Hello Jerome and Eric Thank you for your comments. IMHO the issue of having a working keyboard is essential. DOS and its clones appear to their users as TUI thus if the keyboard does not allow to issue commands it makes the OS to become almost useless. An user that has to hit around ten different keys until he finds the backslash key only to be capable to issue a "cd" command will lost interest quite soon. I had to mount the virtual disk to be capable to inspect it without getting crazy due to the keyboard and to figure out how to fix the issue. 30 years ago I used to use MSDOS every day all day long and thus I was suprised how much the directory structure and the available drivers and files differ from old DOS. So trying to fix this was not so straightforward as I expected at a first glance.
IMO this issue could be tremendously alleviated by adding to FDCONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, as comments, those lines that are required to select a particular keyboard layout. Having the required lines at the appropriate places together with some docs will allow those users that are experienced with DOS already to fix the issue by themselfs. Please note that I am not expecting any kind of magic. The MSDOS installer also did never offer any kind of magic but at least it asked the user to specify some locale and deduced from this what keyboard specific lines to add to config.sys and autoexec.bat. Neitherless it should be remembered that outside the US, the US keyboard layout is almost useless because crucial keys like backslash and colon are at different places and thus not easily found frustrating the average user quite soon. Regards, Juan M. Guerrero ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
