Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

[Eric Auer]

Hi Rugxulo,

> If you already have the original gold standard of DOSes, i.e. MS-DOS
> (which was widely tested and hugely popular, by far the most
> ubiquitous DOS), then you don't urgently "need" any other DOS
> clone at all all, period.

Being the most widely used does not equal being the best.

For example Linux is great for certain use cases and this
is not changed by "but millions already have Windows" as
an argument to use Windows instead for those use cases...

Similarily, FreeDOS gives you a lot of DOS, a lot newer
than the early 1990s Microsoft version, often in a much
smaller package both in terms of disk space and in terms
of the amount of RAM needed. And newer drivers :-)

On the other hand, all DOS clones have to be extremely
similar to MS DOS when it comes to supporting software
apps for DOS. Because if you first have to port your
XYZ app for Linux to "the cool new OS ABC" which also
behaves a bit like DOS, then most users would simply
use XYZ directly in Linux and not care about DOS. But
as FreeDOS and other clones basically run ALL the good
old software for DOS, clones are clearly attractive.

Note that if you want to use more than 1 core of your
CPU or more than 4 GB of RAM, then DOS is not for you.

A multi tasking 64 bit OS will make you more happy then
and nobody complains about a few GB of disk space there.

A reason to use FreeDOS in spite of already having MS DOS:

Your new hardware has bad support from MS DOS and you want
to have more RAM free and a few new drivers. Of course you
are free to achieve that by MIXING the best files from both
versions of DOS, as you already owned MS DOS in my example.

Cheers, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

[Dennis Fenton]

Thanks to everyone on the FreeDOS list who tried to help me. I learned
a few things. After careful consideration I decided to go in a
different direction. I installed MS-DOS 7.10. It is now running
smoothly on my 486 laptop. I had to set up the SCSI drives by writing
a few lines into autoexec.bat and one into config.sys.
Happy computing.

On 25/03/2017, Rugxulo  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 7:20 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>>
>> I disagree about FreeDOS being "not ready yet" or "no advantage to MS
>> DOS".
>
> If you already have the original gold standard of DOSes, i.e. MS-DOS
> (which was widely tested and hugely popular, by far the most
> ubiquitous DOS), then you don't urgently "need" any other DOS clone at
> all, period.
>
> Various DOS clones exist, and they all have minor advantages, but
> overall they work the same (no extra APIs offered, no utilizing newer
> advanced cpu features). For common DOS software (and loadable
> drivers), they all behave effectively the same (more or less) on any
> decent DOS kernel.
>
> Reasons not to use MS-DOS? It's unsupported and proprietary and harder to
> find.
> Reasons not to use FreeDOS? You just want to run the exact same
> software that already runs perfectly on your current MS-DOS install.
>
> Heck, apparently there are still people using TAWK, which is
> (apparently) proprietary and long dead. One guy was complaining that
> GAWK (aka, GPL) still doesn't 100% equal TAWK features despite being
> 20 years newer. Sound familiar? Old habits die hard.
>
> (In hindsight, it's best to not write proprietary, non-standard,
> unportable software at all, if you have a choice. Although nothing
> lasts forever, not even standards, it does certainly help to try to be
> portable/cross-platform from the start.)
>
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