Re: [Freedos-user] Poll and ideas compressed filesystem
Hi Michael, I don't want a graphical web browser at all in freedos. The current option does not support out of the box filtering or plugins comparable to what Internet Explorer and Firefox have. True for the plugins, but one could write ad-filters for Arachne, too. On the other hand, maybe Firefox is a bad comparison: My firefox with ca 30 tabs open burns around 340 MB (incl virtual) memory at the moment, which is way more than you would expect from any normal DOS app ;-). How about the ram-efficiency of other browsers, maybe Opera, Epiphany, Dillo, MidBrowser, Konqueror? I hear that Chrome trades speed for RAM in giving each tab a separate thread? Freedos is not a system that completely insulates the hardware nor is it a multiuser system, so it's appropriateness for network applications is questionable. Especially, considering that the The guys from deskwork.de DOS GUI write that their thing is relatively secure - probably because it provides more or less no server services accessible from the outside :-) general attitude seems to be use whatever exists for dos to network it, networking generally isn't attractive. Freedos currently doesn't support Netware 4.11 very well where a lot of the netware IPX drivers, if you can find any, are designed to be opened on a Windows system. I had assumed that IPX and Netware 4 are very very old? On the other hand, there is no DOS ADS client either ;-) There also was some discussion about various kernels vs various netware versions and workarounds in bugzilla and on other locations, if you have netware, have a look :-) As far as compressed filesystems are concerned or supporting NTFS, you are getting away from being 100% MS DOS compatible. Not if you ask me... Loading a new driver does not make the system misbehave for old apps, does it...? :-) Freedos isn't 100% compatible yet, more reverse engineering needs to be done to make it so. MS-DOS 6.22 supported disk I disagree. Reverse engineering might cause license troubles but of course you can do things like comparing int call logs between running apps in MS DOS and FreeDOS. WHICH apps apart from 386enh mode of Win3 / WfW3 are not compatible yet? compression, but that was a late addition to dos and it created a lot of problems for some dos programs. There were some patent issues for MS with the whole story of compression, so I would avoid cloning their compressor. But I did not know there were problems for apps! Which? Porting MARS netware emulator to freedos would make it far more attractive for networking than it currently is. A new netware client for DOS? Why netware? Everybody seems to be using SMB (Windows) or NFS (Unix) today?? The advantage of supporting NTFS is that freedos could be used as a tool potentially to work on and repair a modern NT based Windows system. There are so many versions of NTFS though, a lot of work would be involved to create a decent implementation of NTFS for a dos based environment. It makes more sense to support NTFS under Linux as NTFS is meant for use on a multi user system. Probably true. And for the repair task in DOS you already have the semi-commercial NTFS4DOS driver anyways, but I agree that Linux works fine for disinfecting Windows ;-) Eric -- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Poll and ideas compressed filesystem
Hi! I think a compressed file system is a good idea, for reasons mentioned before. As you seem to have experience, please sketch the possible usage and contents in a bit more detail. is instead of showing projected free space, show me the actual free space when i do a dir. You could only show the free raw space in the compressed image. How many kilobytes of files you really fit in there depends on how well a file compresses, which depends on contents. One of the reasons why I wanted to know that. Showing the raw space at least gives you the worst case (not compressible) info, though. I for one wold be happy to test such a system, and I'm sure some of the embeded systems folks would be happy as well. Please give more details about such a test: How much disk and RAM space would you want to use and how much content would be in the compressed FS, how much of it would be written to, etc etc? Thanks :-) By the way, does anybody have experience with driver-based FAT32 devices (USB, RAMDISK, as opposed to kernel built-in FAT32 eg harddisk)? Would FAT32 be okay for compressed drives, too? Note that FAT32 takes 0.5 MB for FATs and it must have 64 k clusters (eg 32+0.5 MB size). Eric -- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Poll and ideas compressed filesystem
Hi! In what way would FreeDOS differ from Linux 2.4 then? Apart from being worse in performance, multitasking, having no GUI, no way to show several apps at once... it won't need an eternity to boot or reboot ... Reboots are rare when you can hibernate instead :-) But DOS boots so fast that hibernate is not even needed. it won't need huge resources to work at all ... How huge is huge? A friend ran a 2.2 Linux on 14-32 MB long time, what is a normal amount of RAM modern cool DOS apps will consume? it won't try to see everything as files ... The file / char dev / block dev interface of DOS is not super duper elegant either, so what is wrong? it has a way better DOSEmu :-)) Because it runs faster and full screen but only once? it won't have zillions of apps which are not really usable... Let me guess, your mouse is broken so you need DOS? ;-) PS: What does all that tell us about compressed FS...? Eric -- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Poll FreeDOS and NTFS
Eric Auer schrieb: Hi again, recently I had an off-list discussion about the possibility of booting DOS from NTFS... This leads to the question, how happy are you with the existing solutions? Unhappy. - you can boot DOS from FAT, then load NTFS4DOS which is read/write, free for personal use: www.free-av.de/de/tools/11/avira_ntfs4dos_personal.html Some auto threat analysis tells me it will be 120k ;-) www.browserdefender.com/de/file/859899/site/free-av.com/ - you can boot a MEMDISK from NTFS using GRUB4DOS which apparently can read NTFS directly... This is ca 190k. My Linux GRUB has no NTFS, stage2 is ca 120k and stage1.5 is ca 10k per filesystem?? The NTFS-read part of GRUB4DOS might be 10-100k? - maybe you can use the NTFS-file-reader of GRUB4DOS after booting DOS? I believe PXEBOOT allows similar? - you can port the Linux NTFS driver to DOS. As the Linux version takes ca 105k plus a Linux kernel, a DOS version will probably be as big as NTFS4DOS so it would make sense to make it a JEMM JLM...? This is not an existing solution, it's a possible one. About format (jlm or not see below). - you can write a combination of MEMDISK and SHSUFDRV and GRUB4DOS which somehow keeps a small FAT disk image in a flat file on your NTFS filesystem, R/W?? Not this but this brings me an other idea. The image (hd or floppy) support of grub4dos is good. But the annoying part is that changes written to the image will be only in memory and not written back to the image, if written back to the image this would improve this a lot. - you can boot from CD, DVD, SD, USB stick or similar and then load NTFS4DOS or any other driver... ;-) This ntfs4dos is not optimal, it's proprietary, has an annoying nagscreen, full version can be no longer bought, needs to much conventional memory. In addition, like suggested long time before: a command in config.sys to include another configfile and to phrase it like normal config.sys would help a lot and for sure also wouldn't be to hard to implement? So, which methods have you tried so far? Did they work? Eric PS: We cannot put NTFS _into_ the kernel. Our kernel is 40 kB compressed at the moment. As it drops boot parts after init, it is 10 kB low plus 40 kB HMA later. The HMA is max 64 kB. NTFS r/w might triple all sizes ;-) You cannot load files on NTFS before loading NTFS drivers, unless you put a LILOish sector number list into a loader? I think it's time to add the possibility to boot kernel.sys using parameters (like you can also do with linux kernel). NTFS doesn't need to be inside the kernel, it can be an loadable module (loading on request by parameter). As driver format a hybrid realmode/umb and jemm would be fine (two builds). Jemm only has the disadventage that you would break compatibility to all non-emm386 compatible stuff. -mr -- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Poll and ideas compressed filesystem
Robert Riebisch schrieb: Eric Auer wrote: - would you want a compressed filesystem to be writeable? The question to me is: Would you want a compressed filesystem at all? My discouraging answer: I just don't need it. I never used compressed filesystems anywhere, rather I buy a bigger harddisk but I would never bother with this as it will make things generally more slow and incompatible. I think, what FreeDOS needs for daily use is a good graphical web browser, Ages ago there where some discussions about DOSzilla (Mozilla Firefox for DOS) but the project was never released and is dead. Firefox for DOS would be a killer application, pretty cool. Also Arachne as 32 bit could be pretty cool, look at dr webspyoder or lineo embrowser (arachne forks), them start much faster and feel much smoother. After almost 10 years of Arache being Open Source the development fatally failed, I think you need to be a hardcore optimist to except to come a 32 bit version ever. a nice e-mailer, Not a top priority for me. a word processor like Abiword, FOSS USB drivers, ... Agreed. Robert Riebisch -- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Poll and ideas compressed filesystem
Eric Auer schrieb: Hi Robert, Travis, Robert wrote: Would you want a compressed filesystem at all? My discouraging answer: I just don't need it. I think, what FreeDOS needs for daily use is a good graphical web browser, a nice e-mailer, a word processor like Abiword, FOSS USB drivers, ... In what way would FreeDOS differ from Linux 2.4 then? Apart from being worse in performance, multitasking, having no GUI, no way to show several apps at once... Simple, small, DOS compatible, fast booting, modular, easy to understand, stable. Without complex tricks, you only get EITHER bootable OR writeable compressed filesystems if you ask me... Non-writeable makes it less useful. Non-bootable is bad but may be tricked with known workarrounds (suggestions already made about this topic). -mr -- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Poll and ideas compressed filesystem
Michael Robinson schrieb: As far as compressed filesystems are concerned or supporting NTFS, you are getting away from being 100% MS DOS compatible. No, it depends on how it's being implemented. Freedos isn't 100% compatible yet, more reverse engineering needs to be done to make it so. True. The advantage of supporting NTFS is that freedos could be used as a tool potentially to work on and repair a modern NT based Windows system. Yes. It makes more sense to support NTFS under Linux as NTFS is meant for use on a multi user system. That's already done. But isn't much point to suggest to use linux on a dos list? -mr -- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Poll FreeDOS and NTFS
i use freedos from a dos formatted partition to boot into full screen freedos on a machine that also boots linux. i am happy with that. i also use freedos to boot from within a linux partition using xdosemu. i am happy with that except i have to run a little script first. this is the script #! /bin/bash echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr ~~~ Bonnie Dalzell, MA mail:5100 Hydes Rd PO Box 60, Hydes,MD,USA 21082-0060|EMAIL:bdalz...@qis.net freelance anatomist, vertebrate paleontologist, writer, illustrator, dog breeder, computer nerd iconoclast... Borzoi info at www.borzois.com. Editor Net.Pet Online Animal Magazine - http://www.netpetmagazine.com HOME http://www.qis.net/~borzoi/ BUSINESS http://www.batw.com -- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Poll FreeDOS and NTFS
Hi Bonnie and happy new year still :-) Bonnie Dalzell wrote: i use freedos from a dos formatted partition to boot into full screen freedos on a machine that also boots linux. i am happy with that. i also use freedos to boot from within a linux partition using xdosemu. i am happy with that except i have to run a little script first. this is the script #! /bin/bash echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr True true... I wonder how bad it would be if Ubuntu and Debian made this the default anyway. Instead of a script, I simply changed the global settings in /etc/sysctl.conf: (the file is longer, I only paste the modified lines here) # protect bottom 64k of memory from mmap to prevent NULL-dereference # --- breaks dosemu and wine --- vm.mmap_min_addr = 65536 vm.mmap_min_addr = 0 With this modification, after the next reboot, you no longer have to run the script any more. Eric PS: I wonder when the dosemu.org page will describe 1.4 ;-) -- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Poll FreeDOS and NTFS
True true... I wonder how bad it would be if Ubuntu and Debian made this the default anyway. Instead of a script, I just installed Debian and dosemu and haven't had to change sysctl.conf at all. -- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
