Hi John, if you have Clipper-compiled sources, you can indeed try to compile them again with the free Harbour clone, as you already mentioned. There is also a wikipedia article for those who are new to the topic. As far as I remember, FreeDOS 1.0 came with a version of this, but it was quite big and needed OpenWatcom installed.
On the other hand, porting command line Linux apps with DJGPP works reasonably well, as does running (sometimes no porting needed) of Matlab code in the free Octave system, so maybe Harbour just works? :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbour_%28software%29 http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=xharbour By the way, nice that you have OS/2 Warp around :-) > I'm looking for remarks about porting and running a Clipper compiled > dBase(.dbf files) application on FreeDOS. I've used some index add-on > libraries which may be an issue in FreeDOS. > > I have little source code for the libraries. They and Clipper were > created using Microsoft C 5.1 of long ago... > I have some options. I'll just give FreeDOS a try with QEMU on LINUX If you use Linux anyway, you can use Dosemu which emulated only parts of the hardware - this is faster than a full virtual PC and gives you extra DOS goodies like mapping Linux directories to DOS drive letters without needing drivers for it in DOS. > VMPlayer/VirtualBox on Windows. I could also do time consuming > and extensive redevelopment using harbour-project.souceforge or > xharbour.org Clipper clones. Did you already make an estimate how much code would really have to be changed? Maybe not that much, after all. But as I never worked with Clipper, this is only a guess for me. If your Clipper app worked in PC DOS, it should also work in FreeDOS... Maybe somebody can look at this Brazilian thread? http://www.mandrivabrasil.org/site/forum/index.php?topic=4360.0 The news.gmane.org/gmane.os.freedos.devel archives say that from FreeDOS kernel 2026 to 2027, file locking improved (in particular: network drive file region locking) but printing in Clipper broke. That was back in 2003, so I hope that the bug has been fixed later on. Good to know that Clipper apps in general just work in FreeDOS (print bug or not)... :-) Note that SHARE also got updated (and forked...) since then. Regards, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
