Re: [Freedos-user] entering into the command-line as fast as possible

[Jim Hall]

> On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 11:54 AM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>> www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/
>> contains metados and several other older distros.
>

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 2:09 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
> No, it actually doesn't.
>
> About 1.5 years ago, Jim Hall removed (well, "hid") all the other
> versions there because they were flawed, old, incomplete,
> unmaintained, etc. Which was probably wise, all things considered, but
> it's still a minor inconvenience.

Correct, these were hidden on or around 2014-04-23.

And to expand on this: I have generally supported developers who want
to create "alternative" distributions based on FreeDOS. A strength of
free software and open source software is you can do many things with
it.

But these alternative distributions take up a lot of space, which
concerned me. They also got very out of date. I wanted to delete them.
But 3(b) in the GNU GPL says source code should be available up to
three years after they download the binary, upon request.

My solution was to "hide" these unofficial distributions (Unix chmod)
so you can see the directory entry, but not the files. If someone
wants to re-download one of these old alternative distributions, they
can email me and I'll make the directory visible for a short time.
I've had one request to do this in the last two years.

(This may not be required anyway, since the source code was available
when they downloaded the binary, under 3(a) of the GNU GPL. Users may
not have opted to download the source code, if it was a separate file.
So I understand I could just delete them now, but I'll keep them there
until space becomes a problem or until three years, whichever comes
first.)

Jim

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Re: [Freedos-user] entering into the command-line as fast as possible

[Jim Hall]

> On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:
>> But 3(b) in the GNU GPL says source code should be available up to
>> three years after they download the binary, upon request.
>
On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 3:54 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
[..]
> If you keep older binaries around, the source that produced them is
> more or less required.  Your practice looks like the best compromise.
>


Thanks!

Since anyone who downloaded these unofficial distributions had the
option *at the time they downloaded them* to also download the source
code, I understand 3(a) of the GNU GPL is satisfied. They had the
option. So I could delete these older alternative distributions,
rather than just hiding them and waiting to see who asks to
re-download them.

I'll keep these unofficial distributions hidden for now, since it
isn't a problem to keep them. If space becomes an issue, I'll delete
them.


Jim

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Re: [Freedos-user] entering into the command-line as fast as possible

[userbeitrag]

On Fri, Sep 18 2015 at 10:54pm, dmccunney wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:
>> But 3(b) in the GNU GPL says source code should be available up to
>> three years after they download the binary, upon request.
> The problem is that this is generally taken to mean "The source that
> produced the particular binary the user has", so that the user can get
> the source, reproduce the build environment, and create a duplicate of
> the binary they have.
>
> Since the state of the source in an open source product is variable,
> current source may not build, let alone duplicate the user's binary,
> so you can't just point at the development repository when people
> inquire about source.
>
> If you keep older binaries around, the source that produced them is
> more or less required.  Your practice looks like the best compromise.

Excuse me for interjecting, but doesn't a source repository do exactly
that? If I get GitHub correctly, you can go back to any moment in time
and download the source as it was at this particular moment.

The question is: why not use e.g. GitHub for FreeDOS related sources?

Cheers.

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Re: [Freedos-user] entering into the command-line as fast as possible

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 5:13 PM,   wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 18 2015 at 10:54pm, dmccunney wrote:
>> On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:
>>> But 3(b) in the GNU GPL says source code should be available up to
>>> three years after they download the binary, upon request.

>> The problem is that this is generally taken to mean "The source that
>> produced the particular binary the user has", so that the user can get
>> the source, reproduce the build environment, and create a duplicate of
>> the binary they have.
>>
>> Since the state of the source in an open source product is variable,
>> current source may not build, let alone duplicate the user's binary,
>> so you can't just point at the development repository when people
>> inquire about source.
>>
>> If you keep older binaries around, the source that produced them is
>> more or less required.  Your practice looks like the best compromise.
>
> Excuse me for interjecting, but doesn't a source repository do exactly
> that? If I get GitHub correctly, you can go back to any moment in time
> and download the source as it was at this particular moment.

Github can indeed do that.

Unfortunately, the whole world isn't under Github in particular or git
in general.  There's a lot of code still under CVS. SVN, BZR, HG, and
other things.  (Eric S. Raymond wrote tools to lift stuff out of CVS
repositories and export to something else [*anything* else...] and is
trying to stamp out CVS, but it will take a while.)

> The question is: why not use e.g. GitHub for FreeDOS related sources?

Effort involved?  Given the diversity of sources, this would require
Jim or someone to create a FreeDOS repository on Github and add all of
the various projects that are included in FreeDOS to the repo.  (And
as a matter of courtesy, agreement by the authors of the programs to
this move would be nice, assuming they are still around to provide
permission.)  Effort would also be needed to make clear entry points
to the sources to produce given binaries, because the user looking for
the source may not be familiar with git.

(An effort elsewhere I'm following is an attempt by a former Busybox
maintainer to replace Busybox with something called Toybox, with
Android as a target.  (One of the  Android devs is a heavy committer.
Android is using something called toolbox internally, and he wants to
replace it.  The Toybox lead prefers Mercurial as source repository,
and has fulminated about how gort does various things...)

If you are willing to undertake the fairly massive effort involved,
drop Jim a note...
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Re: [Freedos-user] entering into the command-line as fast as possible

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:
> But 3(b) in the GNU GPL says source code should be available up to
> three years after they download the binary, upon request.

The problem is that this is generally taken to mean "The source that
produced the particular binary the user has", so that the user can get
the source, reproduce the build environment, and create a duplicate of
the binary they have.

Since the state of the source in an open source product is variable,
current source may not build, let alone duplicate the user's binary,
so you can't just point at the development repository when people
inquire about source.

If you keep older binaries around, the source that produced them is
more or less required.  Your practice looks like the best compromise.
__
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

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Re: [Freedos-user] entering into the command-line as fast as possible

[Jim Hall]

> On Fri, Sep 18 2015 at 10:54pm, dmccunney wrote:
>> Since the state of the source in an open source product is variable,
>> current source may not build, let alone duplicate the user's binary,
>> so you can't just point at the development repository when people
>> inquire about source.
>>
>> If you keep older binaries around, the source that produced them is
>> more or less required.  Your practice looks like the best compromise.
>


On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 4:13 PM,   wrote:
> Excuse me for interjecting, but doesn't a source repository do exactly
> that? If I get GitHub correctly, you can go back to any moment in time
> and download the source as it was at this particular moment.
>
> The question is: why not use e.g. GitHub for FreeDOS related sources?


The issue is that these distributions are assembled from a variety of
sources, not all of which are on GitHub. Some programs may be original
to that distribution, and not from the FreeDOS Project. And some
programs may be small enough that they don't have a source code
repository. So providing the source code is a requirement.

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[Freedos-user] entering into the command-line as fast as possible

[josefh . maier]

Hello list.
I am new to Freedos :-)  Back in the old days of MS-DOS i was used
that after booting a PC with a DOS-floppy, the command line was shown.
 Under FreeDos, I am asked to install to harddisk, or create drive C:

Question: What is the fastest approach (after FreeDos is started from
CD-ROM) to enter DOS-commands?

Any fedback is appreciated very much. Thank you!
Joe

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Re: [Freedos-user] entering into the command-line as fast as possible

[Eric Auer]

Hi Joe,

the difference is that you use some INSTALL disk with FreeDOS.
You want to use a BOOT disk instead :-) That gives you all the
software on the boot disk, without having to install first and
without having to abort the install...

You can try metados or brezel or similar floppy distros. If you
do not have a floppy drive, you can simply use a floppy to make
a bootable CD or DVD, at least with the free Linux k3b burning
software this is easy, so I assume with whatever CD burning tool
you have it should also be easy: Take a floppy image and tell a
CD burning tool to use that to make the CD bootable :-)



Bonus: After booting from the INSTALL CD, you can of course go
and abort the install process, for example by pressing CTRL-C
at the right moment or by pressing F5 during boot. However, it
is likely that the install CD has fewer software ready to use
(as you skip the actual install) compared to a simple boot CD.

In short, what you want is a boot floppy, floppy distro or live
CD, but you can also use a boot floppy or floppy distro to make
a boot CD and you can use the install CD as minimalist boot CD.

Cheers, Eric



www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/
contains metados and several other older distros.

https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/
contains the classic ruffidea distro (1-3 disks of 1.44 MB each
or my variant with the first 2 disks in a single 2.88 MB image,
which you can use for bootable CD or DVD on most computers...)
as well as "bare dos" which is what the name suggests.

PS: Are my old config.sys and autoexec.bat examples still useful?
http://ericauer.cosmodata.virtuaserver.com.br/soft/specials/freedos-config.txt



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Re: [Freedos-user] entering into the command-line as fast as possible

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 11:54 AM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/
> contains metados and several other older distros.

No, it actually doesn't.

About 1.5 years ago, Jim Hall removed (well, "hid") all the other
versions there because they were flawed, old, incomplete,
unmaintained, etc. Which was probably wise, all things considered, but
it's still a minor inconvenience.

That's half the reason I wanted to make MetaDOS at all, just to have
"something" halfway decent to fill the void, "something is better than
nothing."

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Re: [Freedos-user] entering into the command-line as fast as possible

[Mateusz Viste]

You might want to try my "all_cd" live cd (443M). It comes with all the 
latest FreeDOS packages, boots directly into a shell, and allows to 
install FreeDOS on hdd if one wishes to.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.1/repos/all_cd.iso

Mateusz




On 16/09/2015 18:43, josefh.ma...@hushmail.com wrote:
> Hello list.
>
> I am new to Freedos :-)  Back in the old days of MS-DOS i was used that
> after booting a PC with a DOS-floppy,
> the command line was shown.  Under FreeDos, I am asked to install
> to harddisk, or create drive C:
>
>
> Question:
>   What is the fastest approach (after FreeDos is started from CD-ROM) to
> enter DOS-commands?
>
>
> Any fedback is appreciated very much. Thank you!
>
> Joe
>
>
>


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