Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's A Fantasy of a future...
Folks, this guy stated he was kicked off some forums, seems he came here for another confrontation, I for one would not give him that. Ron Spruell Sr. -Original Message- From: Liam Proven [mailto:lpro...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2010 7:01 AM To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's A Fantasy of a future... On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 3:58 AM, Michael C. Robinson plu...@robinson-west.com wrote: On Wed, 2010-04-14 at 11:53 +0100, Liam Proven wrote: They have got a very long way and it's a tremendously impressive project. You do them a grave disservice by criticising bad-mouthing them thus. Where did I bad mouth anyone in my statements? I simply stated that ReactOS could remain an alpha OS for 10+ years easily. ReactOS might stay in alpha state forever. As far as putting up what people said on the reactos channel being bad mouthing, that would only be true if I had modified the transcript on my web site. -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's A Fantasy of a future...
As I said in a separate post, Please drop this discussion. Pat Villani Project Coordinator On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Ron Spruell Sr. sprue...@bellsouth.netwrote: Folks, this guy stated he was kicked off some forums, seems he came here for another confrontation, I for one would not give him that. Ron Spruell Sr. -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's A Fantasy of a future...
ReactOS is neither a stable nor potentially even a promising project anymore depending on who you talk to. Sadly, I got kicked off of the forum boards and the IRC channel. I haven't been back since. I don't like when people say, ReactOS is cloning Windows under the GPL and this work doesn't need to be done, because the job isn't getting done. ReactOS could stay in alpha easily for another 10+ years because there are not enough developers and possibly the developers that are working on ReactOS don't have all of the needed skill sets let enough enough time to dedicate to the project. ReactOS isn't going to be a Windows replacement that runs on top of Freedos. Suggesting that ReactOS run on top of Freedos on any of the ReactOS forums or the ReactOS IRC channel will bring down a lot of criticism upon you and most likely more than you can handle. ReactOS quite honestly is seemingly being pushed by rabid anti theists and there is a strong mob mentality on issues of how to do things. The GCC verses MSVC debate comes to mind. I went by nute on the ReactOS forums. Look and you can see how dicey things got. There is the Linux Unified Kernel project, but how well that will allow people to run Windows programs on a Linux system directly is yet to be seen. I bet that LUK has a better chance of working than ReactOS quite honestly. Steer clear of the reactos irc channel, there is no moderating and there is a horrific and horrendous mob mentality. I would like a direct replacement for Windows 98SE which supports a lot of games and other software that is now orphanware. There is hardware for Windows 9x that doesn't work on NT based versions of Windows. I realize that this is not a Freedos 1.1 thing or potentially even a Freedos 3.0 thing. An alternative is to revive Freedos 32 and develop a simple GUI for it that will attract open source programmers. -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's A Fantasy of a future...
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 8:38 AM, Michael C. Robinson plu...@robinson-west.com wrote: ReactOS is neither a stable nor potentially even a promising project anymore depending on who you talk to. Sadly, I got kicked off of the forum boards and the IRC channel. I haven't been back since. I don't like when people say, ReactOS is cloning Windows under the GPL and this work doesn't need to be done, because the job isn't getting done. ReactOS could stay in alpha easily for another 10+ years because there are not enough developers and possibly the developers that are working on ReactOS don't have all of the needed skill sets let enough enough time to dedicate to the project. They have got a very long way and it's a tremendously impressive project. You do them a grave disservice by criticising bad-mouthing them thus. I also think it's a pointless, futile unproductive effort and a colossal waste of work by a lot of smart, dedicated people. ReactOS isn't going to be a Windows replacement that runs on top of Freedos. No, and a very good job to. Suggesting that ReactOS run on top of Freedos on any of the ReactOS forums or the ReactOS IRC channel will bring down a lot of criticism upon you and most likely more than you can handle. And they are absolutely right to do so. It is a ridiculous idea. ReactOS quite honestly is seemingly being pushed by rabid anti theists What the...? What have their religious beliefs got to do with anything? As it happens, I am an evangelistic anti-theist myself, but this is utterly irrelevant to any technical discussion whatsoever. and there is a strong mob mentality on issues of how to do things. Well, there are a whole bunch of people doing stuff and 10x as many who contribute nothing but want to tell them how to proceed. I can understand how why they'd get annoyed. The GCC verses MSVC debate comes to mind. Well, I reckon they should be using GCC myself, but then, the whole project is instant toast if MS ever notices it anyway. I went by nute on the ReactOS forums. Look and you can see how dicey things got. Ahhh, I remember reading some of that. *You* were that trouble-maker, were you? [Laughs] There is the Linux Unified Kernel project, but how well that will allow people to run Windows programs on a Linux system directly is yet to be seen. I bet that LUK has a better chance of working than ReactOS quite honestly. It has a snowball's chance in a supernova. Steer clear of the reactos irc channel, there is no moderating and there is a horrific and horrendous mob mentality. I would like a direct replacement for Windows 98SE which supports a lot of games and other software that is now orphanware. Absurd. You apparently have no conception of the amount of work code involved, and why on earth would a whole team of volunteers spend years cloning a large, complex, obsolete dead OS that was already technically irrelevant a decade ago? I'm suggesting cloning something that was 200KB in size which came from a dead company who no longer even have the sources. You're suggesting something that is around TWO THOUSAND TIMES BIGGER and represented 15Y of work to create, from a very large, aggressive, threatening company which is still trading, is selling a derived product under the same name, and which is famed for attacking rivals putting them out of business. You need professional psychiatric help if you think that's a good idea. There is hardware for Windows 9x that doesn't work on NT based versions of Windows. Then use Win9x and stop complaining. I realize that this is not a Freedos 1.1 thing or potentially even a Freedos 3.0 thing. An alternative is to revive Freedos 32 and develop a simple GUI for it that will attract open source programmers. Thus completely ignoring and failing to address my reasoned argument why that would be a bad idea. Gd... -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lpro...@gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508 -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's A Fantasy of a future...
Liam Proven wrote: why on earth would a whole team of volunteers spend years cloning a large, complex, obsolete dead OS that was already technically irrelevant a decade ago? This is one interesting point to mention, especially to this mailing list. :-) -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's A Fantasy of a future...
Op 14-4-2010 9:38, Michael C. Robinson schreef: I went by nute on the ReactOS forums. Look and you can see how dicey things got. Ah I remember reading those threads you started, with asking over and over again whenever a new/next release would come out. They're releasing more often than FreeDOS at least. I think they got more people working on it. The thing the FreeDOS distribution needs is a better installer program (requires real programming), updated packages (boring as hell, I don't even like to put research into commandline options to archivers anymore nowadays) and bugfixing. Anyway, ReactOS has multiple near-daily built ISO9660 cd-image files available which you can test in an emulator. Sadly they only allow installation from CDROM yet still, no USB, harddisk or network installation options yet. A matter of priority and programming time I guess. Their releases feature a LiveCD, an installation CD with trunk builds and something called ARWINSS, which would be some kind of use of WINE (same way of usage as Linux does). This latest thing is claimed to be best chance to get ReactOS in a usable state. Anyway, we're on a FreeDOS development mailinglist. I'll save my efforts of dualbooting FreeDOS and ReactOS for whenever I got more time off work and get bored enough to actually spend time on FreeDOS. Lack of opensource ASPI driver and packet drivers for recent network cards is demotivating if you want to try to get anything done :) Then again, something like http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=7843 is very motivating (general BIOS flashing program FLASHROM ported from Coreboot/Linux to DOS, seems UPX-compressible but might be dangerous) Same for the opensource ELTORITO driver. I would like a direct replacement for Windows 98SE which supports a lot of games and other software that is now orphanware. There is hardware for Windows 9x that doesn't work on NT based versions of Windows. I realize that this is not a Freedos 1.1 thing or potentially even a Freedos 3.0 thing. An alternative is to revive Freedos 32 and develop a simple GUI for it that will attract open source programmers. Not worthwile I guess, use Windows98. There's not even a replacement yet for Win3.1 -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's A Fantasy of a future...
On Wed, 2010-04-14 at 11:53 +0100, Liam Proven wrote: On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 8:38 AM, Michael C. Robinson plu...@robinson-west.com wrote: ReactOS is neither a stable nor potentially even a promising project anymore depending on who you talk to. Sadly, I got kicked off of the forum boards and the IRC channel. I haven't been back since. I don't like when people say, ReactOS is cloning Windows under the GPL and this work doesn't need to be done, because the job isn't getting done. ReactOS could stay in alpha easily for another 10+ years because there are not enough developers and possibly the developers that are working on ReactOS don't have all of the needed skill sets let enough enough time to dedicate to the project. They have got a very long way and it's a tremendously impressive project. You do them a grave disservice by criticising bad-mouthing them thus. Where did I bad mouth anyone in my statements? I simply stated that ReactOS could remain an alpha OS for 10+ years easily. ReactOS might stay in alpha state forever. As far as putting up what people said on the reactos channel being bad mouthing, that would only be true if I had modified the transcript on my web site. I also think it's a pointless, futile unproductive effort and a colossal waste of work by a lot of smart, dedicated people. Not a lot of people obviously, futile perhaps, smart is hard to verify remotely, dedicated is debatable. ReactOS isn't going to be a Windows replacement that runs on top of Freedos. No, and a very good job to. Suggesting that ReactOS run on top of Freedos on any of the ReactOS forums or the ReactOS IRC channel will bring down a lot of criticism upon you and most likely more than you can handle. And they are absolutely right to do so. It is a ridiculous idea. I suppose Freedos to you is a ridiculous idea also. Perhaps you think that Windows 9x in general and Windows 3.x, the predecessor, were also bad ideas. ReactOS quite honestly is seemingly being pushed by rabid anti theists What the...? What have their religious beliefs got to do with anything? Enough to pressure me to say what it is I believe, announce you have been figured out, and kick me off of the ReactOS channel shortly after. Liam, announcing you are an anti theist suggests that you want attention and are insecure. Why should I or anyone else give you any attention? As it happens, I am an evangelistic anti-theist myself, but this is utterly irrelevant to any technical discussion whatsoever. and there is a strong mob mentality on issues of how to do things. Well, there are a whole bunch of people doing stuff and 10x as many who contribute nothing but want to tell them how to proceed. I can understand how why they'd get annoyed. The GCC verses MSVC debate comes to mind. Well, I reckon they should be using GCC myself, but then, the whole project is instant toast if MS ever notices it anyway. I went by nute on the ReactOS forums. Look and you can see how dicey things got. Ahhh, I remember reading some of that. *You* were that trouble-maker, were you? [Laughs] There is the Linux Unified Kernel project, but how well that will allow people to run Windows programs on a Linux system directly is yet to be seen. I bet that LUK has a better chance of working than ReactOS quite honestly. It has a snowball's chance in a supernova. You are showing unsubstantiated bias and prejudice. Steer clear of the reactos irc channel, there is no moderating and there is a horrific and horrendous mob mentality. I would like a direct replacement for Windows 98SE which supports a lot of games and other software that is now orphanware. Absurd. You apparently have no conception of the amount of work code involved, and why on earth would a whole team of volunteers spend years cloning a large, complex, obsolete dead OS that was already technically irrelevant a decade ago? There is a lot of of orphaned software that was never designed for NT. Windows 9x didn't require as much computing power as NT systems do now when it was popular. Win32 existed in the Windows 9x days where most of or all of the work done on WINE could probably be leveraged. A replacement for Windows 9x would be valuable because legally using Windows 9x is a real challenge these days. I'm suggesting cloning something that was 200KB in size which came from a dead company who no longer even have the sources. You're suggesting something that is around TWO THOUSAND TIMES BIGGER and represented 15Y of work to create, from a very large, aggressive, threatening company which is still trading, is selling a derived product under the same name, and which is famed for attacking rivals putting them out of business. You need professional psychiatric help if you think that's a good idea. There is hardware for Windows 9x that doesn't work on NT based versions of Windows. Then
Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's A Fantasy of a future...
On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Michael C. Robinson plu...@robinson-west.com wrote: DOS is not a good candidate for multitasking. Why DOS can run in less memory and with older hardware than NT style systems and Linux style systems can, others who are more knowledgeable can comment on that. I'm not saying that DOS could be a replacement for Linux or NT-based Windows, but if one were looking for where to expand its functionality, it seems to me that multitasking is the obvious next step, because it was done, successfully, in the 1980s. It's nothing very new. I am not impressed with Freedos network support or printer support for that matter. In the days of DOS, these were the jobs of add-on 3rd party systems, they weren't part of the OS. If someone could port CUPS to Freedos, that would be really nice. Not much use, since no DOS app knows how to print to it. DOS apps contain manage their own printer drivers. As far as networking, someone should make a GPL clone of Microsoft Client and possibly others should start making DOS drivers for modern network cards and release those under a GPL license. Well, it would be very cool, sure, but since the real thing is there and freeware, why not use it? Quite a lot of NICs have NDIS2 drivers that work with DOS, anyway. There is already an existing standard. There's also Novell's ODI standard and DOS client, which I think was also freeware, but it was designed for connecting to Netware servers, which is effectively a dead system now. Linux has Freedos beat hands down for hardware support including sound card support, but I suppose porting Linux drivers to Freedos could be very difficult because Freedos doesn't protect the hardware the way Linux does and because application programs typically try to run the hardware directly. Which drivers do you need? Again, a lot of this is app-dependent stuff, in DOS terms. My notional graphical X.11 GUI would need drivers, but that's why I suggested using X.org. It already has lots of drivers. In the same sense that DOS is not a system that one wants to multitask on, DOS is also not a system that one wants to support multiple users on because there is zero as in no file protection. DOS systems do not support the concept of this file belongs to this user and that file belongs to that user and so on. No, although CDOS and so on resolved that. But I am not suggesting DOS as a fileserver. I installed lots of such systems in the 1980s - mostly 3Com 3+Share - and it's a nightmare I never want to go back to. But for a low-end single-user machine, I don't think we'd need it. Dosbox is a nice way to go, but Linux probably isn't the fastest host system in the world. Perhaps Freedos 32 needs to be revived and a gui developed for it that can run Dosbox. Why? DOSbox already runs on modern OSs that fully support modern hardware. What benefit would there be in fitting DOS with a DOS emulator? That seems a bizarre idea to me. I think the future for Freedos is seeing how much hardware power you really need to emulate the typical PC of days gone by. Is a first generation Pentium that is too slow now for Linux fast enough to emulate the typical IBM PC and run Freedos? I say virtualization and emulation are the future because it may be difficult or impossible to drive modern hardware that DOS applications were not written for in Freedos running natively. An emulator can translate calls for an old sound blaster style card to drive a newer Intel integrated sound system. Otherwise, I encourage people to check out games like Dirk Dashing Secret Agent to get a taste of what can be done natively on a Linux system. It's already been done, on Linux and Windows. There is absolutely no reason to do it on DOS itself. I think a discussion of why Microsoft abandoned DOS for NT is in order before people go crazy about enhancing Freedos. DOS was never intended to support multiple users and multiple processes let alone contain badly written software. No, true, it wasn't, but these problems were solved. I think a multitasking shell on DOS would be a logical next step in enhancing the OS for users of old hardware with limited resources. At a certain point, one has to limit their expectations for Freedos or else the system will disappoint. The point of Freedos is to be able to use very old computers and run old software that predates Windows NT and Linux. I would like to see a simple gui developed for Freedos that can run Firefox, but even that is probably getting too far away from what DOS and Freedos in particular are for. That's exactly the sort of thing I'm proposing: memory management, multitasking and a standard X.11 GUI. Exactly the sort of thing you'd need to port, say, Linux Firefox over. Although I suspect current Firefox might be a bit heavy - but Firefox 2, say, would be OK. A true DOS system has zero intelligence about the software being run. Viruses etcetera are a serious
Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's A Fantasy of a future...
Eric said: I assume that Desqview is also closely linked to some high end version of EMM386, probably QEMM386. Both the QEMM386 and Desqview were quite complex - and non-free. AFAIK, Desqview would run even in a 8088. It did swap processes and their contexts into and out from DOS (low) memory at intervals, probably by trapping the timer interrupt. Of course, if such 8088 did not have EMS hardware, swapping would be to disk, hence very slow. It also had to trap INT 13, INT 10 and perhaps more, to make sure a process would not write screen nor disk spaces belonging to others. Drivers and compatibility would indeed be a problem with a multitasking DOS, but on the other hand, you can still let a single tasking kernel with single tasking drivers serve multiple tasks, as long as you have a wrapper which makes sure that all kernel calls arrive nicely one after another. Extended DOS apps, which need PM and apps which directly access hardware were also problems, and interprocess communication an even worse one. As Eric said, DV was quite complex, but, even so, it used only 200kB (not MB) of RAM. I think some old SuSE Linux versions, 5.x or 6.x, came with some X server for DOS. There is a shareware port of X for DOS, XAPPEAL, which can be found at Simtelnet under the heading ../pub/simtelnet/msdos/xwindows/ The company which made it is long since dead, but its author is not. I was not able to run it in my 486 computer but I am not a programmer nor wanted to spend a lot of time to find out what was wrong. Regards JAS -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
