> On Fri, 27 Jan 2023 at 15:54, tom ehlert <t...@drivesnapshot.de> wrote: > > most people around here already have a working machine, most likely > > Windows or Linux. >
On Sun, Jan 29, 2023 at 5:21 AM Liam Proven <lpro...@gmail.com> wrote: > Are these people the target market for FreeDOS? > > Is there an overlap between this demographic and the users? > According to the results from the August 2021 user survey: yes, there is an overlap with Windows and Linux users. http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Survey/2021 We're seeing a lot of people who want to use FreeDOS casually. They already have a primary machine running some other operating system, and they want to use FreeDOS to play DOS games and do other DOS stuff. Many of these users want to run FreeDOS in a virtual machine like VirtualBox. What's interesting to me is how many FreeDOS users have little (or no) DOS experience. I had mis-remembered this as bi-modal, but the results chart shows several "plateaus" at "beginner" and "moderate" and "expert." My interpretation is that a lot of FreeDOS users are like us: they used DOS in the 1980s and 1990s, and they're playing around in FreeDOS. DOS isn't new to these people. Some of these people run FreeDOS on real hardware, such as the vintage computing crowd that restores Pentium computers (or older, like the PC 5150 or PC XT or PC AT) and want to run FreeDOS on it. But my gut feeling is the vintage computing folks are a minority to the other folks who choose to run FreeDOS in a virtual machine like VirtualBox or PCem or QEMU, or whatever. But we also have a number of users who aren't very familiar with DOS. Based on the "help me" emails I sometimes get, I think many of these people are college students who probably heard about FreeDOS in a computer science class. Some are probably people who read about FreeDOS in an article somewhere (like on The Register, or Opensource.com, etc.) and want to try it out. These people don't know DOS and are new to it - they would prefer to run FreeDOS in a virtual machine, not re-install their primary operating system with FreeDOS. Tom wrote: > > any reason you don't download VirtualBox for your platform, select > > proper devices (there is even a Soundblaster16 emulated), install DOS > > on it and go. > Liam wrote: > Ever tried? I have and I wrote up the result. > > The main reason is that it's extremely hard to get any communications > between the host and the guest. If you download DOS apps it is very > difficult to get them into the VM, or any files you create out again. There isn't a "live" filesystem communication back to the host OS in a full Virtual Machine, to be sure. A PC Emulator is more likely to provide this. It is possible to exchange files with the VM, but only when it is in the "off" state. I do this on Linux using command line tools, but I know others have done it using the GUI (I'm a command line guy). I find the easiest way via the command line (Linux) is to use guestmount. I wrote a "how-to" article about it: https://opensource.com/article/21/6/copy-files-linux-freedos I'll add that if you have a QEMU disk image with FreeDOS on it, you can easily access it from Linux/GNOME by right-clicking on the "img" file, then clicking "Open with Disk Image Mounter." You can also associate the "img" file extension with this action. On Fedora Linux, the default action for "img" files is to use the Disk Image Writer (easy to change when using the "Open with.." menu). Jim _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
