Re: [Freedos-user] Way or utility in Freedos to have two applications running

[andrew fabbro via Freedos-user]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2024 at 4:18 AM Liam Proven via Freedos-user <
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

>
> There are multitasking DOSes out there, but they are aimed at multiple
> people sharing one PC, such as MultiUser DOS. Some are even FOSS:
>
> https://github.com/roelandjansen/pcmos386v501
>

On the Wikipedia page for PC-MOS it says: "MMU support for 286 class
machines was provided using a proprietary hardware shim inserted between
the processor and its socket."

That's pretty wild.


> There are multitasking layers you can load on top of DOS, such as DESQview.
>

And TSR programs
.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Coding in BASIC for Freedos?

[andrew fabbro via Freedos-user]

On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 11:28 AM Jim Hall via Freedos-user <
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> Doing a quick count of _everything_ in the source tree, including
> tools and tests, from  version 2.43 in Jeremy's GitHub
> (https://github.com/FDOS/kernel/releases/tag/ke2043) I found this
> count:
>
> All *.asm and *.inc files: 14,019 lines
> (these are Assembly files)
>
> All *.c and *.h files: 29,510 lines
> (these are C language files)
>

I downloaded kernel.zip from that repo and ran sloccount on it.  For those
unfamiliar, sloccount ("Source Lines of Code Count") counts lines in a
language-aware manner (it knows what's in a comment block and what isn't).
I think it is kind of the standard for "how many lines of code" and it's
been around a long time.  It defines line of code as "a physical source
line of code (SLOC) is a line ending in a newline or end-of-file marker,
and which contains at least one non-whitespace non-comment character".

It says (this is just what's in kernel.zip):

SLOC Directory SLOC-by-Language (Sorted)
28395   SOURCE  ansic=18866,asm=9496,sh=33
0   APPINFO (none)
0   BIN (none)
0   DOC (none)


Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
ansic:18866 (66.44%)
asm:   9496 (33.44%)
sh:  33 (0.12%)

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)= 28,395
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 6.71 (80.56)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 1.10 (13.25)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule)  = 6.08
Total Estimated Cost to Develop   = $ 906,871
 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).
SLOCCount, Copyright (C) 2001-2004 David A. Wheeler
SLOCCount is Open Source Software/Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL.
SLOCCount comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, and you are welcome to
redistribute it under certain conditions as specified by the GNU GPL
license;
see the documentation for details.
Please credit this data as "generated using David A. Wheeler's
'SLOCCount'."

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[Freedos-user] FreeDOS Forums

[andrew fabbro via Freedos-user]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 5:47 AM Linvel Risner via Freedos-user <
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> I don't imagine we have a forum, just an email list, right?
>

There are some forums listed here:

https://www.freedos.org/forums/

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Re: [Freedos-user] what cd rom drivers does freedos use?

[andrew fabbro via Freedos-user]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2024 at 4:29 PM Karen Lewellen via Freedos-user <
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> Forcibly demand?
> What an interesting choice of term..why not did the job for which i
> contracted them?
>

He was making a joke as a way of asking why you would want to run MS-DOS
7.1.

IIRC it was never intended to be a standalone product.  I'm curious what
the personal reasons are, or what 7.1 gives you that 6.22 (or FreeDOS)
can't.

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Re: [Freedos-user] One use case for FreeDos

[andrew fabbro via Freedos-user]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 12:57 PM Jim Hall via Freedos-user <
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> It's a different sort of thing, but a colleague shared his editor's
> advice to write in a way that makes it difficult to go back and edit
> what you've done, while you're writing it. The idea is that you don't
> spend time "editing as you go" - constantly spinning your wheels,
> editing what you just wrote when you should be focusing on writing new
> stuff - and instead do all your editing and revisions after you've
> finished a full draft of something (article, chapter, etc).
>

There's a simpler solution: turn off your monitor :-)   I actually read
that in a fiction writing book once (Frey's *How to Write a Damn Good Novel*
 IIRC).

The "don't revise while you edit" is good advice but in my experience it's
more about consciously not getting bogged down and not using revising as an
excuse.  But you're going to spend far more time rewriting than rewriting,
anyway.  Writing is fundamentally rewriting, not writing.

TBH, none of the pro writers I know use any kind of "distraction free"
setup.  Most of them are writing on Scrivener for macOS (which I used) or
Word for Windows.  If you're going to write a book, you write a book and
distractions aren't going to get in your way.  I've written three books and
did them all on Scrivener for macOS.  If I was going to get distracted, I'd
find a way even if I was carving cuneiform.

But whatever works for you!  The history of alternate writing methods is
long.  Jack Kerouac bought a roll of butcher paper and fed it into a
typewriter and wrote the first draft of *On the Road* as one long
continuous scroll.  Tom Robbins wrote all of his novels one sentence at a
time...drafting it it in his mind, debating it, perfecting it, and then
committing it on his typewriter, and he never revised.  When he'd written
his last sentence, he sent the stack of papers to his publisher.  I'm not
endorsing Kerouac or Robbins' results but writers have tried all kinds of
things and there is no one method that fits everyone.

On Tue, Jan 30, 2024 at 11:13 AM Ben Collver via Freedos-user <
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> If there's a "Walden" for computer programmers, it would be a 4:3
> display running DOS where coding can be done without any modern day
> annoying interruptions.
>

I disagree.  The perfect coding environment is radically different than the
perfect fiction writing environment.  When I'm writing code, I want
reference docs, PDFs of books, StackOverflow, ChatGPT, manuals, my own
library of examples, etc.

Even when I'm writing nonfiction articles (which I do every day), I'm
pulling in info from the web, books, etc.

As always, YMMV.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Is networking unsupported on QEMU? Pilot error suspected.

[andrew fabbro via Freedos-user]

On Tue, Jan 2, 2024 at 8:14 AM Lukáš Kotek via Freedos-user <
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

>
> -device pcnet,netdev=id1 -netdev user,id=id1
>
> It just works for me with no other tweaks necessary. The difference is
> actually only in syntax. Using -net is deprecated for some time, but
> IIRC it should still work. I wonder if it can be relevant here.
>

Thanks Lukas!  This didn't change the boot experience but also works.  I'll
dig into these options.

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Re: [Freedos-user] What DOS programs represent the 1980s and early 90s?

[andrew fabbro via Freedos-user]

Whatever programs are most representative, they might have been distributed
as shareware.  There's still "trial software" today but not like going to a
BBS and seeing hundreds of shareware packages, or getting a CD stuffed with
them.

I was just chatting with a gentlemen (now in his 70s) who published a small
desktop note manager for MS-DOS (Personal Note Manager aka PNM.COM).  In
1990, I mailed him a money order and a week or two later got my unlock key
by postal mail.  That was software activation in MS-DOS times!

Although I personally remember it more with the Apple ][, there was copy
protection for some MS-DOS disks and inevitably copy protection cracking
programs.  The Apple had a legion of these systems and programs - Locksmith
was one cracker I remember, but there were a dozen other with outlandish
names.  All worked to copy floppies and defeat the incredibly ingenious
on-disk protection schemes publishers used.  In my middle school/early teen
years I attended more than one "sharing party" where you'd show up with a
new box of floppies and leave with lots of new games.  Later, companies
went to "manual checks" where the game would prompt you for word 5 on
line 12 of page 53, etc.

I don't remember disk copy protection as much with MS-DOS, but that's
possibly because I had a job and could afford to buy software by the time I
moved to DOS.  MS-DOS itself was widely copied.  When a cousin got a new PC
with new boot disks, his relatives got an MS-DOS upgrade.  If you didn't
have a hard drive, there was nothing to upgrade - you just inserted the new
floppy next time you booted and you were upgraded.

Besides games, a lot of business software was widely copied - I read once
that for every copy of Wordstar sold, at least 20 were copied.  Someone
said once that they should have given Wordstar away for free and just sold
documentation.

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Re: [Freedos-user] What DOS programs represent the 1980s and early 90s ?

[andrew fabbro via Freedos-user]

I don't think any 1980s DOS computing experience is complete without
thinking about Bulletin Board Services and the "big" online services.

If this was 1988, we'd be talking on a FIDOnet echo, or there would be a
"FreeDOS BBS" whose number we'd get from a text file list of BBSes we'd
download over XMODEM.

Speaking of XMODEM, I remember well when I decided to "take the plunge" and
download ZMODEM...it was a long download at 2400, but made things after
that so much faster.  That tells you something about bandwidth in those
days: did I want to tie up the phone line for a few hours to make the "time
investment" in ZMODEM.

I ran a Telegard board for a little while.  I dearly miss the BBS culture,
because it was fun to login to new and interesting communities, see all the
custom extensions/doors/etc. people had programmed, discover new downloads,
swap messages, etc.  Social media of 2023 is just not the same, and even
traditional internet forums don't have the same charm.

There were also online services.  I never played much with CompuSERVE but
was a longtime GEnie user.  GEnie's TUI interface was Aladdin.  What these
services did better than BBSes was the huge chat (or "CB") rooms, where
you'd be on talking with dozens/hundreds of people around the world.  That
was amazing in the early/mid 80s.  GEnie would have thousands of concurrent
users in the late 80s.

On a different note, Sidekick and its TSR ilk are also an important part of
DOS lore.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Is networking unsupported on QEMU? Pilot error suspected.

[andrew fabbro via Freedos-user]

On Fri, Dec 29, 2023 at 1:54 PM Jerome Shidel via Freedos-user <
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> When the default “start” option is provided, FDNET will only attempt to
> start networking support under VirtualBox and VMware. On real hardware and
> other virtual platforms, it will just provide that error message and exit.
>
> The reason for this is simple. It is known to work under those virtual
> machines with the available open source drivers (by various authors) which
> included with the FDNET package.
>

OK, that makes sense.  I thought it was misinterpreting something (as I'm
not running a physical system) or I needed a different QEMU invocation.

I did get networking up and running under QEMU.  After running PCNTPK after
boot, it worked fine:

C:\NET\FDNET\pcntpk int=0x60
C:\NET\FDNET\dhcp

At that point, everything worked fine TCP/IP-wise.  I think I'll add
something like "call C:\LOCAL.BAT" to :End in FDAUTO.BAT and then put my
local startup customizations there to avoid changing the dist FDAUTO.BAT
too much.

Thanks much!
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[Freedos-user] Is networking unsupported on QEMU? Pilot error suspected.

[andrew fabbro via Freedos-user]

Greetings!

I'm a bit perplexed trying to get networking working for FreeDOS 1.3 on
QEMU.  My physical host is an M1 Mac (Apple Silicon).

FreeDOS installs and boots fine, but I get this message:

QEMU network detected.
Physical hardware networking is not supported at this time.

Here is my QEMU invocation:

qemu-system-i386 -boot order=cd -m 32M -k en-us -name FreeDOS1 -cdrom
FD13BNS.iso -drive FreeDOS1.img,format=raw,media=disk -net nic,model=pcnet
-net user

I've also tried model=ne2k_pci, model=e1000, etc.  Also tried similar setup
in UTM, which is a graphical front end for QEMU.

But looking at FreeDOS's startup scripts, I'm thinking maybe QEMU
networking is not supported...?

At line 84 of FDAUTO.BAT, "%dosdir%\bin\fdnet.bat start" is called.
Looking at fdnet.bat, at line 92, "vinfo /m" is executed.  When I execute
this myself at the command line, errorlevel is set to 102.  In fdnet.bat,
this branches to a label called NoAutoQEMU on line 109.  There, since %1 is
"start" there's a goto NoStartQEMU.  That gives the "QEMU network detected"
message.  Then there's a goto NoHardware, which gives the "Physical
networking is not supported at this time" and end.

So is networking under QEMU completely unsupported?

Strangely, I found this forum post in which someone has it working just
fine, so I'm thinking that maybe I'm doing something wrong?

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-virtualization-and-cloud-90/freedos-in-qemu-no-internet-connection-4175638386/

-- 
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