instead.

robs us now to actual see what was claimed and what in fact the ties
between Windows 95 and DOS at that point was...

Even as we don't have the implementation, the first source above does
specify a lot of details.

And here's a less official, though also interesting source: a post
authored by Matthias Paul on 2007-12-18. It also has some technical
comments:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/109018-windows-98-in-dr-dos/page__view__findpost__p__721209

MP [...] WinGlue basically just faked a number of undocumented
MP interfaces and data structures, [...] it was decided to fork
MP the kernel and directly add full MS-DOS 7.0 (and later 7.1)
MP support into the DR-DOS kernel. The DOS 7 compatible fork was
MP nicknamed DR-DOS WinBolt [...]

So, WinGlue (Scheibenkleister) was a basic device driver to make MS
Windows 4 load, and WinBolt was a 7.02-ish fork of the kernel to fully
support the new interfaces. The post also acknowledges that a different
fork went on to be released as 7.03.

Rather to the contrary, if it would be that close, thunking should
not be necessary in the first place (or to a far lesser extend).

Without the parenthetical remark, you would be incorrect, because at least
pointers/buffers do have to be translated or made compatible somehow, no
matter how close the systems are [unless hypothetically the 32-bit APIs
artificially were limited to only using 16-bit registers and pointers].

And the issue of 16 bit thunking in Windows 95 ran itself out
after more and more programs where specifically written for Win32
instead of relying on old Windows 3.x 16bit code/DLLs.

That's to be expected regardless of thunking details.

Regards,
Chris

Re: [Freedos-user] Dual boot

 grub root (hd0,0)
 grub setup (hd0,0)
 grub quit

 Oh so difficult,

That also requires the boot sector to /already/ be set up correctly, just  
in the partition itself this time =)

 shenanigans, and 5-10 times the HD space sprawled across several
 directories and/or partitions, required to make Grub2 work.

I don't disagree that apart from this one feature, GRUB 2 might be more  
complicated to install or whatever.

Regards,
Chris

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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual boot

On 2012-09-19 02:05 (GMT+0200) C. Masloch composed:

 grub root (hd0,0)
 grub setup (hd0,0)
 grub quit

 Oh so difficult,

 That also requires the boot sector to /already/ be set up correctly, just
 in the partition itself this time =)

Another toughie:

A:\ SYS C:

Or, maybe you mean:

A:\ FDISK /MBR
-- 
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words are persuasive. Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual boot


 A:\ SYS C:

 [...]

 A:\ FDISK /MBR

Yep, you successfully circumvented GRUB now =P

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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual boot