Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-28 Thread Mateusz Viste
Hi,

UPX appears indeed in two repositories - IIRC I've put it into both 
DEVEL and UTIL, since it seemed to fit both..

Of course I am interested in your isolinux image, although I don't fully 
understand the benefits of using isolinux versus a 'normal' floppy 
emulation?

To create the FDNPKG CD I use mkisofs, and feed it with a raw image of 
the boot floppy I prepared:

mkisofs -input-charset cp437 -b boot.img -iso-level 1 -f -o all_cd.iso 
cdroot

Could you tell how I would use your solution, and what improvements it 
provides?

cheers,
Mateusz




On 07/28/2013 07:19 PM, Bernd Blaauw wrote:
 Rugxulo schreef op 28-7-2013 0:55:

 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/cdrom/uide/

 Yep, that includes XMGR

 Latest of this is actually 2013-05-23 :

 Oops, didn't notice while browsing the archives.

 Again? I don't remember, but yeah, you could argue it belongs in
 UTIL or somewhere else. Dunno, doesn't matter I guess.

 There's a LISTING.TXT on the 400MB CD, generated by some script. It
 mentioned UPX a couple of times.

 Watcom: most recent?

 1.9 has been latest stable for three years now. I haven't been
 following their latest progress, so I don't really know much about it.

 1.5 was listed in above textfile, guess that's the last one Arkady made.
 Thought you had a more recent archive for v1.8 or so.

 Anyway, I got a 2MB ISO file ready of which the content can be added on
 top of the 400MB CD. ISO recreation necessary. It also acts as an
 isolinux-demonstration. I'll mail it to Mateusz if he's interested.

 Old method of bootdisk-emulation also still possible, I don't know by
 which software the 400MB ISO was created and using which parameters for
 that. Anyway, had some fun modifying the bootdisk part slightly :)

 Bernd


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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-28 Thread Rugxulo
Hi,

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Bernd Blaauw bbla...@home.nl wrote:
 Rugxulo schreef op 28-7-2013 0:55:

 1.9 has been latest stable for three years now. I haven't been
 following their latest progress, so I don't really know much about it.

 1.5 was listed in above textfile, guess that's the last one Arkady made.
 Thought you had a more recent archive for v1.8 or so.

Officially, they stopped including separate .ZIPs after 1.3, so
everything after that had to be done manually. Most people never
complained, AFAIK. A quick check shows that Arkady did at least
package up 1.7.1 for us:

http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Alternative_Open_Watcom_distribution

Though I did always think having to download 80 MB .EXE (.ZIP'd with
sfx installer, ~200 MB unpacked) just for the DOS-only portion was
overkill, hence I did make a DOS host/target only .7z file, which
was only 7 MB (or 45 MB unpacked). Though if all you wanted was bare
bones C (and no helpfiles, etc), even this could be a bit much.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/devel/c/openwatcom/1.9/open-watcom-c-dos-1.9.7z

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-27 Thread Bernd Blaauw
Mateusz Viste schreef op 22-7-2013 21:37:


 edit // I examined settings of the virtual machine, and noticed that I
 had set the 'CPU capping' to 30%. I moved the setting to 100%, and then
 the miracle happened - both UDVD2 and FDAPM stopped freezing! I rebooted
 many times to be sure, and it all worked every time.

 Emulation... Bleh :)

That's good, maybe Ulrich could add this info to the wiki.
For VMware, I know using JEMMEX masks a reboot-issue in kernel (or 
FreeCOM) when trying to do a keyboard-reboot-sequence (ctrl-alt-del , 
but in vmware it's ctrl-alt-insert so host OS doesn't catch the combo)

REN CONFIG.SYS CONFIG.OLD results in:
(getting the same issue on FDAPM COLDBOOT. WARMBOOT works, HOTBOOT 
hangs. No JEMMEX HOTBOOT driver present/loaded)

Invalid opcode at FFF0 F000 0002 015C 0F9D 118A 00D9 0008 0070 118A 00D9 
FF53 F000

Cannot terminate permanent FreeCOM instance
System halted ... reboot or power off now



Also went over the CD, seeing the following obvious things:

upx v3.09   http://upx.sf.net
himemx v3.34http://www.japheth.de/Jemm.html
uide 30-april-2013
mtcp: 2013-04-26

DEVEL: contains UPX again

Watcom: most recent?




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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-22 Thread Rugxulo
Hi,

On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Mateusz Viste mate...@viste-family.net wrote:

 On 07/21/2013 07:59 PM, Bernd Blaauw wrote:

 Ouch, thought this was solved, both with and without some custom fixing
 driver. Most recent VirtualBox (4.2.16?) used? Most recent UDVD2.SYS
 used?

 The UDVD2.SYS I used is the latest I could find (from the link you
 provided).

 The VirtualBox I have is the one my distro packaged for me: 4.1.12.
 Maybe this is something that got fixed in newer VBox.. dunno.

I know it's a fairly big download (esp. on slow connection), but you
could download latest directly from their site. They have a fairly big
selection of Linux distro packages (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuSE,
Mandriva), even one (well, x86 or x64) that says all distributions!!
(EDIT: Apparently binaries for all distros are 81 MB in size each.)

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.16/VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Linux_x86.run
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.16/VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Linux_amd64.run

 In worst case, revert to XCDROM but keep UDVD2 around.

 That's exactly what I did. UDVD2 seems really nice. It just can't be a
 default if it can trigger freezes

I'm pretty sure this is fixed in newer versions. I mean, I don't use
VBox much, but even on my painfully slow (no VT-X) laptop, I don't
recall seeing any slowdown at bootup.

BTW, I think there was also a DOS TSR that Eric Auer made for working
around this. I don't know why it wasn't more widely publicized. I
forget where I even got it, and I don't think I ever tested it. Worst
case scenario:  I (or Eric or ...) could email you that for testing.

EDIT: Here is probably where I found it:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=VirtualBox_-_Chapter_8#The_fix

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-22 Thread Mateusz Viste
Hi,

I did updated my VirtualBox install with the latest version available 
(the Oracle one, not the OSE) - 4.2.16. Unfortunately, UDVD2 still 
freezes there for - literally - a minute. It starts booting, and gets 
stuck for ~1 minute on the screen on the screenshot below.

http://www.viste-family.net/mateusz/temp/udvd2_freeze/udvd2_freeze_vbox_4_2_16.png

Then, after a minute it continues to boot happily, and CD access works 
just fine.

Using additional TSRs to solve the issue sounds a bit like a contraption 
to me. Sure, it's technically interesting that such solutions exists, 
but as a simple end user I naturally tend to pick solutions that works 
out of the box, without requiring any additional magic (and XCDROM.SYS 
seems to be such simple solution).

regards,
Mateusz





On 07/22/2013 08:38 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
 Hi,

 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Mateusz Viste mate...@viste-family.net 
 wrote:

 On 07/21/2013 07:59 PM, Bernd Blaauw wrote:

 Ouch, thought this was solved, both with and without some custom fixing
 driver. Most recent VirtualBox (4.2.16?) used? Most recent UDVD2.SYS
 used?

 The UDVD2.SYS I used is the latest I could find (from the link you
 provided).

 The VirtualBox I have is the one my distro packaged for me: 4.1.12.
 Maybe this is something that got fixed in newer VBox.. dunno.

 I know it's a fairly big download (esp. on slow connection), but you
 could download latest directly from their site. They have a fairly big
 selection of Linux distro packages (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuSE,
 Mandriva), even one (well, x86 or x64) that says all distributions!!
 (EDIT: Apparently binaries for all distros are 81 MB in size each.)

 https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

 http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.16/VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Linux_x86.run
 http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.16/VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Linux_amd64.run

 In worst case, revert to XCDROM but keep UDVD2 around.

 That's exactly what I did. UDVD2 seems really nice. It just can't be a
 default if it can trigger freezes

 I'm pretty sure this is fixed in newer versions. I mean, I don't use
 VBox much, but even on my painfully slow (no VT-X) laptop, I don't
 recall seeing any slowdown at bootup.

 BTW, I think there was also a DOS TSR that Eric Auer made for working
 around this. I don't know why it wasn't more widely publicized. I
 forget where I even got it, and I don't think I ever tested it. Worst
 case scenario:  I (or Eric or ...) could email you that for testing.

 EDIT: Here is probably where I found it:

 http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=VirtualBox_-_Chapter_8#The_fix



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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-22 Thread Mateusz Viste
In fact, it doesn't freeze all the time!
Curiously, the behavior of UDVD2 (or VirtualBox, depends of the point of 
view I guess) is quite erratic. I rebooted the VBox machine several 
times. Sometimes it works fine (UDVD2 don't freeze), sometimes it 
freezes for a short moment (like 5-10s), and sometimes it freezes an 
entire minute.

On a side note, it seems that VBox has also some troubles with FDAPM - 
half of the time, when I try FDAPM POWEROFF or FDAPM COLDBOOT, it 
freezes the virtualbox machine instead of actually halting or rebooting.

edit // I examined settings of the virtual machine, and noticed that I 
had set the 'CPU capping' to 30%. I moved the setting to 100%, and then 
the miracle happened - both UDVD2 and FDAPM stopped freezing! I rebooted 
many times to be sure, and it all worked every time.

Emulation... Bleh :)

cheers,
Mateusz





On 07/22/2013 09:26 PM, Mateusz Viste wrote:
 Hi,

 I did updated my VirtualBox install with the latest version available
 (the Oracle one, not the OSE) - 4.2.16. Unfortunately, UDVD2 still
 freezes there for - literally - a minute. It starts booting, and gets
 stuck for ~1 minute on the screen on the screenshot below.

 http://www.viste-family.net/mateusz/temp/udvd2_freeze/udvd2_freeze_vbox_4_2_16.png

 Then, after a minute it continues to boot happily, and CD access works
 just fine.

 Using additional TSRs to solve the issue sounds a bit like a contraption
 to me. Sure, it's technically interesting that such solutions exists,
 but as a simple end user I naturally tend to pick solutions that works
 out of the box, without requiring any additional magic (and XCDROM.SYS
 seems to be such simple solution).

 regards,
 Mateusz





 On 07/22/2013 08:38 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
 Hi,

 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Mateusz Viste mate...@viste-family.net 
 wrote:

 On 07/21/2013 07:59 PM, Bernd Blaauw wrote:

 Ouch, thought this was solved, both with and without some custom fixing
 driver. Most recent VirtualBox (4.2.16?) used? Most recent UDVD2.SYS
 used?

 The UDVD2.SYS I used is the latest I could find (from the link you
 provided).

 The VirtualBox I have is the one my distro packaged for me: 4.1.12.
 Maybe this is something that got fixed in newer VBox.. dunno.

 I know it's a fairly big download (esp. on slow connection), but you
 could download latest directly from their site. They have a fairly big
 selection of Linux distro packages (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuSE,
 Mandriva), even one (well, x86 or x64) that says all distributions!!
 (EDIT: Apparently binaries for all distros are 81 MB in size each.)

 https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

 http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.16/VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Linux_x86.run
 http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.16/VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Linux_amd64.run

 In worst case, revert to XCDROM but keep UDVD2 around.

 That's exactly what I did. UDVD2 seems really nice. It just can't be a
 default if it can trigger freezes

 I'm pretty sure this is fixed in newer versions. I mean, I don't use
 VBox much, but even on my painfully slow (no VT-X) laptop, I don't
 recall seeing any slowdown at bootup.

 BTW, I think there was also a DOS TSR that Eric Auer made for working
 around this. I don't know why it wasn't more widely publicized. I
 forget where I even got it, and I don't think I ever tested it. Worst
 case scenario:  I (or Eric or ...) could email you that for testing.

 EDIT: Here is probably where I found it:

 http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=VirtualBox_-_Chapter_8#The_fix



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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-21 Thread Mateusz Viste
On 07/21/2013 12:06 AM, Bernd Blaauw wrote:
 Mainly the bootdisk programs:
 * kernel: 2036 instead of 2041

Updated to 2041.

 * xcdrom instead of udvd2

But is udvd2 really better than xcdrom ? What is 'user-perceived' 
difference between these two?

 * sys 3.6 instead of 3.7 or 3.8-test

I think I got the sys that was packaged with the kernel 2041 - but I 
will double check this.

 Yes: load error: no DPMI - Get csdpmi*b.zip upon invoking FDNPKG.EXE

Indeed, again testing on DOSemu doesn't showed me this, since DOSemu 
provides its own DPMI service :) And it worked under VirtualBox because 
I had an old HDD image attached on which CWSDPMI happened to be present.

I added CWSDPMI (r7) to the floppy. For future FDNPKG releases, I will 
probably embed CWSDMI into the FDNPKG binary.

 I get errorlevel 64: Error Reading Hard Disk: Search operation failed.
 Program terminated.

 fdisk 1.2.1 works.

As Rugxulo said, I don't know if downgrading is the best solution :/ But 
if it works fine, then it looks like the easiest solution anyway.

 Yes, and a lack of DOS drivers for various controllers/interfaces is the
 main culprit. The CD driver works for IDE and for SATA in legacy mode.
 Now imagine having only an USB CD drive on a system.
 (or something emulating it, like a Zalman hdd-caddy, or ISOSTICK)

Okay, and would changing XCDROM by UDVD2 change anything with these 
problems?

 I mean I basically get lost of how to get a list of available programs I
 can install. A bit of browsing, more or less.
 SEARCH already implies you as a user know what you want.

In fact, 'SEARCH' find all packages that are available for install, and 
matches your search pattern. If you don't provide a search pattern, then 
all available packages are printed.

I was wondering about creating a separate action for this, like LISTPKG 
or something, but though it would be unnecessary... Now I see that it's 
not as obvious as I though it was. If you have troubles it, then I'm 
sure many people will.

 I'm not sure anymore nowadays the goal is installing FreeDOS on a
 dedicated system, but rather to have it available and to use it, when
 necessary. What I mean to say is, people will boot from your CD, then
 find out their harddisk is partitioned 100% already for Windows. Thus,
 no easy way to get a drive C: available.
  Just put SHSURDRV.EXE on the bootdisk image, and you'll get there.

I see your point. Better to ship a binary that in worst case nobody will 
use, than to limit the feature set of the boot image. Shsudrv is really 
small anyway. I will add - but need to package it first and make sure I 
got the latest version.

 Speaking of bootdisk..if people boot from their own boot medium
 (harddisk or some specific floppy) including CD access, they can't run
 FDNPKG as it's not in the data part of the CD ( X: ) but only in the
 bootdisk part (FDBOOT.IMG). A minor inconvenience for example on systems
 that can't boot from CD.

Sounds like a good idea as well. Not as easy as just putting FDNPKG.EXE 
into the CD, since it needs to have a configuration file in a specific 
place, but that's easy to solve - I will look into that.

I updated the floppy image and CD (for now only added CWSDPMI and 
updated kernel):
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.1/repos/

cheers,
Mateusz

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-21 Thread Mateusz Viste
Hi there,

Just like Rugxulo, I'm a bit lost about all these IDE/SATA/PATA stuff, 
until now I was naively assuming that a SATA CD drive is behaving like a 
PATA one, and same drivers will work, and the only difference is at the 
physical level...
By the way, how come that SATA HDD drives works fine without requiring 
any additional drivers then?

Anyway, I tried to replace the xcdrom.sys with udvd2.sys, as I 
understand that the latter have some special magic for supporting SATA 
CD drives, but unfortunately I got some troubles - when UDVD2 loads, it 
freezes the boot for ~1 minute, which is really a pain.

I am testing this inside a VirtualBox machine. I recall some months ago 
(or was it years maybe?) some flames on the list about this problem, but 
don't remember much constructive ideas, other than saying 'virtualbox is 
buggy'.

Is the situation still the same, ie. is there no way to make UDVD start 
faster under VirtualBox? Is there any other driver nowaday that could 
handle IDE/SATA drives and not freeze VBox for a minute?

Of course I don't say UDVD2 is bad (and I certainly don't want to start 
any nuclear war about this), but the fact is that many people test stuff 
under VBox these days, and if a bootable CD freezes 2s after starting 
booting, they won't get any further.

cheers,
Mateusz





On 07/21/2013 02:27 AM, Rugxulo wrote:
 Hi,

 On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Bernd Blaauw bbla...@home.nl wrote:
 Mateusz Viste schreef op 20-7-2013 23:08:

 Could you tell me please which software you see old?

 Mainly the bootdisk programs:
 * kernel: 2036 instead of 2041

 Well, 2036 wasn't exactly horribly buggy nor super old (FD 1.0 in
 2006), but anyways 

 * xcdrom instead of udvd2

 I profess complete ignorance of all the IDE / SATA / PATA confusion. I
 never understood it, but I'm no engineer. Can someone please explain
 which driver is best in which circumstance? By default, I assumed that
 UIDE doesn't support SATA or PATA, only IDE (maybe only via legacy
 mode).

 In particular, GCDROM and XGCDROM are forks of XCDROM (predecessor of UIDE):

 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/cdrom/gcdrom/
 http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/xcdrom/

 I'm 99% sure that Jack Ellis would strongly recommend against those
 forks since they are based upon older, buggy code. But I'm not sure if
 they somehow work better in non-IDE instances.

 * missing CWSDPMI.EXE apparently

 Yes, cwsdpmi is not on the boot floppy. Mostly because it's not needed -
 have you run into any kind of troubles because of the lack of cwsdpmi?

 Yes: load error: no DPMI - Get csdpmi*b.zip upon invoking FDNPKG.EXE

 Was this intentional or just to avoid swapping to floppy or ... ? Of
 course, you can bind CWSDSTUB.EXE to the .EXE (and/or use CWSPARAM to
 disable swapping entirely). It's still fairly small.

 What's happening exactly? I'm not really a VMware aficionado, never
 tested FreeDOS with this. Is it some kind of a 'known bug' specific to
 FDISK and VMware? What solution would you suggest?

 I get errorlevel 64: Error Reading Hard Disk: Search operation failed.
 Program terminated.

 fdisk 1.2.1 works.

 Meh. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Perhaps one of us needs to ping
 Brian R. again?

 Or you could (should?) also include / try XFDISK and/or SPFdisk ??

 Emulators make things difficult. Dosbox and Rpix86 have very strange
 behaviour for driveletters, filesystems and memory behaviour.

 DOSBox has its own DOS and doesn't use FreeDOS. Unless you're thinking
 of BOOT?

 Rpix86 presumably means something like QEMU on Raspberry PI. (QEMU
 still has various bugs regarding segmentation, probably since it's not
 needed for Linux emulation.)

 Is it because of the XCDROM.SYS ? I'm no expert here, but aren't SATA CD
 drives acting as some kind of 'emulated IDE' ? Or does it mean that the
 boot image would need a special SATA driver, and some detection logic to
 load the right driver? This starts to sound complicated :P

 Yes, and a lack of DOS drivers for various controllers/interfaces is the
 main culprit. The CD driver works for IDE and for SATA in legacy mode.
 Now imagine having only an USB CD drive on a system.
 (or something emulating it, like a Zalman hdd-caddy, or ISOSTICK)

 Didn't someone integrate eltorito.sys into isolinux a few years ago?
 Doesn't that help somewhat?

 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/syslinux/

 I'm not sure anymore nowadays the goal is installing FreeDOS on a
 dedicated system, but rather to have it available and to use it, when
 necessary. What I mean to say is, people will boot from your CD, then
 find out their harddisk is partitioned 100% already for Windows. Thus,
 no easy way to get a drive C: available.

 Unavoidable without some (limited) NTFS driver. Maybe GRUB4DOS can
 boot a DOS image file created as one contiguous block file? But how to
 create that ... dunno, someone may have to write it (not me!).


Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-21 Thread Mateusz Viste
A quick additional note:

Out of pure curiosity, I configured the CD drive in my VirtualBox 
FreeDOS machine as being a SATA one (that is, attached to a SATA / AHCI 
controller).
Unfortunately, both XCDROM.SYS and UDVD2.SYS failed to recognize it.

So for the time being I will put back XCDROM in the FDNPKG bootable CD, 
which has the advantage to not freeze under VirtualBox...

cheers,
Mateusz





On 07/21/2013 06:45 PM, Mateusz Viste wrote:
 Hi there,

 Just like Rugxulo, I'm a bit lost about all these IDE/SATA/PATA stuff,
 until now I was naively assuming that a SATA CD drive is behaving like a
 PATA one, and same drivers will work, and the only difference is at the
 physical level...
 By the way, how come that SATA HDD drives works fine without requiring
 any additional drivers then?

 Anyway, I tried to replace the xcdrom.sys with udvd2.sys, as I
 understand that the latter have some special magic for supporting SATA
 CD drives, but unfortunately I got some troubles - when UDVD2 loads, it
 freezes the boot for ~1 minute, which is really a pain.

 I am testing this inside a VirtualBox machine. I recall some months ago
 (or was it years maybe?) some flames on the list about this problem, but
 don't remember much constructive ideas, other than saying 'virtualbox is
 buggy'.

 Is the situation still the same, ie. is there no way to make UDVD start
 faster under VirtualBox? Is there any other driver nowaday that could
 handle IDE/SATA drives and not freeze VBox for a minute?

 Of course I don't say UDVD2 is bad (and I certainly don't want to start
 any nuclear war about this), but the fact is that many people test stuff
 under VBox these days, and if a bootable CD freezes 2s after starting
 booting, they won't get any further.

 cheers,
 Mateusz





 On 07/21/2013 02:27 AM, Rugxulo wrote:
 Hi,

 On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Bernd Blaauw bbla...@home.nl wrote:
 Mateusz Viste schreef op 20-7-2013 23:08:

 Could you tell me please which software you see old?

 Mainly the bootdisk programs:
 * kernel: 2036 instead of 2041

 Well, 2036 wasn't exactly horribly buggy nor super old (FD 1.0 in
 2006), but anyways 

 * xcdrom instead of udvd2

 I profess complete ignorance of all the IDE / SATA / PATA confusion. I
 never understood it, but I'm no engineer. Can someone please explain
 which driver is best in which circumstance? By default, I assumed that
 UIDE doesn't support SATA or PATA, only IDE (maybe only via legacy
 mode).

 In particular, GCDROM and XGCDROM are forks of XCDROM (predecessor of UIDE):

 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/cdrom/gcdrom/
 http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/xcdrom/

 I'm 99% sure that Jack Ellis would strongly recommend against those
 forks since they are based upon older, buggy code. But I'm not sure if
 they somehow work better in non-IDE instances.

 * missing CWSDPMI.EXE apparently

 Yes, cwsdpmi is not on the boot floppy. Mostly because it's not needed -
 have you run into any kind of troubles because of the lack of cwsdpmi?

 Yes: load error: no DPMI - Get csdpmi*b.zip upon invoking FDNPKG.EXE

 Was this intentional or just to avoid swapping to floppy or ... ? Of
 course, you can bind CWSDSTUB.EXE to the .EXE (and/or use CWSPARAM to
 disable swapping entirely). It's still fairly small.

 What's happening exactly? I'm not really a VMware aficionado, never
 tested FreeDOS with this. Is it some kind of a 'known bug' specific to
 FDISK and VMware? What solution would you suggest?

 I get errorlevel 64: Error Reading Hard Disk: Search operation failed.
 Program terminated.

 fdisk 1.2.1 works.

 Meh. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Perhaps one of us needs to ping
 Brian R. again?

 Or you could (should?) also include / try XFDISK and/or SPFdisk ??

 Emulators make things difficult. Dosbox and Rpix86 have very strange
 behaviour for driveletters, filesystems and memory behaviour.

 DOSBox has its own DOS and doesn't use FreeDOS. Unless you're thinking
 of BOOT?

 Rpix86 presumably means something like QEMU on Raspberry PI. (QEMU
 still has various bugs regarding segmentation, probably since it's not
 needed for Linux emulation.)

 Is it because of the XCDROM.SYS ? I'm no expert here, but aren't SATA CD
 drives acting as some kind of 'emulated IDE' ? Or does it mean that the
 boot image would need a special SATA driver, and some detection logic to
 load the right driver? This starts to sound complicated :P

 Yes, and a lack of DOS drivers for various controllers/interfaces is the
 main culprit. The CD driver works for IDE and for SATA in legacy mode.
 Now imagine having only an USB CD drive on a system.
 (or something emulating it, like a Zalman hdd-caddy, or ISOSTICK)

 Didn't someone integrate eltorito.sys into isolinux a few years ago?
 Doesn't that help somewhat?

 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/syslinux/

 I'm not sure anymore nowadays the goal is installing FreeDOS on a
 

Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-21 Thread Bernd Blaauw
Mateusz Viste schreef op 21-7-2013 18:45:

 Just like Rugxulo, I'm a bit lost about all these IDE/SATA/PATA stuff,
 until now I was naively assuming that a SATA CD drive is behaving like a
 PATA one, and same drivers will work, and the only difference is at the
 physical level...

You're right. IDE can be configured as PIO or UDMA, SATA can be 
configured in AHCI or IDE (legacy) mode.

That still doesn't take into account other interfaces/controllers:
* SCSI
* FireWire
* USB
* parallel port
* serial port
* soundcards
* specific interface cards

All of these can have a CD drive attached to them. Remember Iomega's 
zipdrives having lots of different drivers

 By the way, how come that SATA HDD drives works fine without requiring
 any additional drivers then?

Ancient BIOS int13 compatibility causes your bootdrive to be listed as 
drive 0x80, and DOS kernel assigns driveletters to partitions on it, 
starting with C:.

Same as some small capacity removable drives (ZIP, USBstick) could be 
listed as drive A: , and high capacity ones as drive C:


 Anyway, I tried to replace the xcdrom.sys with udvd2.sys, as I
 understand that the latter have some special magic for supporting SATA
 CD drives, but unfortunately I got some troubles - when UDVD2 loads, it
 freezes the boot for ~1 minute, which is really a pain.

Ouch, thought this was solved, both with and without some custom fixing 
driver. Most recent VirtualBox (4.2.16?) used? Most recent UDVD2.SYS 
used? 
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/cdrom/uide/drivers-2013-04-30.zip

In worst case, revert to XCDROM but keep UDVD2 around. Also add 
SYSLINUX's ELTORITO.SYS driver on the disk if you want. That one is very 
specific though, and only grants access to the most recent ISO9660 
filesystem that you booted from in non-emulation mode (as used by 
Isolinux and GRUB). Thus only grants access to 1 'cd-drive' no matter 
what interface you booted it from.
(but even that can be broken, if replacing BIOS USB emulation stack by 
an own USB driver stack in DOS).

Your CD is in floppy-emulation mode however, trying to explain how to 
add isolinux is a slight nightmare though, same for trying to explain 
how to make it bootable.

 I am testing this inside a VirtualBox machine. I recall some months ago
 (or was it years maybe?) some flames on the list about this problem, but
 don't remember much constructive ideas, other than saying 'virtualbox is
 buggy'.

Incomplete emulation isn't much fun. Every emulator has its own quircks.

 Is the situation still the same, ie. is there no way to make UDVD start
 faster under VirtualBox? Is there any other driver nowaday that could
 handle IDE/SATA drives and not freeze VBox for a minute?

Keep what you have if that proves to be better. Ideal loading order 
would be:
1) ELTORITO.SYS
2) if fails, load XCDROM

 Of course I don't say UDVD2 is bad (and I certainly don't want to start
 any nuclear war about this), but the fact is that many people test stuff
 under VBox these days, and if a bootable CD freezes 2s after starting
 booting, they won't get any further.

You're right.

I've not tried to use RUFUS on your ISO to get its content onto USB 
flash drive. A step too far for now :)

Bernd

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-21 Thread Mateusz Viste
Hello,

On 07/21/2013 07:59 PM, Bernd Blaauw wrote:
 All of these can have a CD drive attached to them. Remember Iomega's
 zipdrives having lots of different drivers

Okay, I understand now. The whole thing is not much about CDROM drives, 
but rather on any possible substitute that people can use. It's all 
clear now - thanks!

 Ouch, thought this was solved, both with and without some custom fixing
 driver. Most recent VirtualBox (4.2.16?) used? Most recent UDVD2.SYS
 used?
 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/cdrom/uide/drivers-2013-04-30.zip

The UDVD2.SYS I used is the latest I could find (from the link you 
provided).

The VirtualBox I have is the one my distro packaged for me: 4.1.12. 
Maybe this is something that got fixed in newer VBox.. dunno.

 In worst case, revert to XCDROM but keep UDVD2 around.

That's exactly what I did. UDVD2 seems really nice. It just can't be a 
default if it can trigger freezes

cheers,
Mateusz

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-20 Thread Bernd Blaauw
Mateusz Viste schreef op 19-7-2013 20:54:

 This makes it possible to use this CD on a clean PC to install the
 latest version of FreeDOS. There is no installer - you need to use
 FDISK, FORMAT and SYS by yourself. Then use FDNPKG to install whatever
 packages you need.

Thanks for making this available Mateusz!

I'm running into a few issues here:
* old versions of software (or is this to demo the updater? ).
* missing CWSDPMI.EXE apparently
* FDNPKG exits on SIGSERV on many commands
* FDISK 1.3.1 doesn't like VMware Workstation 9.
* bootCD only compatible with optical drives on IDE controller.
* old CD drivers used, maybe UDVD2
* any (working) usage examples for FDNPKG available?
* harddisk (with FAT partition) required. SHSURDRV works on systems with 
enough RAM, as your config loads XMS/EMS/UMB/HMA anyway already.

 I haven't tested it thoroughly (just verified that I am able to boot and
 install at least one package), so please not hesitate to report any
 problems (solutions to these problems are welcome, too). ;)

Could you also please make available the 1.44MB bootdisk image used in 
the CD? Some people like to butcher (ehm..optimize) this, without 
downloading the entire ISO.

Bernd



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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-20 Thread Mateusz Viste
Hi Bernd, nice to see you're still around!

On 07/20/2013 06:57 PM, Bernd Blaauw wrote:
 * old versions of software (or is this to demo the updater? ).

Nope, not a 'demo' purpose at all. It's all supposed to be pretty up to 
date :/
Could you tell me please which software you see old?

 * missing CWSDPMI.EXE apparently

Yes, cwsdpmi is not on the boot floppy. Mostly because it's not needed - 
have you run into any kind of troubles because of the lack of cwsdpmi?

 * FDNPKG exits on SIGSERV on many commands

You are right indeed, shame on me!
There was a nasty bug related to memory management in FDNPKG (precisely 
at the very end, when FDNPKG was trying to be nice and free all his memory).

Curiously this bug never triggered any crash under DOSemu - I had to run 
a VirtualBox machine to reproduce the problem.

Anyway, I fixed it, and updated the binary on the boot image. The bugfix 
will be part of the next FDNPKG release (which should happen soon by the 
way).

 * FDISK 1.3.1 doesn't like VMware Workstation 9.

What's happening exactly? I'm not really a VMware aficionado, never 
tested FreeDOS with this. Is it some kind of a 'known bug' specific to 
FDISK and VMware? What solution would you suggest?

 * bootCD only compatible with optical drives on IDE controller.

Is it because of the XCDROM.SYS ? I'm no expert here, but aren't SATA CD 
drives acting as some kind of 'emulated IDE' ? Or does it mean that the 
boot image would need a special SATA driver, and some detection logic to 
load the right driver? This starts to sound complicated :P

 * any (working) usage examples for FDNPKG available?

I think you got lost because of the memory bug. Now that it's fixed, 
FDNPKG usage should be quite intuitive.

Basic operations are:

Search for package
   FDNPKG SEARCH [searchstring]

Install a package
   FDNPKG INSTALL pkgname

A help is also available if you run FDNPKG without any parameters. Let 
me know if anything is not clear - I will try to improve the help then.

 * harddisk (with FAT partition) required. SHSURDRV works on systems with
 enough RAM, as your config loads XMS/EMS/UMB/HMA anyway already.

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying.. Yes, a harddisk is 
required indeed... since the goal is to install FreeDOS on a hdd.
Are you suggesting emulating a C: drive with a RAMdisk, and installing 
FreeDOS there? What would be the real life use case? Are you thinking 
about some kind of full-blown automated FreeDOS RAM-powered livecd, like 
what Knoppix does with the 'toram' boot option?

 Could you also please make available the 1.44MB bootdisk image used in
 the CD? Some people like to butcher (ehm..optimize) this, without
 downloading the entire ISO.

That's a very good point - I will synch since now on the floppy image on 
iBiblio separately, too. It's named 'boot.img', and it's in the same 
location as the CD image:

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

cheers,
Mateusz

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-20 Thread Bernd Blaauw
Mateusz Viste schreef op 20-7-2013 23:08:

 Could you tell me please which software you see old?

Mainly the bootdisk programs:
* kernel: 2036 instead of 2041
* xcdrom instead of udvd2
* sys 3.6 instead of 3.7 or 3.8-test

 * missing CWSDPMI.EXE apparently

 Yes, cwsdpmi is not on the boot floppy. Mostly because it's not needed -
 have you run into any kind of troubles because of the lack of cwsdpmi?

Yes: load error: no DPMI - Get csdpmi*b.zip upon invoking FDNPKG.EXE

 Anyway, I fixed it, and updated the binary on the boot image. The bugfix
 will be part of the next FDNPKG release (which should happen soon by the
 way).

Thanks for fixing.


 What's happening exactly? I'm not really a VMware aficionado, never
 tested FreeDOS with this. Is it some kind of a 'known bug' specific to
 FDISK and VMware? What solution would you suggest?

I get errorlevel 64: Error Reading Hard Disk: Search operation failed. 
Program terminated.

fdisk 1.2.1 works.

Emulators make things difficult. Dosbox and Rpix86 have very strange 
behaviour for driveletters, filesystems and memory behaviour.

 Is it because of the XCDROM.SYS ? I'm no expert here, but aren't SATA CD
 drives acting as some kind of 'emulated IDE' ? Or does it mean that the
 boot image would need a special SATA driver, and some detection logic to
 load the right driver? This starts to sound complicated :P

Yes, and a lack of DOS drivers for various controllers/interfaces is the 
main culprit. The CD driver works for IDE and for SATA in legacy mode. 
Now imagine having only an USB CD drive on a system.
(or something emulating it, like a Zalman hdd-caddy, or ISOSTICK)


But do keep things simple, better a mostly-working environment that's 
released, instead of something over-engineered but never-released (like 
I have).

 I think you got lost because of the memory bug. Now that it's fixed,
 FDNPKG usage should be quite intuitive.

I mean I basically get lost of how to get a list of available programs I 
can install. A bit of browsing, more or less.
SEARCH already implies you as a user know what you want.

 I'm not sure I understand what you are saying.. Yes, a harddisk is
 required indeed... since the goal is to install FreeDOS on a hdd.

I'm not sure anymore nowadays the goal is installing FreeDOS on a 
dedicated system, but rather to have it available and to use it, when 
necessary. What I mean to say is, people will boot from your CD, then 
find out their harddisk is partitioned 100% already for Windows. Thus, 
no easy way to get a drive C: available.

 Are you suggesting emulating a C: drive with a RAMdisk, and installing
 FreeDOS there? What would be the real life use case? Are you thinking
 about some kind of full-blown automated FreeDOS RAM-powered livecd, like
 what Knoppix does with the 'toram' boot option?

Just put SHSURDRV.EXE on the bootdisk image, and you'll get there. 
Speaking of bootdisk..if people boot from their own boot medium 
(harddisk or some specific floppy) including CD access, they can't run 
FDNPKG as it's not in the data part of the CD ( X: ) but only in the 
bootdisk part (FDBOOT.IMG). A minor inconvenience for example on systems 
that can't boot from CD.

 That's a very good point - I will synch since now on the floppy image on
 iBiblio separately, too. It's named 'boot.img', and it's in the same
 location as the CD image:

Thanks! I'll get the FDNPKG from there.

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



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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-20 Thread Rugxulo
Hi,

On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Bernd Blaauw bbla...@home.nl wrote:
 Mateusz Viste schreef op 20-7-2013 23:08:

 Could you tell me please which software you see old?

 Mainly the bootdisk programs:
 * kernel: 2036 instead of 2041

Well, 2036 wasn't exactly horribly buggy nor super old (FD 1.0 in
2006), but anyways 

 * xcdrom instead of udvd2

I profess complete ignorance of all the IDE / SATA / PATA confusion. I
never understood it, but I'm no engineer. Can someone please explain
which driver is best in which circumstance? By default, I assumed that
UIDE doesn't support SATA or PATA, only IDE (maybe only via legacy
mode).

In particular, GCDROM and XGCDROM are forks of XCDROM (predecessor of UIDE):

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/cdrom/gcdrom/
http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/xcdrom/

I'm 99% sure that Jack Ellis would strongly recommend against those
forks since they are based upon older, buggy code. But I'm not sure if
they somehow work better in non-IDE instances.

 * missing CWSDPMI.EXE apparently

 Yes, cwsdpmi is not on the boot floppy. Mostly because it's not needed -
 have you run into any kind of troubles because of the lack of cwsdpmi?

 Yes: load error: no DPMI - Get csdpmi*b.zip upon invoking FDNPKG.EXE

Was this intentional or just to avoid swapping to floppy or ... ? Of
course, you can bind CWSDSTUB.EXE to the .EXE (and/or use CWSPARAM to
disable swapping entirely). It's still fairly small.

 What's happening exactly? I'm not really a VMware aficionado, never
 tested FreeDOS with this. Is it some kind of a 'known bug' specific to
 FDISK and VMware? What solution would you suggest?

 I get errorlevel 64: Error Reading Hard Disk: Search operation failed.
 Program terminated.

 fdisk 1.2.1 works.

Meh. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Perhaps one of us needs to ping
Brian R. again?

Or you could (should?) also include / try XFDISK and/or SPFdisk ??

 Emulators make things difficult. Dosbox and Rpix86 have very strange
 behaviour for driveletters, filesystems and memory behaviour.

DOSBox has its own DOS and doesn't use FreeDOS. Unless you're thinking
of BOOT?

Rpix86 presumably means something like QEMU on Raspberry PI. (QEMU
still has various bugs regarding segmentation, probably since it's not
needed for Linux emulation.)

 Is it because of the XCDROM.SYS ? I'm no expert here, but aren't SATA CD
 drives acting as some kind of 'emulated IDE' ? Or does it mean that the
 boot image would need a special SATA driver, and some detection logic to
 load the right driver? This starts to sound complicated :P

 Yes, and a lack of DOS drivers for various controllers/interfaces is the
 main culprit. The CD driver works for IDE and for SATA in legacy mode.
 Now imagine having only an USB CD drive on a system.
 (or something emulating it, like a Zalman hdd-caddy, or ISOSTICK)

Didn't someone integrate eltorito.sys into isolinux a few years ago?
Doesn't that help somewhat?

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/syslinux/

 I'm not sure anymore nowadays the goal is installing FreeDOS on a
 dedicated system, but rather to have it available and to use it, when
 necessary. What I mean to say is, people will boot from your CD, then
 find out their harddisk is partitioned 100% already for Windows. Thus,
 no easy way to get a drive C: available.

Unavoidable without some (limited) NTFS driver. Maybe GRUB4DOS can
boot a DOS image file created as one contiguous block file? But how to
create that ... dunno, someone may have to write it (not me!).

But anyways, Windows since Vista lets you optionally resize the NTFS
partition, so it's no big deal. (Also RUFUS can install FreeDOS to
bootable USB stick.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-20 Thread Chris Evans
I thought  uide was a dma version of IDE pio mode? It works on the atapi io
ports..

-Chris
Http://tawhakisoft.com/


On Saturday, July 20, 2013, Rugxulo wrote:

 Hi,

 On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Bernd Blaauw bbla...@home.nljavascript:;
 wrote:
  Mateusz Viste schreef op 20-7-2013 23:08:
 
  Could you tell me please which software you see old?
 
  Mainly the bootdisk programs:
  * kernel: 2036 instead of 2041

 Well, 2036 wasn't exactly horribly buggy nor super old (FD 1.0 in
 2006), but anyways 

  * xcdrom instead of udvd2

 I profess complete ignorance of all the IDE / SATA / PATA confusion. I
 never understood it, but I'm no engineer. Can someone please explain
 which driver is best in which circumstance? By default, I assumed that
 UIDE doesn't support SATA or PATA, only IDE (maybe only via legacy
 mode).

 In particular, GCDROM and XGCDROM are forks of XCDROM (predecessor of
 UIDE):

 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/cdrom/gcdrom/
 http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/xcdrom/

 I'm 99% sure that Jack Ellis would strongly recommend against those
 forks since they are based upon older, buggy code. But I'm not sure if
 they somehow work better in non-IDE instances.

  * missing CWSDPMI.EXE apparently
 
  Yes, cwsdpmi is not on the boot floppy. Mostly because it's not needed -
  have you run into any kind of troubles because of the lack of cwsdpmi?
 
  Yes: load error: no DPMI - Get csdpmi*b.zip upon invoking FDNPKG.EXE

 Was this intentional or just to avoid swapping to floppy or ... ? Of
 course, you can bind CWSDSTUB.EXE to the .EXE (and/or use CWSPARAM to
 disable swapping entirely). It's still fairly small.

  What's happening exactly? I'm not really a VMware aficionado, never
  tested FreeDOS with this. Is it some kind of a 'known bug' specific to
  FDISK and VMware? What solution would you suggest?
 
  I get errorlevel 64: Error Reading Hard Disk: Search operation failed.
  Program terminated.
 
  fdisk 1.2.1 works.

 Meh. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Perhaps one of us needs to ping
 Brian R. again?

 Or you could (should?) also include / try XFDISK and/or SPFdisk ??

  Emulators make things difficult. Dosbox and Rpix86 have very strange
  behaviour for driveletters, filesystems and memory behaviour.

 DOSBox has its own DOS and doesn't use FreeDOS. Unless you're thinking
 of BOOT?

 Rpix86 presumably means something like QEMU on Raspberry PI. (QEMU
 still has various bugs regarding segmentation, probably since it's not
 needed for Linux emulation.)

  Is it because of the XCDROM.SYS ? I'm no expert here, but aren't SATA CD
  drives acting as some kind of 'emulated IDE' ? Or does it mean that the
  boot image would need a special SATA driver, and some detection logic to
  load the right driver? This starts to sound complicated :P
 
  Yes, and a lack of DOS drivers for various controllers/interfaces is the
  main culprit. The CD driver works for IDE and for SATA in legacy mode.
  Now imagine having only an USB CD drive on a system.
  (or something emulating it, like a Zalman hdd-caddy, or ISOSTICK)

 Didn't someone integrate eltorito.sys into isolinux a few years ago?
 Doesn't that help somewhat?

 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/syslinux/

  I'm not sure anymore nowadays the goal is installing FreeDOS on a
  dedicated system, but rather to have it available and to use it, when
  necessary. What I mean to say is, people will boot from your CD, then
  find out their harddisk is partitioned 100% already for Windows. Thus,
  no easy way to get a drive C: available.

 Unavoidable without some (limited) NTFS driver. Maybe GRUB4DOS can
 boot a DOS image file created as one contiguous block file? But how to
 create that ... dunno, someone may have to write it (not me!).

 But anyways, Windows since Vista lets you optionally resize the NTFS
 partition, so it's no big deal. (Also RUFUS can install FreeDOS to
 bootable USB stick.)


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[Freedos-user] FreeDOS FDNPKG install CD

2013-07-19 Thread Mateusz Viste
Hi all,

Some times ago I announced that I will always keep an up-to-date CD 
version of all FDNPKG repositories, so everyone could download the CD 
and use it as an offline set of repositories to install/update packages.

Yesterday I created a small FreeDOS boot image and added it to the CD. 
So now, the FDNPKG repositories CD is a bootable CD that boots into a 
minimalistic FreeDOS system with a few tools (FDISK, FORMAT, EDIT, 
SYS...) and FDNPKG.

This makes it possible to use this CD on a clean PC to install the 
latest version of FreeDOS. There is no installer - you need to use 
FDISK, FORMAT and SYS by yourself. Then use FDNPKG to install whatever 
packages you need.

After booting, a short instruction is displayed about how to install 
FreeDOS.

This is not an ideal solution, but I believe it might come handy.

The CD is available here (all_cd.iso):
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.1/repos/

I haven't tested it thoroughly (just verified that I am able to boot and 
install at least one package), so please not hesitate to report any 
problems (solutions to these problems are welcome, too). ;)

cheers,
Mateusz

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