Re: [Freedos-user] AST Research drivers
Hi again, On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 4:41 PM, Jeffrey ellsn...@aol.com wrote: It's a shame to let good software disappear because of copyright law, esp. when the original copyright holders have no interest in hosting it themselves. But it's very common (esp. for legacy). Especially since these are the drivers for the hardware, and are necessary for changing the cpu speed or display mode on certain models. Without these, there is no way to make those configuration changes. I sympathize, but most of the mirrors out there are only for GNU stuff (mostly Linux) or Windows or Mac OS X or *BSD. Almost nobody cares about anything else. Could you post some of the documentation though? A lot of AST technical papers are already available at http://www.textfiles.com/computers/ASTRESEARCH/ Do the docs say you can redistribute them? Otherwise I'm not sure Jim (or iBiblio) would even consider it. You could probably?? claim fair use and just upload all this stuff to a local Tripod (or Google Site or whatever) page, but I dunno. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_web_hosting_services -- Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] AST Research drivers
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 6:27 PM, Jeffrey ellsn...@aol.com wrote: About a year and a half ago, the last website offering support for AST research computers went down. Because have an AST 80386, I downloaded all the drivers and files before that happened. Would it be legal for you to host them? AST is now defunct, and they had a large market share back in the day, so I'm sure many people would find them useful. What website was supporting the stuff and offering the drivers? Was it officially affiliated with AST? If AST is defunct, I'd consider doing something like creating a Google Site to host it. What you are in practice concerned with is who (if anyone) holds the rights, and might object. Objections normally come if someone sees *money* it, and I can't see that being the case here. __ Dennis -- Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] AST driver problem...
There has been quite a bit of talk about AST hardware needing special drivers even under DOS. Well, if the company won't put the drivers in the public domain and there aren't very many AST computers in the world, the logical thing to do is recycle the ones that are left and replace them. Am I missing something? Are AST computers superior to normal PC compatibles? In general, can free dos drivers be developed for hardware that is otherwise unusable? For example, the sound blaster 16 pci card doesn't work apparently without expanded memory in dos and the driver has to be in a Windows 98 tree. Rather weird if you ask me. More to the point, you can't play Ultima 7 even under MS-DOS 6.20 because the game is not compatible with protected mode environments. Oops! There is Exult, but I find that it is somewhat unstable on top of 98SE. I haven't used it in a current Fedora system. Free operating systems whether we are discussing Freedos, Minix, or Linux have problems with certain hardware. In the Linux world unfortunately, drivers for modern graphics cards that work are hard to come by. In a Freedos environment, modern graphics card came after DOS lost most of it's popularity. On modern systems, one can use an emulated dos environment to create the appearance of a legacy PC, but what if you don't want to emulate? What if you are after real time computing and need to use the full capability of a modern graphics card? I can't think of a good example, but I'm sure one exists. Maybe Freedos isn't the best get the maximum out of a modern computer in real time OS. Dos was originally developed before the modern computers of today existed. Minix may be a better choice. I'm sure there are other real time OS'es available beyond Minix and Freedos. A few questions and points to take away: 1) Why should the open source community support rare hardware? 2) Can the open source community support rare or even cutting edge hardware? 3) What is it about DOS environments that draws people to them instead of Linux, Minix, etcetera environments? There is talk of not letting copyrighted software that the producers don't care about get lost. I think supporting software that is unpopular or not well documented inside and out in the public domain is a mistake. Freedos exists because DOS is well defined in the public domain and there are talented people who took that information implementing what we have today. Think about where the open source community focuses resources and why. One of the weaknesses of a real time OS is that it probably won't protect against bad programming in the interest of speed. Another issue, spaghetti code is more likely which is harder to maintain than object oriented code. Whether a true real time environment is necessary for a particular task has to be weighed against the disadvantages. Computers are so fast now that an OS which allows one to write maintainable code at the expense of some speed loss probably makes more sense than an OS which will run a program as fast as possible at the expense of the code being harder to maintain. Harder to maintain code is more likely to have serious bugs which is counterproductive when time performance is critical. There is probably a sweet spot between real time and general purpose that is appropriate for most applications. As a thought experiment, how do you design a real time kernel so that you can say this operation has to complete in x time and it will? -- Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Can't boot FreeDOS from Grub2
On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Ugh, this sounds messy. Partitions are a pain! I've had worse pains. I noprmally prefer to have each OS on its own drive, but that wasn't an option here. The old box this was done on was a gift from a friend who had upgraded, and it's basically a testbed to see what performance I can wring out of ancient hardware *without* spending money on it. On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:19 AM, dmccunney dennis.mccun...@gmail.com wrote: I know the topic has been discussed here before, but I'm still struggling with this problem. Well, Grub 2 is fairly new, or at least a lot of Linux distros only fairly recently started using it as default. I know it's supposed to be better somehow, but it always drags up complaints on bugs or hard-to-use or whatever. It certainly doesn't sound promising, but what can you do when distros force it on you? (Your repo may or may not also have older GRUB 1 as a fallback, lemme see ) https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Uninstalling_GRUB_2 I'd as soon not. The only thing not working is booting to FreeDOS, and I'd prefer not to introduce more variables. I multi-boot Win2K Pro, Ubuntu Linux, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS on an old Fujitsu Lifebook. It has a 40GB IDE HD, with a 20GB primary partition for 2K, and an extended partition with a 512MB swap areas used by Ubuntu and Puppy, a bit over 8GB each for Ubuntu and Puppy, and a 2GB slice for FreeDOS, formatted as FAT32. This used to work. On this Lenovo cpu, I'm triple-booting Win7 64-bit Home Premium, Lucid PuppyLinux 5.2.8, and FreeDOS 1.1 (ish). I would like to do something similar (but not exactly the same) for my Dell laptop. However, I have to be very careful as it's such a ball of wax. In particular, Grub 2 scares me. (Workarounds include VirtualBox, but without VT-X, it's painful. Live USB for Fedora worked okay but very quickly corrupted itself, so it's not reliable, IMHO.) EDIT: Actually, I (strangely) installed Puppy on native ext3 instead of a save file (frugal?). The save file method is probably easier to install. Though I once or twice tried booting successfully with Gujin (mini DOS version atop FreeDOS). I have full installs for both Ubuntu and Puppy. Both are on ext4 file systems (to take advantage of extents,) and each mounts the other's slice. I spent some time playing because I wanted to have *one* copy of major apps shared between both Linuxs, some some things live on one side, and some on the other. I have an open source Windows driver that will let me see and access the Linux slices from 2K. Like I said, this *used* to work. All were booting fine from Grub2 before I did the clean re-install of Win2K and had to redo Grub in consequence. I do vaguely recall having to do some fiddling to get FreeDOS to boot the first time around. Unfortunately, I don't recall just which fiddle did the trick. Don't forget that you can always use DOSBox (universe??) or DOSEMU (multiverse??). I know neither is perfect, but neither is raw DOS either! They all have their own tradeoffs due to various bugs, limitations, etc. I use DOSEmu under Ubuntu for other things, but wanted a pure DOS boot. Among other things, the old box doesn't have to horsepower to do emulation for other than simple stuff, and I don't think some of that I have on FreeDOS woruld work well in DOSEmu. My next step might be to copy the stuff I want to preserve over to the Win2K slice from Win2K, then delete and recreate the FreeDOS partition and do a clean install, but it's not clear that will solve the problem. Suggestions? I don't know. On this Lenovo PC, I use BTTR's tiny BOOTMGR, whose MBR chainloads (?) to the boot managers for Win7 (BCD?) and PuppyLinux (GRUB 1) on their own partitions. In short, you may have better luck using something like BOOTMGR, GRUB Legacy (1), or Gujin. I'm sorry I can't help more, but partitions (primary? extended?) are complicated. P.S. Don't forget Rufus: Noted, but I'm not quite up to throwing out the baby with the bathwater just yet, which is about what completely redoing my setup with a different boot manager would come down to. __ Dennis -- Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
