Re: [Freedos-user] Turkish F Keyboard Support

[Rugxulo]

Saluton,

On Oct 1, 2016 5:18 PM, "Henrique Peron"  wrote:
>
> KEYB TR,,KEYBRD2.SYS (for the QWERTY turkish keyboard layout)
> KEYB TR,,KEYBRD2.SYS /ID:440 (for the FGĞIOD turkish keyboard layout)
>
> Regards,
> Henrique

I was wondering if/when you would chime in (as the obvious resident
expert). Always glad to hear from you, and I hope you're doing well.   :-)
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Re: [Freedos-user] UIDE.SYS

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 5:53 AM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
>
> Note that for live CD, you can also often use the tiny
> ELTORITO driver because after booting from CD, you get
> temporary BIOS support for easy CD access.
>
> I could not find a nice link for ELTORITO.SYS, but check
>
> www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/syslinux/
>
> as that may have useful information...? Original site for
> the driver was http://www.nu2.nu/eltorito/ which is gone.
>
> PS: Rugxulo, Jim, please make eltorito.sys easier to find!

syslinux-6.03.zip (from iBiblio above) does have eltorito.sys (and
*.asm for NASM), 1554 bytes, calling itself version "1.5".

Is that what you meant? So you want someone to put a README telling
people that it contains "eltorito.sys"? By itself that's not much
help, is it?

Quoting the SysLinux wiki:

http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=MEMDISK

"
MEMDISK and generic El Torito CD-ROM driver for DOS
-
If you're using MEMDISK to boot DOS from a CD-ROM (using ISOLINUX),
you might find the generic El Torito CD-ROM driver (eltorito.sys) by
Gary Tong and Bart Lagerweij useful. It is now included with the
Syslinux distribution, in the dosutil directory. See the file
dosutil/eltorito.txt for more information.

Example usage of eltorito.sys in CONFIG.SYS:

device=eltorito.sys /X:MSCD0001

Corresponding MSCDEX command which can be placed in AUTOEXEC.BAT:

MSCDEX /X:MSCD0001 /L:X

Where X is the drive letter.
"

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Re: [Freedos-user] Urgent FreeDos Keyboard Layout Hardware Help

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 12:41 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> Unfortunately Turkish is not among the layouts built into the smaller MKEYB 
> driver
>
> PS: You may also want to use DISPLAY and MODE to load a
> font optimized for codepage 857, as BIOS default is 437.
>
>> Example of Running Code : A:\FREEDOS>keyb.exe TR,857,KEYBRD2.SYS

BTW, just to state the obvious, although I know that cp857 is mostly
preferred for Turkish (not that I understand it), but (with FreeDOS)
I've used cp853 successfully (which was the previously preferred
codepage for Turkish, Maltese, and Esperanto).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_853

But if all you want to do is edit text, you can even edit Unicode with
various DOS editors (e.g. GNU Emacs, Blocek, or Mined).

I'll try to quote the relevant config I've used for cp853 (it's been a
while since I weakly tried it, but it did work):

(FDCONFIG.SYS):

COUNTRY=1,,C:\FDOS\COUNTRY.SYS

(AUTOEXEC.BAT):

set CPIDIR=%DOSDIR%\cpi
display con=(ega,,3)
mode con cp prep=((853) %CPIDIR%\ega.cpx)
mode con cp prep=((,737,869) %CPIDIR%\ega5.cpx)
mode con cp sel=853
set CPIDIR=

nlsfunc /y %DOSDIR%\country.sys

REM (can unload later, needs 286+)
REM !! BUG ALERT !!: do NOT use 2009 KEYB*.SYS files w/ 2006 KEYB.EXE
keyb us,,%DOSDIR%\keyboard.sys
echo.
echo KEYB: Ctrl-Alt-F1 to disable or Ctrl-Alt-F2 to re-enable!
echo.

mode con cp /status

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Re: [Freedos-user] Urgent FreeDos Keyboard Layout Hardware Help

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 12:41 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> have you checked whether there could be a problem with the
> settings of your host operating system

His details say kernel 2042, so maybe it's a regression?? Maybe he
could try (older) 2041 instead?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/freedos/files/Kernel/2041/ke2041_86f32.zip/download

Or is he testing classic FD 1.1 or (newer) FD 1.2-pre? (Or some other
variation?)

Okay, obviously we need to see "full" FDCONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT
somewhere. Try pasting them here:

http://pastebin.com/

> and/or virtualbox?
>
> Please explain exactly in which way KEYB "does not work" inside virtualbox.

But he says: "We can load custom keyboard settings in a virtualbox
machine without any problems."

Alas, no explicit error messages mentioned (or what lacking
functionality is actually expected).

Is this an upgrade? Has this worked before (with FreeDOS)? Is this
something (relatively) newly broken? Or is it just not obvious to you
how exactly to use KEYB (and friends, etc.)?

> PS: You may also want to use DISPLAY and MODE to load a
> font optimized for codepage 857, as BIOS default is 437.

If he isn't using DISPLAY, MODE, etc. already, then that may be his problem.

http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/display.htm

(... continued below ...)

>> We have a problem with using FreeDos keyboard layaout when we try to
>> load any custom keyboard.We can load custom keyboard settings in a
>> virtualbox machine without any problems.

VBox works 100% fine, then?

>> When we use on a Real Hardware Machine  we didn't recieve any code
>> errors but any other custom keyboard settings doesnt work.

"Any other custom keyboard settings" ... what exactly "doesn't work" (anymore)??

>> We need to solve this problem for our work usage in Freedos urgently.
>> FreeDos keyboard programmer or Assembler coder who can solve this
>> problem for us please contact with me urgently.
>
>> Solver of this problem will be rewarded with 500$.

I assume Tom Ehlert can whip up some quick Turkish support in MKEYB
for you, if needed.

(However, I don't think FD KEYB is totally beyond use, but I can't
understand what you're seeing or missing.)

>> FreeDos Version : 0.84-pre2 XMS_Swap [Aug 28 2006 00:29:00] Dos
>> Version 7.10 FreeDOS  kernel 2042 (build 2042 OEM:0xfd) [compiled May
>> 11 2016]
>
>> Example of Running Code : A:\FREEDOS>keyb.exe TR,857,KEYBRD2.SYS
>> FreeDOS KEYB 2.01 - (c) Aitor Santamaria Merino - GNU GPL 2.0
>> Keyboard Layout : KEYBRD2.SYS [857] (3)

Here's what last worked for me:

if not "%DEFAULT%"=="853" keyb gk,,%DOSDIR%\keybrd2.sys

Not much difference to your invocation, so I don't know what's choking for you.

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Re: [Freedos-user] M2WAT

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Aug 26, 2016 7:35 PM, "Louis Santillan" <lpsan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the feed.  I realized the issue redirection as soon as
> Ulrich mentioned it.  Is it possible this is a bug wrt how FD
> Command.com handles REM statements?  Obviously my expectation was that
> REM was a true comment and not some pseudo NOP command that ignores
> its arguments, allowing the redirection to continue to be processed by
> the %SHELL%.   I'll fix this up tonight and also test against my MS
> DOS VM.  Thanks for the fix suggestion as well Rugxulo.

No, IIRC, all major DOS shells have this quirk (maybe not XP's CMD, can't
remember). So you can create a zero-byte file with "REM >blah", if needed.

I know, it's absurd and useless, not a great idea to rely on it. Like I
said, you can avoid the issue with careful use of "::" when necessary ( > <
| ). On the bright side, you save a whole byte per line!  :-)
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Re: [Freedos-user] M2WAT

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 5:01 PM, Ulrich Hansen  wrote:
>
> Am 26.08.2016 um 08:28 schrieb Louis Santillan :
>
> Made my own dog food:
>
> 
>
> Hi Louis,
> Thanks for your work! It’s a nice idea to use a batch file for it. I just
> tried it. It works but has some flaws yet. Here’s the feedback:
>
> 1. If I run the program in AUTOEXEC.BAT I get several error messages. See:
> https://www.lazybrowndog.net/freedos/files/m2wat.bat.png

Presumably due to this line:

REM -- Copyright (c) 2016, Louis P. Santillan 

... so ...

FIX: Change "REM" to "::" and it should hopefully ignore that.

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Re: [Freedos-user] M2WAT

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 5:43 PM, Ulrich Hansen  wrote:
>
> What do you think of M2WAT? I use it quite often. It is Open Source, written
> by cordata, a FreeDOS user, in a post to this list.

I vaguely remember when he posted it, but I never had urgent need to use it.

> Wouldn’t it be a good candidate for the net section of your repo? I know it 
> is a very small
> utility…

Maybe.

> https://github.com/ulrich-hansen/M2WAT

Two minor nitpicks:

1). The .COM isn't even UPX'd. Bloat!  ;-)
2). The source is named "W2WAT.C", which is confusing.

Otherwise, seems fine. Should these minor issues be fixed first?

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Re: [Freedos-user] intel PRO/1000 DOS packet driver

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 5:47 AM, Ulrich Hansen  wrote:
>
> I found that the intel DOS packet driver for the PRO/1000 network card isn’t
> in the CRYNWR package.
>
> As it is Open Source since 2007 I felt free to package it into an FDNPKG
> compatible zip-file.

In the interest of keeping useful things like this mirrored, I've
(also) put it here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/net/e1000pkt.zip

(If you can think of a better place for it, let me know.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] dma crosses 64k boundary error

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 12:28 PM, Tom Ehlert  wrote:
>>
>> I keep getting the error dma crosses 64k boundary when using tools
>> like rawrite3 or hard drive manufacturers tools floppy creation
>> software. I need to boot from Windows 98 bootdisk to get rid of it.
>
> I'm still surprised this comes up today, and not 15 years ago.
> do you have remarkable hardware?

Is it possible that different tools don't exhibit the same behavior / bug?

So, just for comparison, there are various other tools to write floppy
images to physical disk:

1). FD diskcopy
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/diskcopy/0.9/

2). sfx14436 (stub)
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/tools/

3). FreeBSD fdimage.exe
http://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/old-releases/i386/4.8-RELEASE/4.8-RELEASE/tools/

4). PLoP's diskimg
https://www.plop.at/en/dostools.html#diskimg.com

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Re: [Freedos-user] freedos 1.2 archivers

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 5:46 PM, Dimitris Zilaskos  wrote:
>
> Thank you for the advice. I tried FDIMPLES, seem to show everything
> installed, but for some reason p7zip is missing from its list.

I don't really recommend p7zip for heavy use. For one thing, there is
no active (DOS) maintainer, and it's somewhat buggy because of that
(and the fact that it's really a very sloppy POSIX port that barely
works with DJGPP). I don't grok C++, so I wasn't much further help
regarding it. It does work, but it's far from perfect.

If you just want to unpack .7z files, use 7zdec. But normally, as Jim
Hall always tells us, ZIP is preferred overall, so just use (old but
good) Info-Zip (zip / unzip).

(Or you could run old standalone Win32 7za [sic] under HX. That worked
pretty well. Besides, the DJGPP build of p7zip doesn't have 7z [sic]
anyways ... although even that build [Win32] I did briefly get running
under HX).

There's also upstream DJGPP builds of XZ, if you just can't live
without LZMA. And a billion other archivers (UHarc??). I honestly
haven't kept up in recent years (not sure why I ever bothered, I'm not
savvy enough to understand the details anyways).

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Re: [Freedos-user] How to use German keyboard layout with FreeDOS?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 8:31 AM, Kai Schaetzl  wrote:
>
> VER does not report a DOS version, only a
> FreeCOM-0.84 version. I think I'm running 1.1, but only the core. There is no 
> bin
> directory.

Try "ver /r" or check the file date of "kernel.sys" (but neither is
100% guaranteed since any of it can be freely changed). IIRC, FD 1.1
used kernel 2040.

> Anyway, don't need it anymore. Just needed the right parameter for keyb.

There's also a very tiny one from Japheth ("Public Domain" [with
sources, apparently]):

http://web.archive.org/web/20140325234635/http://www.japheth.de/Download/DOS/KEYBGR.zip

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Re: [Freedos-user] How to use German keyboard layout with FreeDOS?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 8:31 AM, Kai Schaetzl  wrote:
>
> But I have the same problem with it. Adding "keyb gr" to autoexec.bat does
> not run it. It seems autoexec.bat isn't executed at all. Shouldn't it run
> automatically once DOS is loaded?

Normally (but not always) it is called "autoexec.bat", which is called
from the shell from within "config.sys".

IIRC, some DOSes have different names (sometimes for dual booting,
e.g. DR-DOS: dconfig.sys, autodos7.bat).

For FreeDOS, "fdconfig.sys" is read before "config.sys". And in that
you can specify a different name for the .BAT, e.g. see below for what
I personally use (non-standard!):

!SHELL=\SYSTEM\COMMAND.COM \SYSTEM /E:1024 /MSG /P=\FDAUTO.BAT

You can also technically change the "kernel.sys" file name and use a
switch of SYS to boot a different name, but that's quite obscure.
Sure, normally it's okay to do whatever if you're running a single DOS
alone, but sometimes you want to have multiple paths of execution
(e.g. "BOOT" / MetaKern).

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Re: [Freedos-user] How to use German keyboard layout with FreeDOS?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 9:00 AM, Tom Ehlert  wrote:
>
>>> The KEYB layouts can be found here:
>>>
>>> http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=kpdos
>
>> That's the point where the circle starts (and ends). There are no plain
>> keyboard layout files (.kl) in there, only the .key files. But these need
>> kc for compiling to a .kl file. And there's nowhere you can get kc from.

Assuming you have the "full" (official) FD 1.1 install, do you not
find KC.EXE anywhere?

Booting up "FreeDOS 1.1 final" under VBox ... "dir /s/a-d/b \kc.exe" shows this:

c:\fdos\bin\kc.exe

Of course, you can also just do "kc /?" or "which kc".

> in that case, KPDOS does not qualify as open source, and I recommend to
> remove KPDOS from future releases of FreeDOS

Let's not overreact.

I haven't messed with this stuff much, esp. recently, so I don't
remember the details. (And obviously I'm not the maintainer anyways.)

But isn't this what you're actually looking for (although you don't
direly need it, AFAIK)??

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/keyb/2.0/kc200x.zip
(That has KC.EXE, KEYCODE.EXE, and KLIB.EXE . Plus, sources in
kc200s.zip also exist.)

>> I don't need it now anymore it seems. But still wondering if it's really
>> not available from anywhere.

Just for comparison, I looked here, and apparently in FD 1.0 (2006) it
was bundled inside KEYB[XS].ZIP:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 - Preview 22 - EDIT CPU load

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 9:24 AM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But indeed, even with IDLEHALT, that doesn't seem to work with FD
> EDIT. Nor does TDE, strangely enough, which uses DJGPP's
> __dpmi_yield(). Even e3-16 is guilty (no surprise there, it's quite
> simplistic).

Just FYI, TDE has keyboard issues under VBox, so it's mostly useless there.

> I also tried ancient Stevie 3.69a (TurboC?) and newer VILE 9.8
> (DJGPP), yet surprisingly both seemed to not hog the host cpu at all.
> Must be a vi thing!  :-P

Actually, upon further look, it seems to only work for those two vi
clones exactly because of IDLEHALT.

Unfortunately, I am not competent enough to hack E3 very well, so my
weak attempts didn't seem to fix the issue there.

(Plus I don't like hardcoded "lines", always stuck at 25. TODO.
Although I did find a 186 instruction, which I consider a bug, so I
quickly fixed that to 8086-friendly, even if that's overall futile.
And I still wonder if WordStar keys are easier / more popular for end
users than vi. Oh well, E3 is much smaller than most editors, that's
for sure.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 - Preview 22 - EDIT CPU load

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 6:01 AM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
>> I just downloaded the bootable FD 1.2pre22 CD and booted a VM in
>> VirtualBox.  I see `FDAPM APMDOS` in autoexec.bat.  No IDLEHALT in
>> FDCONFIG.SYS.  CPU also spikes to 100% when I run `edit autoexec.bat`.
>
> I remember that this is a problem with certain EDIT versions. Of
> course IDLEHALT is nice, but FDAPM APMDOS should be okay as well.
>
> Here is what for example EDIT 0.7c did in DFLAT's dispatch_message:
> ...
> Please check the sources or ask Aitor Santamaria and Joe Cosentino.
> Maybe your version is missing some patches...

According to DFP100S.ZIP's "source/dflatp/message.c":

BOOL dispatch_message(void)
{
WINDOW Mwnd, Kwnd;
/*  collect mouse and keyboard events --- */
collect_events();

/* only message.c can fill the event queue, but all components */
/* can fill the message queue. Events come from user or clock. */
if ( (EventQueueCtr == 0) && (MsgQueueCtr == 0) &&
(handshaking == 0) ) {/* BORED - new 0.7c */
union REGS r;
#if 0/* int 2f is often quite crowded */
r.x.ax = 0x1680;/* release multitasker timeslice */
int86(0x2f, , );/* multiplexer call */
#else
r.h.ah = 0x84;/* "network" idle call */
int86(0x2a, , );/* network interfaces */
#endif
...
}

But indeed, even with IDLEHALT, that doesn't seem to work with FD
EDIT. Nor does TDE, strangely enough, which uses DJGPP's
__dpmi_yield(). Even e3-16 is guilty (no surprise there, it's quite
simplistic).

I also tried ancient Stevie 3.69a (TurboC?) and newer VILE 9.8
(DJGPP), yet surprisingly both seemed to not hog the host cpu at all.
Must be a vi thing!  :-P

P.S. IDLEHALT works quite well otherwise, esp. when just sitting at
the console / shell doing nothing. That's why I mentioned it in the
first place, it's better than nothing.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 - Preview 22

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Jul 19, 2016 8:55 PM, "Louis Santillan"  wrote:
>
> DOSAPM (which also handles the `reboot` command
> amongst others) isn't setup to handle this?

What about IDLEHALT in FDCONFIG.SYS?
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Re: [Freedos-user] Which freedos on 486

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 8:26 AM, Dimitris Zilaskos  wrote:
>
> I have LBA configured in the BIOS for the hard drives, mostly because it
> keeps BIOS boot and Windows 98 working. I was unable so far to find a
> working combination with different non LBA modes. I will retry sys c: on a
> new FAT32 installation.

Try different SYSs from different kernels (e.g. 2039, 2041). You
already tried 2042 and 2036, yes? Who knows, it's a long shot, but it
could be a rare bug / regression.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/freedos/files/Kernel/

Heck, since you say you have Debian (but is that separate machine?),
you could try Eric's Sys-FreeDOS-Linux (Perl + NASM) there.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/sys/sys-freedos-linux/

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Re: [Freedos-user] Which freedos on 486

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 7:21 PM, Dimitris Zilaskos  wrote:
>
> Thank you for following up. fdisk reports that C: drive is already active. I
> did run mbrzap it completed successfully but there has been no change,
> system gets stuck right after BIOS summary table.

What filesystem(s) are you using? FAT32, presumably. You said you had
4 GB and 6 GB HDDs, right?

Sometimes it has been noticed that a FAT32 partition is created with
plain type 0xB instead of 0xC (LBA), so you may have to change that.

http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/fdisk.htm

I'm not entirely sure what is most informative or useful here:
"/STATUS"? "/XO"? "/SPEC"?

Honestly, I think I just used BootMgr to change it:

http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=bootmgr

(This may not be your problem, I'm just grasping at straws.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] Which freedos on 486

[Rugxulo]

Hi again,

On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 7:21 PM, Dimitris Zilaskos <dimitr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am trying to install FreeDOS on my old 486.
>
> Versions 1.1 and 1.2 floppy bootdisks either hang on boot printing odd
> characters or will not detect the CDROM.

As mentioned, CD-ROM may not be well-supported by default. You may
have to find your own (legacy, proprietary, hardware-specific) DOS
driver elsewhere (on random third-party site). Unavoidable.

> System is a 486DX4-100, 32 MB RAM. VESA Local Bus controller with primary IDE
> loaded with 2 HDD - 6 GB and 4 GB, secondary IDE the CDROM. BIOS supports
> boot only from floppy and hdd.

Have you not tried Smart Boot Manager? It may let you boot from CD:

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html

> Is there a recommended strategy to get FreeDOS installed on such an ancient
> system? Did some research and tried several bootdisks that float around,
> nothing worked quite like FreeDOS 1.0.

Just FYI, there's nothing hugely special about FD 1.0, it's roughly
the same. If you want to swap out shell (FreeCOM 0.84-pre2 XMS_Swap)
or kernel (2036) for different versions, it might help (but might
not).

https://sourceforge.net/projects/freedos/files/

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/kernel/
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/command/

Not sure why HIMEMX would be failing. Also not sure how to isolate
what is going on there. Well, I'm not maintainer anyways (not sure
there is one, actively anyways).

So here's an old floppy of mine, for comparison, yet another to try,
if you really want a different alternative:

https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/BARE_DOS.ZIP?attredirects=0
https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/bare_dos.txt?attredirects=0

To be honest, floppy doesn't get a lot of attention anymore, even from
me. I would also (maybe?) point you to others of mine, but they use
HIMEMX, and you'd have to manually modify it to avoid that, so that's
probably not a good suggestion right now.

BTW, do you know exactly which version of HimemX you're using here?
3.32, perhaps??? Latest is probably here, so it might be worth trying
instead (rare chance, but anyways):

https://sourceforge.net/projects/himemx/files/v3.34/himemx.zip/download

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Re: [Freedos-user] Which freedos on 486

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 8:02 AM, Dimitris Zilaskos  wrote:
>
> Thanks for the followup. Hitting F8 reveals HIMEMX triggering this problem:
>
> Let me know what else I can try - I will recheck the floppies for starters
> in case they went bad and check the rest of your suggestions.

Unless I'm reading it incorrectly, your picture indicates that your
machine has 32 MB of RAM. Is that correct?

In that case, since (strangely) HIMEMX doesn't appear to work on your
machine, you could use a different alternative (e.g. FDXMS or even
probably FDXMS286).

1). https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/xms/fdxms/
2). https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/xms/fdxms286/

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS website (rants)

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 7:32 PM, Jose Antonio Senna
 wrote:
>
>   This said, I also admit browsing from DOS
>  is going to be less and less practical.
>  Lynx 2.8.5 supports HTTPS (and is the only
>  tried DOS browser which does),

I'm pretty sure Links2 (non-lite version) can support HTTPS also.

But if you try Links2 and it doesn't work well for you, I'm pretty
sure the developer (mikulas) would still accept your feedback. He
seems open to suggestions.

>   It shall be possible to write a browser "for DOS"
>  from scratch (possibly using only expanded
>  memory, so it may run even in a 8088, albeit
>  a fast one), but it will take so much skilled
>  effort that nobody is going to do it.

Honestly, I'd err more on the side of "nobody has those skills
anymore" rather than pretending "if only we had more xyz" (money,
developers, time, etc).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS website

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

Dennis, I wish we wouldn't have to constantly state how obsolete DOS
is and how it's horribly dead and useless. I doubt Jasenna is directly
profiting from your "obvious" advice to upgrade. (Sigh.)

On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 10:11 PM, Thomas Mueller  wrote:
>
> I browsed www.rahul.net/dkaufman/  just for curiosity.  Last released version 
> of DOS
> port of lynx was 2.8.5rel.1, date 18 April 2004.

There's a newer DJGPP "port" 2.8.9 since two weeks ago. Not from Doug,
though, and I'd hardly call it well-supported. Heck, I haven't even
tried it. I don't know what it supports or how well it works:

http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/djgpp/current/v2tk/lynx289b.zip
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.msdos.djgpp/5HbYKiotvcA

(irony: you probably can't see that announcement without Javascript)

(For my DOS uses, Links2 is plenty good enough.)

> Last line of this web page read:
> This page last updated 2 November 2006.

Links 2.13 (DJGPP build, mirrored to iBiblio for us) was just released
two weeks ago as well.

> I also tried www.nettamer.net/tamer.html : looked like the same old stuff 
> from 1999.
>
> I checked www.glennmcc.org : latest Arachne is v1.97, dating to Mar 04, 2013.
>
> I think it might be possible to produce a DOS web browser with support for 
> current web standards,

It's possible (in theory) to support some Javascript, but adding
things like HTML5 are probably out of the question.

> but would not be worthwhile on an OS that distinguishes between conventional, 
> extended and
> expanded memory.

DJGPP v2 built stuff usually only sees DPMI, which behind the scenes
is based upon whatever other kind is available (EMS/VCPI, XMS, raw).
You don't have to do anything special to access it, so that is a red
herring.

> Writing a web browser is more efficient in Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Haiku

FreeBSD isn't a supported target for Opera anymore (last I checked).
So how "easy" can it be if even they aren't supported? Does any
"major" web browser support Haiku? Or even eCS (OS/2)? AFAIK, no.

Face it, only the big three (billion-dollar) OSes are worth anybody's
effort anymore. Which is horribly lazy and inept, but that's the way
it is. Honestly, a web browser shouldn't be almost bigger than the OS
itself! It's a mess, but there's not much normal people can do about
it.

But it's also not fair to pretend that development just magically
happens (while whining about money, as if that solves everything).
First of all, money and developers don't grow on trees. We're lucky
when anything is supported, and it's not always guaranteed that even
Windows, Linux, and Mac are all equal in features.

> not to mention Windows and Mac, and not many people would be interested
> in web-browsing from DOS.

IE is practically dead (or so I thought) in lieu of Edge. And legacy
things (like "old" Win7) are going away. Let's not pretend that it's
really about DOS. It's more about ultra-modern advancements (which
personally I think we can live without, but nobody agrees with me).

Probably cost-efficient Android tablets or Chromebooks are the future
(though iOS is still extremely popular).

> At this stage, my interest in browsing from DOS would be mainly to see if it 
> works on simpler sites,
> naturally not including any kind of online commerce.

Considering that most companies (and even individuals) are not immune
to hacks, and that this problem seems to be increasing, I think any
overzealous claims of security (on any OS) would be somewhat naive.
Not to be a pessimist, but the Internet itself may not survive if
certain groups can't keep their hands off of other peoples' goods.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeBASIC status?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 10:22 AM, dos386  wrote:
>
>> I've never used QB64 but have heard some stuff about it.
>> For one, it uses a C++ compiler as backend, no?
>
> http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=8785 (shots and
> links are dead, unfortunately)
> http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=8891

Yes, I vaguely remember, but HX trickery isn't really "DOS".

>> doing some reading on the pros/cons of FreeBASIC vs QB64
>
> EXE's from Q64 used to depend from only 8 MiO DLL bloat back in 2010
> ... no clue how far it works nowadays 6 years later.

No idea if it behaves better or not. But, again, it has no DOS port,
so it's less interesting (to me).

> AFAIK FreeBASIC still works in DOS (check the forum) ...

Yeah, it still works, I can successfully rebuild FBMD5 under QEMU with
latest FBC.   :-)

> although the DGJPP bloat is a bit frustrating.

Free Pascal is better (thanks to smartlinking and no libc dependency).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.1 crashing in VirtualBox 5.0.22

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 2:19 PM, Abe Mishler  wrote:
>
> I'm interested in learning how games like DOOM (requires 3MB available)
> were able to work. I know I know, read the source code.

AFAIK, Doom was originally compiled with Watcom using a DOS extender
(DOS4G Professional). So it's 386 pmode code.

All the open source ports (since late 1997?) started with the
so-called Linux sources (thus no DOS soundcard support), so pretty
much all of the newer DOS-based ports used DJGPP v2 (DPMI) and Allegro
(sound, gfx). This was before OpenWatcom was officially released
(2003).

See here:ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/doomsrc.txt

> I'm getting there. I'm also reading "MS-DOS Beyond 640K" by James Forney.
> Interesting to note that Id says not to use memory managers or disk caching
> programs with Doom.

Even back in the DOS days, I don't think anyone was naive enough to
expect everyone to (always) run without any memory managers. DOS
extenders usually went out of their way to support multiple
environments (raw, EMS/VCPI, XMS, DPMI). Certainly running under
Windows wasn't always forbidden, and that won't let you disable
everything.

Yes, some DOS games needed a fairly clean setup, but most of them (by
design) could handle themselves gracefully in multiple environments.
E.g. Quake (DJGPP-based) was explicitly debugged and tested so that it
could run under Win95 with (I think?) only 16 MB of RAM.

> Doom and other games must do their own memory management which makes sense
> for performance.

Doom may allocate everything up front and privately manage it all
itself, but that's all. It's not overriding the OS (or APIs).

And yes, that was probably faster for 1993, back when the best you had
was a fast 386 or slow 486. Although technically the Intel Pentium
(586) first came out in 1993, but it wasn't common. Even when Quake
came out in 1996 (and was heavily optimized for Intel's pipelined 587
FPU), the Pentium wasn't universal.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.1 crashing in VirtualBox 5.0.22

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 10:08 AM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> I think that even 597 kB of low DOS memory is plenty for old DOS programs.

"597 kb should be enough for anyone." -- Eric Auer, 2016:-)

In Abe's recent screenshot, he shows that he's now getting (thanks to
Ulrich) "628 kb" free. This is actually "643,488" bytes! That's
plenty! (It's easy to forget that "kb" is not equal to 1000.)

Seriously, I can't speak for all apps, but it's rare to need (much
more, if any) greater than 500 kb. Needing 600 kb is almost unheard of
(right??). At least, I only vaguely remember one demo (submerge??)
that needed over 600,000 bytes free. And even that was probably badly
designed. Some games require more than 500 kb, but that too is of
questionable design. Most well-behaved apps (yeah, I know that's not
saying much) don't really need that much.

My own VBox setup "only" gets 596 kb (610,544) free. That's HimemX
only (and FreeCOM XMS_Swap, of course; and yes, packet driver can vary
a lot in size, too). I can't remember exactly, but my native FreeDOS
install is also similar, and I see no huge problems. Though it's
impossible to test everything, of course.

Can anyone provide real-world usage examples of needing 600,000 bytes
or more free?? (Besides obvious things like user data or combining
several TSRs.) Do any popular apps from yesteryear need that much?

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.1 crashing in VirtualBox 5.0.22

[Rugxulo]

Hi again,

On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 12:34 AM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But I agree, in theory, that JEMMEX shouldn't be preferred or
> suggested without a good reason. But that's not my decision for FD 1.2
> (and I forget offhand what Jerome uses, I haven't downloaded any
> recent prereleases, too preoccupied with other bagatela).

Just so Jerome doesn't tear me a new one (not really, he's nice), I
quickly downloaded FDI-FLOPPY.zip (dated June 27):

It simply loads HimemX (XMSv3, 386+) and nothing else.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.1 crashing in VirtualBox 5.0.22

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 6:51 PM, Abe Mishler <a...@mishlerlabs.com> wrote:
>
>> On Jun 30, 2016, at 6:19 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> If JEMMEX is your only problem, then you have no problems.
>
> This idea has appeared before in this thread and it is a relief to hear it 
> echoed.
> Perhaps a disclaimer like this is warranted in the Wiki install guide for new 
> users
> like myself. (I had very limited exposure to DOS when it was mainstream so 
> the idea
> of so many different memory modes has been overwhelming to learn suddenly.)

I didn't have a PC back then, but AFAIK 

The IBM PC used an 8088 in 1981. The max memory supported was 640 kb
(low / conventional), but even that was usually overly idealistic. I
think?? you typically got 400 kb free back in those days (if you could
even afford the full 640 kb at all). The original IBM PC didn't even
have a hard drive, and it shipped with like two 160 kb floppy drives.
I think 64 kb of RAM was the initial amount (similar to CP/M, I
suppose).

Only later did 500 kb RAM free become the norm and even required, e.g.
MS-DOS 5 bragged about freeing up "45 kb at least".

Of course, originally it was optional things like (hardware) EMS that
(partially) brought more RAM. That was presumably more common with
8086-ish machines than newer ones. With the 286, although it took a
while to standardize, the preferred approach was either "raw", XMSv2,
or DPMI (which really sat atop one of the others). Even DPMI didn't
appear until 1989/1990 with Windows 3.0.

The 286 was, what, 1982? Obviously the 386 was (first) introduced in
1986 by Intel. But the IBM PC didn't get the 286 until (I don't even
know) XT? Nope, Wikipedia says "XT 286" was 1986. Nope, Wikipedia also
says "The 80286 was employed for the IBM PC/AT, introduced in 1984".
But it took a *long* time for megabytes of RAM to become common. It
was just too expensive. (My 1994-era 486 Sx/25 only had 4 MB.)

Long story short, the differing memory APIs were due to different
hardware. So hardware "expanded" (EMS) needed one API while the 286
(max 16 MB RAM)'s "extended" (XMS) memory needed another one. And
Windows 3.0 (1990) invented yet another one (DPMI) that was "better"
than VCPI (and more widely supported, although most DPMI servers ended
up being 386+ anyways).

> If a consensus can be reached, I would humbly submit the idea of swapping 
> options 1 and 2 in the next release to give less emphasis to JEMMEX.

Even Blackthorne (game, which is now freeware BTW) required EMS, and
that was what, 1990s?? (Wikipedia says 1994.) So we can't totally say
that nobody should or can use EMS (e.g. EMM386). But yeah, I agree,
JEMMEX as default isn't really all it's cracked up to be (due to
various rare quirks, among other reasons).

> As a new user, I naively thought that JEMMEX was the best/preferred option 
> based on its ranking which may be intended.

In theory, if everything was perfectly bug-free, then sure, having
both XMS and software-emulated EMS (via V86 mode) + VCPI and using
UMBs (leading to more conventional memory free) is perfectly ideal.
(DPMI is usually loaded on demand via separate TSR.)

Obviously, in hindsight, you don't really need a billion APIs for the
same family of hardware. But that's the point, FreeDOS tries to
support 8086, 286, and 386 memory schemes (but no AMD64, obviously).

> But under the example of VBox, it doesn't hold up. I think I have learned now 
> that even though JEMMEX claims
> to do the same thing as option 2 in less memory by combining driver logic, 
> option 2 really works better even if
> there is a slightly larger overhead.

The more differing environments, the more testing you have to do to
support them all. It can add up, leaving obscure bugs.

> Option 2 certainly gives me more expanded memory (EMS).

Not sure why, offhand.

> At least this seems to be the case in VBox. However, JEMMEX behaves just fine 
> running under QEMU.
> So go figure. Perhaps the Wiki should push people towards QEMU on Linux 
> rather than VBox on Windows.

No, because most people don't need JEMMEX and/or EMS, and VBox
(sometimes) has other advantages. It's not worth giving up the whole
environment due to one or two accidental incompatibilities.

But I agree, in theory, that JEMMEX shouldn't be preferred or
suggested without a good reason. But that's not my decision for FD 1.2
(and I forget offhand what Jerome uses, I haven't downloaded any
recent prereleases, too preoccupied with other bagatela).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeBASIC status?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

I'm no expert, so I've only lightly dabbled.

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 6:10 PM, Abe Mishler  wrote:
>
> I see it is back up now.

Like I said before, the compiler has been around (even heavily
developed) for 12 years! It's no toy but instead a mature tool at this
point.

> I had been doing some reading on the pros/cons of FreeBASIC vs QB64. Not 
> looking to start a flame war here,
> but I had decided to invest some time with FreeBASIC when the site went down. 
> I thought perhaps that was an
> early portent that I had picked the "wrong" compiler.

I've never used QB64 but have heard some stuff about it. For one, it
uses a C++ compiler as backend, no?

FreeBASIC is a fully native compiler (written in itself), albeit not
really optimizing, although it does also have an optional C (GCC)
output backend. The DOS version is based upon DJGPP's libc (and uses
DJGPP ports of GNU BinUtils), so it's compatible with anything (e.g.
libs) that already works with that.

fbhelp is really helpful (no pun intended) for looking up what's
supported. A lot of that is taken directly from the wiki. Also, the
DOS FAQ is quite helpful, too (thanks to DOS386).

> I see that Black Annex is probably written with QB64

But I (barely) disagree that the above is the "best QB game ever"
since, quite honestly, there were hundreds of really amazing (DOS
graphical) games written for vanilla QBasic interpreter. Well, at
least I always found them amazing. Even though I never worked on any,
they were always really really beyond what you would normally consider
appropriate for QB (so Gorillas is not the ultimate example I'd give,
there were many programs way way better than that ... although even
that is probably better than Donkey, heh, sorry Bill).

FYI, there's a truly brilliant genius named Joel who has written a lot
of cool stuff (even using QuickBASIC, e.g. NES emulator):

https://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit

> Does anyone have any experience or tips working with the DOS version of 
> FreeBASIC in FreeDOS that they'd like to share?
>
> If not, thanks for humoring me this far in the thread.

It has several supported "dialects", e.g. "fb" or "fblite" or "qb".
While the QB (and VBDOS) compatibility isn't 100%, it's better than
nothing. Of course, I think they more or less recommend all new code
be written in "improved" dialects like "fb", which offers a lot of
advantages. Though I'm not honestly sure if they ever finished with
the OOP support. (It's at least partially supported, though.)

Oh, you can also do inline asm (although that's not as easy as it
sounds with DPMI/pmode).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.1 crashing in VirtualBox 5.0.22

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 6:17 AM, Abe Mishler <a...@mishlerlabs.com> wrote:
>
>> On 6/29/2016 1:03 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
>
> On the page that you sent regarding QEMU Binaries for Windows, it says:
> "QEMU for Windows is experimental software and might contain even
> serious bugs, so use the binaries at your own risk."

It's just a standard disclaimer, don't read too much into it. It works
fine for me (FreeDOS). While I haven't exhaustively tested gigabytes
of software, everything I tried seems to work fairly well, no huge
obvious deficiencies. So don't worry.

The only real problem would be if it had major bugs and they refused
to hear bug reports or even consider fixing them. AFAIK, that's not
true. But indeed, I do think they prefer Linux more.

Nevertheless, several other OSes bundle Windows binaries of QEMU with
some of their releases (e.g. ReactOS, AROS), so it must also work well
for them too. So don't overreact, it works! But no software is 100%
perfect, hence some people feel the need to explicitly disclaim legal
liability, etc.

> Since QEMU is more mature on linux right now, I installed Xubuntu 16.04
> LTS inside VirtualBox (5.0.24 now) and then QEMU inside of that.

I don't think it's a billion times more mature there. QEMU is a very
complicated suite of software, for many many different architectures.
Certainly it's almost strange / funny / pointless to install QEMU
inside another OS inside VBox!

VBox works well too. If you have problems with JEMMEX, then don't run
that. Again, you really don't need it at all. Don't kid yourself, VBox
is well-tested (overall), just not as much for DOS. So FreeDOS still
(mostly) works fine there.

> FreeDOS is much peppier inside of this configuration. I will probably get
> another HD for a native Xubuntu install and skip the VBox on Win 8.1
> layer altogether.

Setup a bootable USB jump drive instead, it's probably cheaper and
easier. Okay, so technically I don't know of all the ways to make one
(DistroWatch Weekly mentioned a few ways several months ago), but IIRC
the latest Ubuntu actually recommends RUFUS (which is also well-known
for supporting FreeDOS)!

A while back I had setup a Ubuntu 14.04 jump drive (with persistence),
but it's fairly slow, so that may be a concern for you. But I don't
think it has to be that way, I just don't have the time or energy to
try billions of configurations.

antiX 13 was very good and lightning fast, and 16 was just released,
so maybe you should try that instead, it's based upon Debian.

> Side note: Since VBox was updated to 5.0.24 during this thread I decided
> to try a new installation of FreeDOS with it but had the same problem.

If JEMMEX is your only problem, then you have no problems.

>> But nothing beats running natively (on real hardware).
>>
> You're right about that. As Ulrich mentioned earlier, he uses screencast
> software to capture what he's doing. I'm interested in doing the same so
> I think FreeDOS in QEMU on linux is the way to go (for me, at this time).

Who knows, eventually there might be an official Flatpak (or Snappy?)
package that works across all the major distros. I think that will
ease deployment (instead of having billions of separate incompatible
versions).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeBASIC status?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 6:52 AM, Abe Mishler  wrote:
>
> Does anyone know the state of FreeBASIC? The site (http://freebasic.net)
> has been down for at least 2 days now. Has the project been shuttered?

I'm not in the loop and haven't heard anything privately, but I know
that I browsed there in the past week with no problems. Everything is
still chugging along, AFAIK. So no, it's not anywhere near being
abandoned. (IIRC, the project has been constantly improving since
2004.)

The most recent release was five months ago (which, all things
considered, is quite a short gap, we don't need new releases every
week). It's already been mirrored to iBiblio for us:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/devel/basic/freebasic/1.05.0/

Anything in particular you were looking for?

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.1 crashing in VirtualBox 5.0.22

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 10:05 AM, Abe Mishler <a...@mishlerlabs.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/28/2016 7:55 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
>>
>> I would recommend you (also) test under QEMU if you're that worried or
>> want (potentially) better stability.
>>
> QEMU, while about 10x slower (on Win 8.1 amd64 host), ran perfectly.
> Thank you for the suggestion. Perhaps there are some optimizations that
> I don't know about...

Not sure about improving speed, esp. on Windows. There used to be
kqemu for older versions (0.9.0?), but that's been discontinued.

Anyways, VBox itself is allegedly partially based upon QEMU, but it's
not true that QEMU is always slower. At least one thing I was running
was faster under QEMU (+ Linux) than VBox (+ Win7), even without VT-X.
But that could be because of many different reasons. Using VT-X (which
for QEMU means using KVM variant instead) obviously increases speed
even further.

But nothing beats running natively (on real hardware).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.1 crashing in VirtualBox 5.0.22

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 3:55 PM, Abe Mishler  wrote:
>
> Strange, right? And not just on one computer, but three separate ones; each
> running different hardware and software (host OS). Although I would expect
> that the underlying differences are abstracted away by VirtualBox.

It's not really that strange. EMS is rarely used nowadays, and DOS (in
all its billions of setups) isn't highly tested by emulators. Their
focus is on other, more popular, guests.

It's impossible (or maybe unprofitable) to test every emulator under
the sun (dozens!), plus having to work around all the bugs and missing
features. Some OSes present bigger problems than others (OS/2,
OpenBSD), even requiring VT-X compatible hardware.

I would recommend you (also) test under QEMU if you're that worried or
want (potentially) better stability. At least Windows (32-bit or
64-bit) binaries are easily available below (not to mention that QEMU
runs on various other host OSes too, e.g. Linux):

http://qemu.weilnetz.de/

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Re: [Freedos-user] a unique directory tree question?

[Rugxulo]

Hi, Bret,

(somewhat off-topic)

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 6:21 PM, Bret Johnson  wrote:
> The DELTREE utility should work OK, though it's a dangerous utility to use.  
> You can easily end up
> accidentally deleting some things that you really wanted to keep.

Backup backup backup!

> I generally only use DELTREE in a small, "confined" case where I'm really 
> sure there's nothing "hidden"
> or forgotten that I really don't want to delete (I don't know your exact 
> situation).  When I'm trying to do a
> "large" project where I'm not sure of the consequences, I generally use a 
> dedicated visual file management
> utility (I personally like Necromancer's DOS Navigator, though there are a 
> ton of similar programs out there).

There's a newer fork of NDN available here (as I assume you're still
using old classic from 2010):

= 
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_wEiYjzVkC0ZGtkbENENzF1Nms=drive_web

= (actually, I discovered it here, but while the maintainer [CandyMan]
hasn't really promoted it, he's still somewhat active in other
projects) http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?p=186222#186222

EDIT: I don't actually know if this now is newer than the ones of his
that I still have on my hard drive (from this past March). I didn't
test them much, and with no one else actively interested, it seemed a
less valuable way to spend my time. So I'm just telling you for
completeness, if you want to test them.   :-/

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.1 crashing in VirtualBox 5.0.22

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 12:56 PM, Abe Mishler  wrote:
>
> It's apparent that a well written book might help me come up
> to speed on all of these memory modes and managers.

I'm not an expert, but the simple answer is you don't need all of
them. Pure XMS (and optional DPMI) should suffice for most uses. Don't
overcomplicate it. Don't worry about every feature under the sun
unless an app you want to run direly needs it (unlikely). EMS is quite
old and rare, and even without EMM386, the amount of conventional
memory free should be "good enough" for most existing programs, so you
probably don't need UMBs at all. (But see UMBPCI. Or EMS Magic, which
reuses conventional memory, which is sometimes better for
compatibility.) Besides, you can "JEMM386 LOAD" (and "UNLOAD") later
if you (temporarily) need EMS for something (but not for UMBs).

Somebody, when preparing FD 1.1, was perhaps overzealous for features
when trying to support JEMMEX. But, for the record, VBox is not
necessarily bug-free or a primary target (remember that DOS is meant
for actual native booting, or at least was before UEFI). So yes,
presumably EMM386 (et al.) work better on "real" native hardware than
emulators. That can't be avoided, but perhaps it's not wise to
recommend (or even include) overcomplicated JEMMEX config lines in
future FD versions. (This has been discussed before, so you're not the
first one to notice this hanging VBox + JEMMEX behavior.)

P.S. Emulators are still (usually) run on top of advanced host OSes.
So I'm not sure certain low-level DOS things are directly useful there
(software cache, screen saver, ultra DMA). So I wouldn't worry about
those either.

> My interest is in programming anyways (I'm new to DOS but not programming).
> Any suggestions?

The officially recommended compilers / languages are C (OpenWatcom)
and assembler (NASM). But the DJGPP tree is quite nice too (and
includes barely-related offshoots like Free Pascal, FreeBASIC, and
more). None of these need EMS or UMBs.

So it's unlikely you'll be interested in EMS at all. Stick to real
mode (640 kb) or DPMI (2 GB).

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 5:47 PM,   wrote:
>
> BTW, I fear that VirtualBox does not have guest additions,

AFAIK, you're correct, it does not support DOS.

The FD wiki suggests to use FTPSRV instead:

http://freedos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/VirtualBox_-_Chapter_6

> and VMware Tools are also not available for DOS.

As mentioned, several years ago, one dude (Eduardo Casino) around here
wrote his own:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsmount/

This is already listed under the Software List ("UTIL"):

http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=vmsmount

P.S. I don't think QEMU needs additions, just use "fat:/":

http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-doc.html#disk_005fimages_005ffat_005fimages

(Or, like I previously mentioned, use external tools to insert/extract
from file system image.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mtools

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games - and DOS installation

[Rugxulo]

Dennis, we've already had this pointless conversation several times
over. I'm not sure why you keep rehashing it.


On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 3:06 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The number of people who still have actual need to run DOS is a vanishingly 
> small fraction of the PC market.

This is a FreeDOS mailing list. The fact that anybody here uses
Windows is off-topic, irrelevant, and (mostly) accidental.

We don't need constant reminders about how small our marketshare is.
We frankly don't care because there is nothing you can add to DOS that
will "fix" it. Some people will never be happy no matter what we do.
Some people, like you, can't see the forest for the trees.

> MS doesn't care about DOS, and *shouldn't*.

MS doesn't participate in this mailing list, nor do they have anything
to do with running it. They are not involved. We are not here asking
them to do anything.

You don't have to tell us (over and over) how insignificant we are.
It's not productive. We are not a billion-dollar company and never
will be. Get over it. If that makes you think so much less of us, I
suggest you find a suitable Windows forum to coddle you.

> The folks they consider their customers stopped running DOS and DOS apps 
> decades back.

MS has more than enough money to do whatever they want. Even if there
were billions in potential DOS revenue, they still wouldn't care. They
definitely don't need any more money. They're still a business, but
they are beyond worry. Actually, they make tons more from the "cloud"
and Office 365 than Windows these days. They have diversified a lot.
(Heck, they squandered $26 billion on LinkedIn! How does that
technically "improve" Windows NT at all or gain further customers for
Windows??)

But MS' potential business strategies are off-topic here.

> There are a variety of reasons why Windows (*and* Linux) *are* better than 
> DOS.

Irrelevant to DOS users, especially on this mailing list. You should
not be trying to convert anyone here to the Windows religion. There
are plenty of other forums for that.

> The folks who *do* care about DOS are mostly hobbyists who like playing with 
> retro tech.

And apparently contrarians who like beating a dead horse.

> Most of what I do on computers these days can't be done under DOS.

Like complaining about how much DOS "sux0rz!!!1". Get with it, FreeDOS
devs, Dennis needs to whine, and he needs it NOW!

> Ultimately, it comes down to money.  The sort of support you would
> like is stuff the people who could *do* it expect to be *paid* for.

I've never seen anyone pretend to be willing to work writing DOS
drivers for money. Those people don't exist. I think you're
overestimating the potential developers for such tasks.

> It's what they do for a living.  They aren't going to do it free for
> fun.  There's next to no money in DOS these days, so it won't happen.

I agree that bounties do exist in other OSes, and a lot of development
is sponsored by corporations. Still, that is a small fraction of all
work done. That talent base is extremely small and not to be taken for
granted. We expect miracles, but we're lucky when we can still do the
basics.

Again, these so-called DOS-savvy developers don't exist. They just
don't. They aren't willing to work for money because they don't have
the appropriate skills. I've never heard of anyone, appropriately
inclined, whine about lack of money. Developers are very few and far
in between. It's not nearly as common as you think.

> The world changes, and we must change with it.  Sitting still isn't normally 
> an option.

Patches welcome. Otherwise, shut up and get out. Sorry (not sorry!) to
be crass, but it's not conducive to further development to just
constantly berate people, saying, "Change! You suck! You're old!
Improve!"

None of us are that naive. We're all well aware of Windows, Linux,
macOS [sic], and various others. You didn't tell us anything we didn't
already know. We don't need you to constantly remind us how crappy we
are. It just doesn't solve anything. It's frankly annoying.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
>
>> I wonder if it was possible to include the guest integration drivers for
>> Virtual PC, VirtualBox, QEMU (are there any?), Hyper-V in a provided VHD
>
> Eduardo Casino has written VMSMOUNT in 2011 :-) It lets you
> mount VMWare shared directories as a FreeDOS drive letter :-)

I haven't really used VMware, but one person warned me that it
required VT-X nowadays. Also, I'm not even sure if there is still a
32-bit version either. I've heard some good things, but it might be
safer to use something else.

(Yes, I know, most others lack tools like VMSMOUNT. But at least QEMU
has partial "fat:" read/write support. VirtualBox can use FTPSRV or
whatever.)

Actually, it's probably easier to use other tools for inserting and
extracting files from disk images, e.g. Gilles V.'s Extract, 7-Zip 7z
[sic], or GNU Mtools.

> I guess it would also be possible to do something fancy for
> mouse support.

Most programs don't forcibly insist on using one, thankfully.

> DOS does not have a built-in clipboard, so a
> guest driver for that would have to do something else, such
> as Linux style "mark to put into clipboard, use middle mouse
> button to paste clipboard contents into keyboard buffer" but
> I am not aware of such guest drivers for DOS yet.

The only clipboard util (of that kind) TSR that I can think of would
be DOSCLIP.ARJ by Veit Kannegieser. Although I can't remember ever
using it, and I can't find it on his homepage anymore. But it has
sources, yet I don't know the license offhand either (don't see any
obvious mentions, might have to email him for definitive answer). Take
a look if curious:

1). https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/dosclip.arj?attredirects=0
1b). EDIT: also needs LHTSR: http://kannegieser.net/veit/quelle/lhtsr.arj

2). http://kannegieser.net/veit/programm/index_e.htm  (not here? even
WayBack doesn't show it, dunno!)

N.B. This may not be exactly what you wanted, but I think?? it tries
to be Win16 API compatible, so it's basically a global clipboard for
apps that are Win16 aware.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 3:44 AM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
>
> Hi Rugxulo, some CWSDPMI nitpicking and some memory limits coming ;-)
>
>> So DR-DOS 7.03 forcibly needed its own (weird, hybrid, bundled VxD or
>> whatever) EMM386, which had its own built-in XMS (so no separate HIMEM
>> needed) plus built-in DPMI (so no CWSDPMI needed).
>
> CWSDPMI is both a DPMI host and a DOS extender.

No, CWSDPMI is pure DPMI "only", roughly 0.9 with a very few 1.0
extensions. It is not a DOS "extender" at all because it doesn't
support any (non-standard, unofficial) int 21h extensions. So it
doesn't support Watcom apps (e.g. Doom).

> So if you run programs compiled to use it, but are in DR-DOS, you may still
> need CWSDPMI,

OpenDOS 7.01 allegedly had a buggy DPMI server, so you needed to
disable it and use CWSDPMI instead for your DJGPP apps. However, that
was later fixed in 7.02 or such.

With 7.03, you can NOT multitask if you don't enable their own
built-in DPMI host. (I don't think so-called "OpenDOS" ever had a full
release, so it probably didn't even officially have multitasking.)

> but that could rely on DR-EMM386 for the DPMI part of the work.

I think their built-in DPMI did support unofficial int 21h extensions
(same as Windows and a very few others), but it lacked virtual memory.

Sadly, GCC just eats up too much RAM, even in (nowadays considered)
"ancient" versions. So the whole multitasking advantage wasn't as good
as it sounded. Besides, you also probably wanted software cache and/or
RAM drive to speed things up (at least I did), and even those were of
limited use (due to hardcoded memory limits, again).

> The same thing happens when you run such a
> program inside Windows or a DOS window of Windows, which also
> provide DPMI already :-)

Which is why Vista's DPMI bug (memory limits again!) was all the more
painful. You couldn't override it with anything else (at least not
until SP1 via registry). For the company that actually invented DPMI,
they sure dropped the ball there. It's sad that DPMI was considered so
superior to every other scheme but eventually rejected, abandoned,
allowed to bitrot.

>> But it was allegedly limited to 64 MB per task, hardcoded, no matter
>> if you incorrectly tried to switch out the XMSv2 (e.g. trying to use
>> HIMEMX) or not.
>
> Interesting limitation. EMS, XMS2, XMS3, VCPI, DPMI all have limits,
> but if DR-EMM386 claims to support XMS3, it should support > 64MB...

But it didn't. It probably just faked the version number for
compatibility (dunno why) with unknown apps. Bad idea, I think, but I
don't know the details or why.

> EMS 3.2: Up to 8 MB, one 64 kB page frame with 4 pages of 16 kB
> EMS 4: Up to 32 MB? Maps 4 kB and 16 kB pages in your low 1 MB
>
> DPMI: Up to 4 GB, in theory, but see the XMS 3 limitations.
> VCPI: Up to 4 GB, in theory, but only up to 4 MB vm86 shared space?

EMS/VCPI were obsoleted by DPMI. Unlike VCPI, DPMI could run on a 286
and didn't always mandate (unsafe) ring 0.

> XMS 2: Up to 64 MB, in some cases limited to only 16 or 32 MB
> XMS 3: Up to 4 GB, in practice even only 2 or roughly 3 GB

Right, I get about 2.5 GB here locally with XMSv3 (HIMEMX). Not sure
about maximum allowed by CWSDPMI, it has some bugs. I don't push it
(or any extender) too hard, I'm not expert enough (or at all!) to do
everything.

> Background: VCPI helps you to take over protected mode for yourself
> without breaking too much of the current system state. This is why
> Windows does not allow VCPI software to run.

VCPI was basically an extension of EMS, and it was spearheaded (I
think??) by Desqview dudes.

> Windows itself used a special interface called GEMMIS to take over memory
> management for itself. In other words, it replaced HIMEM and EMM386 on the 
> fly to
> have full control in 386 enhanced mode. Which is part of the reason
> why that mode has troubles with FreeDOS and non-commercial EMM386.

EMS and XMS were considered ugly hacks but unavoidable in the old
days. DPMI was considered the future. Too bad nobody kept it updated!

> Windows for Workgroups 3.11 always wants to run in enhanced mode,
> you can only run WfW 3.11 in a limited "safe mode" without that.

At that time you could still boot to pure DOS, but the goal was
(probably) to make that less necessary over time.

> Fun facts: Some games get confused if you have more than 16 or 32 MB
> of RAM reported to them and even Windows 3 has problems above 256 MB,
> although you can edit the config to get it working with at most 1 GB,
> where even the most modest possible swap calculation sign-overflows.

This is part of the reason why DOSBox doesn't support more than 64 MB max RAM.

> Also, DOS software only sees limited amounts of memory when you run it
> inside Windows 3, ol

Re: [Freedos-user] Games - and DOS installation

[Rugxulo]

Hi, Dennis,  :-)

I know this may shock you, but this is a DOS mailing list. You know,
people here actively want to use "DOS" binaries on DOS-compatible
OSes.

I'm just saying, keep that in mind below.

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 12:11 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 6:39 AM, TJ Edmister  wrote:
>>
>> Since I boot Win2K/XP from FAT32, I also have the ability to put FD right
>> on the C: partition and add it to my BOOT.INI as an option. This needs a
>> little juggling of boot sectors to accomplish though.
>
> I have to ask: why FAT32?

DOS doesn't read NTFS.

(Yes, I know there were some partial, buggy third-party tools for
that, but mostly "by design", for "security"??, MS never cared enough
to let other OSes "share" data with Windows. They put all their eggs
in one basket.)

Yes, I suppose you can have both FAT32 and NTFS, and just copy files,
if/when needed. In fact, you have to do that nowadays, Vista on up
won't boot from FAT anymore. (At least Vista can finally resize the
NTFS partition instead of more painful alternatives.)

> I stayed at Win98 SE longer than I wanted to, because I was still
> waiting for driver support for all of my peripherals.  When a driver
> for my SCSI scanner finally appeared for Win2K, I jumped

Sigh, isn't it great that drivers are incompatible between OSes?  :-P

> Win98 reached the point of having to be rebooted four or five times a day.
> Win2K just ran.

And was buggier (for DOS apps). Stability is always good, but when you
can't even run the apps you want to run, it's fairly useless. Might as
well use a Mac!

> It was up 24/7, and rebooted only if I was fiddling
> with hardware or installing new software or a Windows update that
> required it.  I was delighted.

2k and XP are dead as doorknobs, totally unsupported. Even most
third-party apps now brag about being incompatible to XP. It's a
shame.

> I was aware you *could* install 2K on FAT32, but couldn't understand
> why you might want to.

Just use both, best of both worlds. No, your boot partition doesn't
have to be the same as your data partition. IIRC, most SSD users put
the OS on ultra-fast SSD and put all their
frequently-read/write-accessed (big) media files elsewhere.

> NTFS supported things I sorely missed.  One
> was a far more robust file system that was far easier to repair if
> there was a problem.  If I had a file system problem, I ran CHKDSK.
> On a FAT file system, this would result in a directory created by it
> to hold orphaned file fragments, and files with names like
> FILE.CHK.  Once in a while, the file fragments it found were
> usable.  Mostly, they just needed to be deleted, and if they were
> pieces of programs, the programs needed to be reinstalled.  On an NTFS
> system, CHKDSK simply put everything back where it was supposed to be
> under its original name.  The only time that didn't happen was when a
> directory entry happened to be on a bad block and it had to create a
> new one.  It was no problem to mark the block bad, then rename the new
> directory to the old name.

Great, but NTFS doesn't work on DOS, which is an 8086-compatible
real-mode OS. FAT is designed by minimalism, out of necessity. Sure,
if you're willing to up the memory requirements a gig or two, you can
have all the features of other OSes.

It's not fair to expect them to do the same things. They target
entirely different systems. Is NTFS better? I hope so, it's all you
get nowadays! DOS is dead (to them), they don't care anymore, not even
about binary compatibility. Buy all new (Win10/Metro) apps! Upgrade
upgrade upgrade!

> If I needed to run old 16bit DOS apps, I could do so in NTVDM, and
> they didn't have to be on a FAT filesystem to use them.

NTVDM has regressed since XP. It's not as good anymore. Even XP wasn't
perfect. It's not a long-term solution. It's going away. MS doesn't
care (and hasn't) anymore.

It's not fair to pretend that "Windows is better than DOS!" because
they don't even barely half-support it anymore. We all know the
(previous) advantages. We'd all still be using Windows full-time if it
worked for us, but sadly it doesn't. They threw DOS away, and they're
already trying to do the same to anything written for Win7 or older.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 4:00 AM, Brandon Taylor 
wrote:
>
> As much as I hate to concede, I must. I have found a critical passage on
the FreeDOS website
> which, in my eyes, discourages further experimentation:

How did it discourage anybody? By giving them total freedom??

> “FreeDOS is a complete operating system. If you choose to install this on
your computer,
> you may overwrite the operating system you have now (for example,
Windows.) If this is not
> what you intend, please stop now.”

In case it hasn't already been made obvious, this is a warning for
inexperienced users who (surprise!) would rather NOT wipe out their
existing OS and data if all they want to do is play around and experiment
with DOS.

Perhaps it needs to mention that VMs (e.g. QEMU) are a much safer
alternative.

> It seems, in making FreeDOS, the developers have decided to stay true to
the original nature
> of the earliest days of DOS. 640KB was all the memory anyone ever needed,
DOS liked to be
> the ONLY operating system on any given PC, and multi-booting wasn't even
heard of.

Sure, multi-booting is still somewhat rare, mostly because it's dangerous
and nobody "needs" DOS as much as they used to (or nowadays even frown upon
it).

But there's an entire category just for multi-booting ("BOOT"):

http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=boot

But, as Eric already mentioned, 640 kb is only for IBM PCs running
8088/8086. Anything like 286 (max 16 MB ftw!) can run XMSv2 or DPMI 0.9 and
386 can run XMSv3 and DPMI 1.0. (Although almost all DPMI stuff is 386+.)
While you may not get full "4 GB" of RAM on 386+, you can usually get up to
2 GB, comfortably. That is well supported by many tools (e.g. OpenWatcom,
DJGPP, FreeBASIC, Free Pascal).

> Anyway, Dennis, although plugging a different SourceForge project, is
essentially correct.
> DOSBox always played my games without problems, and, as the old adage
goes,
> “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”

DOSBox is "only" for games, nothing else. That was their entire goal. It's
not a "real" DOS and was never meant to boot on native hardware. Heck, to
stay portable, they refused to add any x86 extensions, so it's slow as
molasses! (A "fast 486" isn't very fast, IMHO.)

> So anyway, thus ends my brief and unsuccessful foray into FreeDOS.

DOS is not for the faint-hearted! If you don't already know it and like it,
it's not going to do what you want. Honestly, it's an uphill battle (maybe
impossible task) to keep supporting it in such a hostile tech world that
doesn't care one whit about legacy anymore.

I hate to be cynical, but it just goes to show you that nothing stays
popular forever. Even if you get "better", nobody cares, it's "too old" or
"doesn't burn DVDs" or whatnot. You can't win for trying.

Why try at all? Nobody will care in a few years, and it'll all be obsolete
in lieu of newer trendy stuff. Ungrateful world.  :-(

> Sent from my Windows 10 phone

Ah, the true problem presents itself.   ;-)
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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 1:47 PM,   wrote:
>>
>>> Running FreeDOS on real hardware can be challenging.
>> FreeDOS no, old DOS games yes.
>
> No offence, FreeDOS is of course a modern project. But DOS is an old
> conpect for an operating system.

But you have to be "old" to run on old cpus (e.g. 8086, 286). Sure, in
theory you could have a binary OS release that runs on multiple cpu
families (dispatching via CPUID), but that's a lot more testing and
work. DOS already offloads almost everything outside of the kernel,
which is probably a bit too minimal.

There's just not a lot of sympathy for old hardware anymore. Forced
obsoletion is more fierce than ever, so people are routinely asked to
upgrade (or even re-buy) everything on a fairly constant basis. They
don't want stability, legacy, compatibility, they want "shiny! new!"
features.

>>> FreeDOS on the other hand is a very old operating system concept.
>> Old concept yes, old operating system no. This means: DOS
>> has no multi tasking and no 64 bit address space, so your
>> modern computer will be bored: Only a single CPU core and
>> at most 3 to 4 GB of RAM can be used inside DOS. Which is
>> of course a lot more than old DOS games ever could imagine.
>
> DR DOS had a multitasker.

So did OS/2. Also Win16 and Win9x. Not to mention Desqview. And even
DOSEMU. And WinXP's NTVDM.

And nobody cares anymore.  :-(   Well, maybe ReactOS, but even their
NTVDM still needs lots of work.

>> This leads to the next problem:
>>> Running it on modern hardware will very often result in some features
>>> not working correctly. DOS games often required an AdLib or SoundBlaster
>>> audio card. For AC'97 and Intel HD-Audio sound, there are no DOS drivers
>> Old DOS games do not use "DOS drivers" for sound. They could
>> not imagine that games would have any more fancy sound card
>> available than a stereo SoundBlaster. So the games THEMSELVES
>> contain drivers for SoundBlaster.

More or less true (but not absolutely). Blame the tooling, but even
then there has been "some" support for dynamic loading of libs, etc.
It's just not popular (or bug-free or easy enough, I suppose). E.g.
(DJGPP-built) "h2dos -sndpci" (as .dxe). (Bad example, that's a fairly
recent backport. But I know many DOS games had separate drivers for
various hardware.)

There were other games that used similar methods for drivers, but
those never caught on as much (and weren't well-supported).

So it's not that nobody did it, they just didn't keep it up, it didn't
widely catch on, it wasn't obvious enough, etc.

> Yes, but bit number of original DOS programs cannot use modern sound
> hardware.
>> Is there anything else than sound which has problems in DOS on
>> modern hardware, when playing old games written in the 1990s?

Cpu timing?

>> Which other "dozens" of drivers do you miss? Interesting topic!
>
> 2. I don't know if there is one, but a CPU throttling driver would be a
> good thing. One that supports Intel (Enhanced) SpeedStep and AMD
> PowerNow!/Cool'n'Quiet. Reading the ACPI tables would be required.
> Turning off the remaining (unused) CPU cores would reduce power
> consumption and enhance the thermal situation.

There are at least two simple prototypes for that for DOS in recent
years, but they weren't widely tested and thus don't work on all
models.

Power management, as designed by hardware manufacturers, doesn't
concern itself very much with DOS. By far, most people only use
Windows or (less common) Linux.

> 3. USB devices like USB sound cards, USB video cards (enabling you to
> use a second/third/... montior) will not work. USB video capturing
> devices (WebCams, analog TV, DVB, ...) will also lack drivers and a
> usable protocol.

Already lamented as "too complicated" by local experts.

> 6. How is the support for graphics cards? Are there tools to add
> additional VESA modes if they happen to be missing in the BIOS?

VESA is way too simplistic for modern users anyways. And one hobbyist
told me that his professor said hardware acceleration was basically
impossible for DOS anyways. So DOS is stuck in minimal support, at
best, and it's not going to get better. You're going to have to do
without, dual boot, and/or use DOSEMU.

> 8. But the worst incompatibility of them all is the lack of CSM
> (Compatiblity Support Module) on modern UEFI machines. Or does FreeDOS
> run on EFI/UEFI?

Lacking CSM is because they aren't intended to be used for legacy
OSes. That's their prerogative. How can you convince them that DOS is
still important in 2016? AFAIK, you can't.

> I know, this may not be a dozen, but a lot. Depending on the actual
> hardware and on the requirement of the to-be-used (legacy) software.
>
> IMHO, for games lack of sound and mouse/joystick support really is the
> fun-killer.

Unavoidable, esp. sound. Maybe I could have minimal hope for the
others (doubt it!), but overall nobody is writing drivers for DOS
anymore.

I hate to be pessimistic, but I think 

Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 8:48 PM, Brandon Taylor
 wrote:
>
> And Eric -- I'm sorry for sounding like a total newbie, but how am I
> supposed to create a bootable USB drive with a "full" version of
> FreeDOS? I'm looking at the files from SourceForge and I can't make head
> or tail of the installation instructions.

IIRC, there is an option in RUFUS to use the fd11src.iso file for
installation. Otherwise it just uses what is bundled with RUFUS
itself, which is extremely minimal bare bones.

You can find the .iso on iBiblio mirror, or you can just grab
individual .ZIP packages from iBiblio as well, so you don't need to
have it all (e.g. full "BASE").

7-Zip's (cmdline) 7z [sic] will unpack an .iso , if you need that.
(The GUI can also do it, I think that's called 7zFm.exe , if you find
that more convenient.)

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/

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Re: [Freedos-user] Games

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 7:30 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> However, your listing seems to be incomplete -
> no kernel or command.com are shown, but obviously you
> must have them, otherwise you could not have made the listing :-)

Just a hunch, but presumably they are "hidden" (+H). Thus, he probably
did "DIR" instead of "DIR /A", so they didn't (directly) show up in
the dir listing.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Open Source and/or Free Software?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

Just coming back to this  I hope this isn't too (accidentally) polemical.

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 8:25 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 5:19 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:
>
> For the developers and communicants of the open source religion, the
> critical part is "Free as in freedom".  You can get the source to what
> you run.

For some, that is the entire point because their goal is to solve
technical problems, serve others (literally), even do something else
that isn't directly related to software or money itself. Some tasks
literally cannot be solved without freely-available sources (or, at
the very least, would be exponentially more difficult).

> For the vast majority of end users *running* open source code, the
> critical part is "Free as in beer."  They don't have to *pay* for it.

Very rarely are people forced to do anything in software. More or
less, you are free to not use software if it doesn't suit you. I know
some schools and governments may force certain decisions, but overall
end users can buy or rent or develop whatever they want. (Draconian
legalese hurts more than it helps.)

My point is that they never "had" to pay for it. They were free to use
something else. That's why we have so many compilers, archivers, text
editors, graphics viewers, audio players, etc. You are (almost) always
free to look for alternatives or even write your own. It's not always
easy, but it's definitely not impossible (for the most part).

Money is not the only decision maker, nor should it be. It's a very
naive view that "money solves all problems". Similarly you could say
that open/free doesn't either. So there really is no
one-size-fits-all, no panacea for every hindrance.

> The majority of *users* of open source products don't *need* the
> source, and couldn't use it if they had it.  They aren't programmers,
> wouldn't understand the code, couldn't fix bugs or make enhancements,
> and couldn't reproduce the build environment and build a duplicate of
> the binary they got on their own machine.  The just want
> free-as-in-beer code that does what they need and they don't have to
> pay for.

That's not quite true. There have always been scripting environments
and similar interpreters for end users. They were always allowed to do
some reasonable things. Maybe not modify the kernel itself or build
world, but they certainly had enough room to fiddle. (You already
mentioned Lisp, which blurs the lines between data and code.) Awk,
Sed, Sh, Bc/Dc, Rexx, Debug, QBasic, Lua, Javascript, Forth, etc.

It's more than just editing a configuration file or a simple command
batch script. It's more than just simple arithmetic or file
manipulation. Heck, it's even more than just arrays or raw pointers.
Some things just can't be done with canned (proprietary) binaries,
esp. those that run on no other OS or architecture (which is most of
them), which are soon obsoleted. Proprietary binaries are only of
limited use "if" they have been exhaustively tested. (Of course, you
could say that about all software, but proprietary moreso because it
can't be easily fixed. Of course, too many fixes/changes ruin
stability.)

>> These days, I think "open source software" and "free software" are
>> pretty much the same. I use the terms interchangeably.
>
> The question becomes whether you mean Free as in Freedom, or Free as
> in Beer. :-)

Honestly, I think all the talk of money here is overly cynical and a
waste of time. It's not a good way to solve technical problems by
constantly worrying about money. It may be a necessary evil,
sometimes, but it's certainly counter-productive for most
conversations.

Do you want your software to be used? Does it need improvements? Has
it been heavily tested? Do you need money? Do those goals conflict?
Will circumstances change in the future? Who is the target audience?

> If you *only* wanted software in a FreeDOS distro that met Stallman's
> requirements, you might have problems actually making a distro.  Too
> much of what you might like to include won't be under a GPL license.
> If you relax your licensing requirements, things become easier.

Even RMS has to know that licensing is a tricky minefield, and that
relicensing isn't even always possible. But even he can't be so
destructive as to throw everything away at every impassible hurdle.
Sometimes you have to accept things as imperfect, whether you like it
or not, or you'll have nothing to work with.

Even if you don't like or prefer GPL, he still has a point: without
the freedom to modify and redistribute software, it's much harder to
get "real work" done. You can try living without but eventually you
hit a wall.

Not everyone is meant to make their own OS distribution, but it's
certainly a difficult and thankless task. For anything trying to reach
as wide an audience as possible, it's much more reasonable to be as
free as possible than overly restrict end users (which would be
short-sighted 

Re: [Freedos-user] command / shell conflict

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 4:34 AM, Don Flowers <donr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> UPDATE:
> So after three or four loads of shell.exe per session, the strings error 
> showed up again (Freecom 0.84)

Even when using "/MSG /P"? So what is the implication, that there's a
memory leak in FreeCOM somewhere? I wouldn't be too surprised.

> and Freecom 0.80 has some issues (2GB max shown on HD, OGN not recognized)

Testing an old release for comparison? Why not test 0.82pl3 from SF.net?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/freedos/files/FreeCOM/082pl3%20%28use%20xmsswap%20for%20386%2B%20PC%29/

But yes, FreeCOM has various bugs and needs to be cleaned up and fixed
(eventually), but so far nobody has stepped up to do it.

> I discovered one other alternative that seems to be working - I set a
> %config% variable (SET WPSHELL=C:\DP23\SHELL.EXE),

You mean "SET" within FDCONFIG.SYS??

> then %WPSHELL% /C;
> following that I execute a batch file with the same command and the shell
> loads as it should and on exit all my path variables are intact with no
> strings error messages.

So "all my path variables are intact" means there is probably a memory
corruption issue somewhere??


> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 5:21 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 4:18 PM, Don Flowers <donr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > So /MSG seems to work, more testing needed to be sure, What does this
>> > switch
>> > do, (besides help me of course)?
>>
>> http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/command.htm
>>
>> "/MSGStores all error messages in memory (requires /P as well)."

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Re: [Freedos-user] Open Source and/or Free Software?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

It's very hard to speak wisely here. Please keep in mind that I'm not
strictly advocating against proprietary software (even though I think,
sometimes, it has very limited appeal).

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 8:25 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 5:19 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:
>
> For the vast majority of end users *running* open source code, the
> critical part is "Free as in beer."  They don't have to *pay* for it.
> The majority of *users* of open source products don't *need* the
> source, and couldn't use it if they had it.  They aren't programmers,
> wouldn't understand the code, couldn't fix bugs or make enhancements,
> and couldn't reproduce the build environment and build a duplicate of
> the binary they got on their own machine.  The just want
> free-as-in-beer code that does what they need and they don't have to
> pay for.

They already paid for their hardware, phone/Internet, host OS, etc.
Isn't that enough? It's not reasonable (to me) to have to infinitely
pay pay pay just to be able to halfway sometimes use software in a
very limited and restricted fashion. Face it, endless royalties only
sound good to potential millionaires. To the poor schlubs stuck with
the bill, they hate it; they don't want more taxes.

But sometimes it's not about "no cost" but instead about finding
something that is easily available (you know, not having to scrounge
eBay for used copies from a company that doesn't exist anymore).

Do you think all proprietary software is well-supported? Nope, it's up
to the whim of the copyright holder. At least with free/libre
software, you can fix it yourself or pay literally anyone else to do
it. There's no chance to do that if proprietary developers don't care.

> That's Stallman's problem.  The question is how much anyone else
> *cares* what he thinks.  My impression is that increasingly few do.

He received the 2015 ACM Software System award for GCC. Now, I have no
idea how much he is still involved in that, but he was historically
very crucial there. And yes, GCC is an impressive behemoth that made a
huge impact on the world. There are still plenty of commercial
compilers (even those based upon Clang), but without GCC the worldwide
software ecosystem overall would be much "poorer".

I agree that RMS' influence isn't as much as he'd like anymore, but he
does have some good points. I assume you're implying that permissive
licenses are very popular as well, not just GPL.

> Every open source license I'm aware of assumes you will make source
> offered under it available.  If you aren't willing to release source,
> you don't *use* an open source license.  The differences lie
> elsewhere, like how the code may be reused.

No, most so-called "permissive" licenses don't force releasing
sources. Only the original batch is released, but that's not your job
to propagate (unlike GPL). So no, BSD or MIT don't force changes to be
public. Maybe I'm misunderstanding here, but I assume you knew that
already.

> And every license I'm aware of other than public domain

Which (like most licenses) isn't valid in 100% of all jurisdictions.

> has the expectation that if you fork it to produce a closed source commercial
> variant, you will negotiate a closed source license with the original
> author permitting you to do so.  You may not simply make a closed
> source fork.

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Berlin/en/BCC64

"BCC64 is based on Clang." (No, I'm not aware of them paying any
royalties, nor of any legal need to do so. If they did, it wouldn't be
considered "free/libre" and it would be shunned like OpenWatcom.)

> You *go* closed source commercial because you plan to
> *sell* the software you will create, and you cannot successfully
> *sell* stuff offered as open source.  If you do that, the original
> author will generally expect a cut of the take, because you are making
> money off his code.

No, they don't expect any money, they gave it away "freely" (or maybe
got paid once for it). So they don't get mandatory royalties.

In general, like you admit, free software is more of a one-time bounty
type of thing. It's not about perpetual royalties ("hoarding", as RMS
calls it). RMS considers free software to be helping his neighbor,
less about excessively restricting them in both freedom and money.
Some things can't be solved with money alone.

>> These days, I think "open source software" and "free software" are
>> pretty much the same. I use the terms interchangeably.
>
> The question becomes whether you mean Free as in Freedom, or Free as
> in Beer. :-)

FreeDOS uses a GPL'd kernel, so that would be "freedom". Otherwise,
what's the point? Just use old MS-DOS, but certainly Microsoft doesn't
produce DOS (or OS/2 or Win16) software anymore, and it's much harder
to find than it used to be.

>> To avoid running into problems, my preference is to include open
>> source software with FreeDOS.
>
> If you *only* wanted software in a 

[Freedos-user] Open Source and/or Free Software?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

Although licensing discussions are usually not productive in their own
right ("shut up and code!"), and it's always a waste of time and words
rehashing the same old issues, there are some helpful web pages that
clarify (at least to me) various aspects of the computing world at
large.

In other words, here's some links for your edification, but please
let's not devolve this into arguments, flamewars, etc. This is more
friendly advice than anything, just so some of you know what is up (if
you didn't already).

1). https://sourceforge.net/blog/the-evolution-of-open-source/
"It was during this time that Richard Stallman emerged and founded the
free software movement "

2). https://libreboot.org/
"Since 14 May 2016, Libreboot is part of the GNU project."

3). https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

4). http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-non-gnu-distros.html
(It was once naively suggested that FreeDOS could eventually show up
there. That will probably not happen without a fair bit of extra
effort, though. So I'm not sure how feasible that truly is, see
below.)

5). http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html

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Re: [Freedos-user] command / shell conflict

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 4:18 PM, Don Flowers  wrote:
>
> So /MSG seems to work, more testing needed to be sure, What does this switch
> do, (besides help me of course)?

http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/command.htm

"/MSGStores all error messages in memory (requires /P as well)."

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Re: [Freedos-user] command / shell conflict

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 8:57 AM, dosgeek57  wrote:
>
> I am a user of DataPerfect and the WordPerfect shell. The command is
> shell.exe.

Not familiar with it, unfortunately. But 

> When I load by the shell I get a command.com strings error, my
> path is wiped out and I have to reboot.

Try putting "/MSG" in your SHELL= line in (FD)CONFIG.SYS. Does that help?

> The shell is necessary to run
> macros, so not using it is not an option. I tried loadfix and that works the
> first time if Jemmex and jemm386 are not loaded, but hangs on the second
> try. Any suggestions are welcome.

Yeah, uh, don't use JEMM if you don't have to. Try to stick to HIMEMX.
But it sounds like that's what you're doing, yet it still won't work?

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Re: [Freedos-user] Some food for thought

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 2:37 PM, Mateusz Viste  wrote:
> On 22/05/2016 21:10, Ralf Quint wrote:
>> I think what the author mentions does apply in an even greater range to
>> FreeDOS
>>
>> http://www.techrepublic.com/article/time-linux-fans-open-their-arms-to-closed-source/
>
> The article you point to doesn't imply that Linux distributions
> should start distributing closed-source software.

Linux is already partially closed source. Binary blobs, needing
proprietary firmware, various other things like Steam or maybe EME, I
dunno. The FSF doesn't promote any of the popular, major Linux distros
because of this.

Some of that is unavoidable: accept it (despite no sources) or do without.

But I assume they still want the "core" to be free. Optional
media/gaming stuff is probably okay (or at least "mostly"
unavoidable), but core functionality? No way.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 Package LSM Data Verification

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 6:22 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.  wrote:
>
> Is DOSLFN going to be dropped? I don’t know. It is not up to me and my 
> opinion is not even relevant.
> I have not been informed of any decision to do so. The problem is its 
> licensing is unclear. There is no
> licensing information contained in its source files or with its binaries. It 
> may be Public Domain.
> I have no idea.

You'd have to email the two authors and ask for either clarification
or relicensing:  Henrik Haftmann and Jason Hood. I already pointed you
to the latter's webpage, but I understand if you don't want the
tedious burden of doing that.

If not, then just keep things simple, don't include it (by default);
instead, let users grab it by themselves. Not 100% ideal but certainly
less stressful.

> Freely available source is not Open Source and is not Public Domain. All 
> works are Copyright at the
> moment of their creation.

That's not quite true. U.S. government officials are (sometimes?)
forced to keep their works and documents in the "public domain" (which
itself isn't a universally accepted idea). At least that's the
impression I got (from old TDE 4.0). And things may be different for
works predating the major law changes (1988? '70s??).

But I have no full grasp of the mess, and none of us are lawyers (or
can't afford to hire one full-time, certainly!). Sometimes I think
it's impossible to be perfect, too many obstacles, even when trying
our hardest.

> Regardless if it is declared or not. However, it is nearly impossible to 
> enforce
> a Copyright violation without said notice. But, would you like to see FreeDOS 
> sued into non-existence
> do to a minor copyright violation?

FreeDOS is not a legal entity, only a very unofficial loose-knit group
of volunteers. The cost of an initial lawsuit against us would most
likely outweigh our total assets! Literally nobody would win. However,
that doesn't mean we have the right to be lazy and sloppy. (Nor should
every spurious complaint be treated as valid.)

> Now in regards to my original quoted message. If DOSLFN is found to be 
> unsuitable, I will not be hunting down an alternative to it.

Honestly, it's probably dubious, "as is". So I don't blame you.
Certainly, VFAT patents don't expire for another year or two (2017?).
I hate to be the bringer of bad news or (accidentally, falsely) imply
that it's not legally suitable, as we've all used it for many years,
but it's probably not "perfect" by any stretch.

> Someone in either the freedos-user or devel group mentioned that there was 
> another program that did lfn and it was very buggy. I have no idea what it is 
> called.

I can only guess. The only ones I know, offhand, are LFNDOS (GPL) and
StarLFN (public domain). I haven't heavily used either, but I've
lightly dabbled with the latter (in non-VFAT mode only, LONGNAME.DAT a
la DESCRIPT.ION, which is somewhat slow when dealing with lots of
files).

> I have no idea if it is buggy. If you would like to find a suitable 
> alternative, it can be considered for inclusion.

I hate to be a pessimist, but it's just too much stress for too little
gain. DOS users should be used to 8.3 limitations. Some people (ahem,
DOS386) would even complain that it's not proper "DOS" software if it
can't handle SFNs properly (e.g. some DJGPP-compiled stuff, although
that's not DJGPP's fault, per se).

I doubt anybody here can really complain. All of us already have all
the DOS software we need. The FD 1.2 distro is meant for (presumably)
new users or those who haven't used DOS in a while. The diehards
already know where everything is, how to find and install it, etc.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 Package LSM Data Verification

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 3:15 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.  wrote:
>
> And, CURL is now back. It’s sources were located. I also updated it.
> Hopefully, it is not broken.
>
> CURL - Listed as GPL, IT IS NOT GPL! It is less strict and is only
> copyrighted public domain. Included.

Even the official Curl website now points to (IMO, unreliable link)
M.K.'s recent (Dec. 2015) build of 7.46.0 (while latest is 7.49.0).

AFAIK, it is not broken, it supports "SSL SSH" (according to Curl's
download page). I did, minimally, use it once or twice. I could
definitely try it again, that's not hard to do (under QEMU or VBox).

Since Curl (unwisely?) decides to point *directly* to Mik's
(unreliable) webpage, it makes me want to mirror it to iBiblio.
Certainly the (main) license is presumably okay.

The problem is making sure it has all the (third-party source)
dependencies and making sure their licenses are acceptable. Which
unfortunately is hard to do since (AFAIK) rebuilding on or for DOS is
never easy for things like that. Maybe its makefile has improved
lately, but I haven't tried. And without an official "DOS" maintainer,
it's just too hard to guess on our own for every single file.

So it's just uncertain (as are most things that are complicated),
unfortunately. So I can't put any huge confidence in it, but it's
"probably" okay (or no worse than usual, just sloppy, sigh). I'd
really hate to guess blindly or make a mistake in this area.

N.B. I should probably ignore Curl (for now) and focus on CTMOUSE.ZIP
and JEMM.ZIP tomorrow instead. I said I would "fix" those, so I need
to do that, first and foremost.

> I have spent many many many hours fixing broken and incorrect packages. At
> least for now and the foreseeable future, I think I am done fixing them. I
> will be more than happy to include the remainder once they are fixed.

It may be a lost cause. Maybe having tons of third-party packages
included is a bad idea. There probably needs to be a smaller "core" of
FreeDOS that doesn't have all the bells and whistles.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 Missing Packages and XDEL

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

I have created "xdel/" under "util/file/", so your .ZIP (and the old
one) can now be found here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/file/xdel/


On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 7:51 PM, Alain Mouette <ala...@pobox.com> wrote:
>
> On 10-05-2016 00:39, Rugxulo wrote:
>>
>> A quick search on iBiblio shows the following files:
>>
>> ./distributions/1.0/pkgs/xdels.lsm
>> ./distributions/1.0/pkgs/xdels.zip
>> ./distributions/1.0/pkgs/xdelx.lsm
>> ./distributions/1.0/pkgs/xdelx.zip
>> ./util/file/xdel204.zip
>>
> This is the updated version is 206c, only LSM and some files moved for
> compatibility by Jerome
>
> Last version only real difference is in 205: "added kittenization (by
> Blair Campbell)" and english/portuguese/spanish translations
>
> Thanks for updating it :)

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Re: [Freedos-user] Cobalt OS 1.2

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

I have not tested it, but 

On May 18, 2016 10:22 PM, "Corbin Davenport"  wrote:
>
> A few months ago I posted here about my new FreeDOS
> distribution aimed at beginner DOS users, named Cobalt.
>
> - VirtualBox is now fully supported. Right now Cobalt can detect
> if it is running under VirtualBox, and suggests the user disable
> the VT-x/AMD-V virtualization feature that breaks a lot of DOS
> programs. In the future, I'm going to try and extend this to
> some form of file sharing.

1). How are you detecting VBox?

2). What programs break? I'm not denying the possibility, but turning off
VT-X makes things much much slower. I honestly wouldn't turn it off for all
programs, by default.

3). File sharing? Good luck! Outside of VMSMOUNT (VMware specific), I'm not
aware of any others. Perhaps you can use FTPSRV?
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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 Package LSM Data Verification

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 11:50 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
>
> Going back to cases, what prompted this discussion was Rex Conn's open
> source license for 4DOS, which indicated his source code couldn't be
> used in a *commercial* product without contacting him.  There was a
> question about including it with that restriction. I don't see that as
> unreasonable, and it's actually standard practice in most cases.

It's an unacceptable restriction to the "open source" (OSI) and "Free
software" crowd, so they will shun the entire distribution (as they
already have been, which means less redistribution, less forks, less
improvements).

Jim Hall is the FreeDOS project head and is heavily in favor of being
as free/libre as possible. iBiblio and SF.net are both similarly
minded (among others), so it doesn't make a lot of sense to go against
the grain.

But the DOS ecosystem (or whatever fractured mess is left) is so lazy,
stubborn, and ignorant that it seems content to ignore the obvious
hazards. I'm not really blaming anyone, but this situation is not very
acceptable. Is it better than nothing? Sure, but so is living in a
hole in the ground.

We have to do better, if only because we need more developers. If we
continue to piss them off for no good reason, then we're screwed.

"FreeDOS" does not mean "FreewareDOS". That was never the goal, and
you can't do much future work with only proprietary blobs.

> The implicit assumption is that a commercial offering will be closed
> source, and you must contact the author for permission to use it that
> way.  And I would be flatly astonished if anyone ever *did* contact
> Rex about using the 16 bit code he released as open source in a
> commercial product.

Even if you were correct, it's still not compatible with free/libre
ideals, so any developers or users who adhere to those "four freedoms"
will completely avoid FreeDOS (and call it "non-free").

> For that matter, I strongly suspect there are license
> incompatibilities between stuff currently offered with FreeDOS,  in
> the sense that you may not be able to lift source from one project and
> use it an another with a different license.

There are rough edges in Linux, OpenBSD, modern x86 hardware, etc.
There is no perfect system (AFAIK).

Even just idle thinking, trying to make FreeDOS compatible for the
below list, seems mindbogglingly impossible!

http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-non-gnu-distros.html

Is FreeDOS perfect? No, far from it, but we aren't doing ourselves any
favors by being lazy and stubborn. We can't keep making excuses. We
have to change and improve.

> Everything issued as part of a FreeDOS distro should be open source,

The "BASE" should be free/libre (four freedoms), yes, that is Jim's goal.

> offered under licenses that permit providing the source along with the
> binaries.  Whether any of the sources may be incorporated in a
> commercial product offered for sale will be governed by the specific
> license under which the source is offered.  The same will be true for
> whether any of the sources can be used in other projects offered under
> a different license.  It should not be a factor in whether its offered
> in a FreeDOS distribution.

I just can't explain this any more clearly. FreeDOS must be "Free". It
must do a better job of making clear what exactly is free/libre and
what is not. I don't want to delete or throw away working software,
even proprietary, but we need to heavily emphasize the free/libre
stuff and deprecate anything that prevents us from widely
redistributing. I'm not saying throw away 4DOS, but if it causes other
people to shun the entire project then we need to rethink our goals.
The less obstacles the better!

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 Package LSM Data Verification

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 5:52 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
>
> What we now face is a situation where work might *never* lapse into
> the public domain.
>
> The US is currently Life + 70 years.

Totally logical, you pinko commie swine! (extreme sarcasm)

> Canada is still Life + 50, and
> the Project Gutenberg Canada site is leading the fight to keep it that
> way.

Are you sure? I thought it was 60. I vaguely remember hearing that
_The Little Prince_ was public domain in Canada (but not U.S.).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince#Extension_of_copyrights_in_France

Okay, this makes no sense, but who said it had to?  ;-)   I honestly
have no idea of their rationale behind this. Perhaps these kinds of
rules are meant to benefit the copyright holder's children??

> There are people making a good case it's time to simply abolish
> copyrights, as they largely no longer serve the original intended
> purpose.

Well, when the copyright holder is nowhere to be found, or it's proven
that you can't legally buy xyz anymore, then what good is
(effectively) throwing it away unused? Especially for software, which
ages faster (and thus loses value) worse than any other kind of work.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 - Preview 17

[Rugxulo]

Hi, thanks for the response!

On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 11:17 PM, Kenneth Davis <jere...@fdos.org> wrote:
> On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 6:10 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I notice that there is seemingly one bug / regression
>
> Try http://www.fdos.org/kernel/testing/truename/KERNEL.SYS

Using this one, everything seems fine (although more testing needed is
always a given).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 Package LSM Data Verification

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

Dennis, I almost hate to bring this type of stuff up. It's almost
flamebait because nobody can agree. So it's a waste of time.
Nevertheless 

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 3:58 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 2:58 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.  
> wrote:
>>
>> I can't imagine anyone taking stuff from a FreeDOS 1.2 release and
>> *wanting* to issue it as a commercial product.  Rex released 4DOS as
>> open source because it was no longer selling.  The world had moved on
>> from MSDOS and 16 bit, and so had he.
>>
>> It is not an impossibility. For example , the current version of the
>> commercial product SpinRite runs on a FreeDOS boot CD.
>
> What has that to do with anything?
>
> Spinrite is and always has been a commercial product.  The vast
> majority of what ran under DOS back when was commercial.  The fact
> that it *runs* under FreeDOS is irrelevant.

It's pretty relevant. Without a "free" DOS, he couldn't (re)distribute
a bootable CD at all. He'd have to make all his users find a
compatible DOS elsewhere, which is not as easy as it sounds (anymore).

> It just means FreeDOS is
> compatible enough with MS/PC/DR DOS that Spinrite *will* work under
> it.  That level of compatibility was a FreeDOS design goal from the
> beginning.

Yes, but compatibility means little if you can't redistribute (or
easily acquire) the OS. There are many commercial, proprietary DOSes,
but almost all of them have died (and can't be easily found legally).
I'm not trying to overhype FreeDOS, but it's literally the only one
who cares about that. Any one of them could've done it, but they
didn't.

> And as I recall, Spinrite only uses DOS to load it.  It does not
> actually use DOS once up and running, and has its own low level code
> for disk access and testing.

Great, but "barely uses" still means you have to have a compatible DOS
... unless he makes it like old PC booter games (no OS or only uses
BIOS).

> The issue is open source code in a FreeDOS distro being used in a
> commercial product.

I hate to nitpick, but please stop using "open source" to mean
something other than OSI. Yes, it can be misused, and no, they
probably can't stop you (trademark claims), but it's not beneficial at
all to pretend that "open source" means just "sources available". Most
people only refer to "open source" as OSI (or similar free software).

> That may not be impossible, but it's so unlikely
> that whether the particular open source license freely allows such
> usage is something I wouldn't waste a moment worrying about.

It's not unlikely or they wouldn't have bothered making such restrictions.

> As a rule, if you wish to incorporate open source code into a commercial
> product, you are expected to get clearance from the author (and likely
> pay a fee for the right to do so.)

Not at all. Who told you that? You're pretty uninformed here. "Open
source" always means able to use without charge. The term was designed
to be business friendly so that they could hire developers (if needed)
to improve existing code bases, similar to (but broader than) GPL.
Even GPL was designed more to sell future development as a service
instead of perpetual royalties just to use a single-user license of
proprietary crud that can't be changed.

> If the idea is that only code
> issued under an open source license that *doesn't* require you to
> contact the author about commercial usage should be included in the
> FreeDOS 1.2 distro, that's a profoundly silly notion.

Silly? Aren't you friends with Eric Raymond? He's a very big "open
source" (OSI) proponent. Heck, he co-founded OSI!

OSI was meant to 'promote open source ideas on "pragmatic,
business-case grounds." '. And business obviously means money, but
that doesn't mean paying (over and over again) for frozen software.

I realize that there's still lots of proprietary software, and not
everyone agrees with OSI or FSF. But there is a heavy push towards
business-friendly "open source" / "free software". It's just easier
for developers (and those who are willing to pay people to improve
public software).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 - Preview 17

[Rugxulo]

Hi again,

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 3:47 PM, Jerome Shidel <jer...@shidel.net> wrote:
>> On May 15, 2016, at 4:19 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On May 11, 2016, at 11:11 PM, perditi...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>
>>> Kernel update is forthcoming.
>>> I still need to run some tests and make 386+ builds, but updated
>>> packages will be available at
>>> http://www.fdos.org/kernel/release/LATEST/fdpkg/ and release builds
>>> uploaded to SF.
>>
>> Uh, it doesn't work. Any attempt to download the 2042 files from
>> SF.net fails with an error message.
>
> I had no problem downloading them from the provided link. Also, put them into 
> FDI - P19 that I released earlier today.

Okay, I just grabbed it from above (and not SF.net).

I notice that there is seemingly one bug / regression, otherwise all
my "tests" (MetaDOS) seem to work fine. (I assume Jeremy will notice
this and that I don't have to file a separate bug report or email him
privately. If not, I'll try to remember later.)

In an attempt to not load the RAM driver over and over again, I had a
naive "if exist %RAMDRIVE%:\nul goto end" inside the actual
RAMDRIVE.BAT file (which is called by autoexec).

That no longer works. Apparently it's even getting confused about
drives since "\tmp" already exists on boot drive. "if exist g:\tmp\nul
echo Yup!" succeeds (as does "q:" or "z:" or anything else, which is
way past my setting for LASTDRIVE). Same with "a:\extras" or
"a:\system" or "a:\network".

So "A:\> if exist z:\network\nul echo Yup!" says "Yup!" when it
shouldn't (because "a:\network" exists). But "if exist z:\netwrk\nul
echo Yup!" still fails (as it should).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 Package LSM Data Verification

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 1:34 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 8:06 AM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.  
> wrote:
>>
>> However, clause 3 for its license makes it NON-COMMERCIAL use only.
>>
>> (3) The Software, or any portion of it, may not be used in any commercial
>>   product without written permission from Rex Conn 
>
> I fail to understand why that's a problem.

If you're forbidden from making derivatives and redistributing them
openly, even selling them, then it's neither "open source" (OSI) nor
"Free software" (FSF).

Many online hosts (e.g. SF.net) demand open source. Even Jim Hall
doesn't want anything non-free mirrored to iBiblio anymore, if at all
possible.

It's easy to discount it as zealotry, but it really does simplify
things when you have the so-called "four freedoms" (run, study,
modify, redistribute).

FreeDOS was meant to be "free". The kernel is GPL. I realize that it's
a losing battle in some ways. Some things are probably insurmountable
(binary blobs?). Even Linux is still having as hard a time as ever.
There's just too many proprietary pieces in today's world, and they're
not going away any time soon.

You can't win everything. But we still have to try. Otherwise what's
the point? Just use Windows (and IE/Edge, MSVC, Hyper-V, Word, etc).

If there are literally no practical benefits for license restrictions,
then they should be lifted / avoided.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 - Preview 17

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 10:24 AM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.
 wrote:
>
> On May 11, 2016, at 11:11 PM, perditi...@gmail.com wrote:
> [..]
>
> Kernel update is forthcoming.
> I still need to run some tests and make 386+ builds, but updated
> packages will be available at
> http://www.fdos.org/kernel/release/LATEST/fdpkg/ and release builds
> uploaded to SF.
>
> Jeremy
>
>
> I just realized it was available.
>
> So, even though I pushed FDI Preview 18 last night…
>
> I took a few seconds, and Preview 19 is now out the door. It uses and
> installs 2042.

Uh, it doesn't work. Any attempt to download the 2042 files from
SF.net fails with an error message.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 Package LSM Data Verification

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 10:02 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.
<jer...@shidel.net> wrote:
>> On May 14, 2016, at 9:45 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> BASE:
>>>
>>> No issues.
>>
>> Really? Did you double-check JEMM (JLOAD.EXE + *.JLM) and CuteMouse
>> (COM2EXE.EXE)
>
> I did not evaluate every single file in each package.

I don't know why I halfway expected you to fix it while at the same
time explicitly saying it's not your responsibility to vet thousands
of files!

In case you haven't noticed, it's a minefield, and we just don't have
the manpower to fix everything. So I personally just tend to ignore
some things because I can't fix it all either.

Having said that, and despite the honest pessimism that things will
never be "100% perfect", I assume that your .ZIPs of CuteMouse
(ctmouse.zip) and Jemm386 (jemm.zip) come from here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.1/repos/base/

If that's the case, then I will (weakly) "try" to fix them in the next
few days, and then re-upload them
so that FD 1.2 will have a slightly less burdensome status. (Which
means trying to rebuild all their various (sub)binaries, which
shouldn't be "too" hard.)

Honestly, this kind of task belongs to the maintainers of those
aforementioned packages, but
since most so-called maintainers are too busy (or long since
disappeared), it falls to such
pathetic souls such as myself. (Sigh.) :-(

> Without going into details, my free time gets more and more limited as we 
> move into
> summer. So, I am not going to evaluate or bring into compliance individual 
> files or
> packages. I can either drop non-compliant packages. Or, I can replace them 
> with
> compliant versions. I’m not trying to be a jerk. I just don’t have the spare 
> time to
> devote to that level of detail on those kind of issues.

Of course. That's totally fine. You have bigger priorities and other
hobbies. I don't demand anything special.

I just hate to drop some things that are, in fact, useful and "mostly"
free just because of some errant file or two. Jemm386 I never use much
anymore (although it's still very useful, in select cases; but JLOAD
never caught on, quite honestly). CuteMouse might be a much bigger
loss (although I personally try to avoid the mouse, usually, which
isn't easy in some programs).

Neither should have to be dropped, so I'm 99% sure that I can remove
the closed-source parts successfully. I know this isn't a "real"
problem, thus we keep procrastinating, but we do overall want to keep
FreeDOS "free" (or as close as possible!).

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 Package LSM Data Verification

[Rugxulo]

Hi again,

On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 8:22 AM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.  wrote:
>
> It took some doing. But, I have gone through all both the packages proposed
> for the FreeDOS 1.2 release. So, here are the changes that have been
> implemented. Some of these are listed even though it was decided beforehand
> that they were going to be pulled. One or two, have problems and aI am
> waiting on a decision from Jim to determine their fate. I have corrected
> nearly all packages with incorrect license types and versions. For example:
>
> BASE\APPEND was just GNU GPL, but is GNU General Public License, Version 2
> DEVEL\REGINA was listed as GPL, but is actually GNU Library General Public
> License, Version 2
> DEVEL\NASM has moved from GPL  to Simplified (2-Clause) BSD License.
> etc…

Great, but it's not really your responsibility to precisely mention
the exact (sub)license of every single util included. That's very hard
to do with thousands of files, way too many to vet (IMHO)!

In particular, some software is "GPLv2 only" while others are "GPLv2
(or later)" or even "GPLv2 (only) or GPLv3 (only)".

[It's a mess.]

> Anyhow, these are the problem packages and their probable destinies.
>
> ARCHIVER:
>
> ZOO - Includes sources, may be Public Domain. No License information.
> Dropped.

I already pointed you to Debian. Or just use older 2.01 if that
worried. Or just use BOOZ, at least it can decompress. But hey, it's
fairly obscure at this point, so I doubt most people even want it or
know what it is.

> BASE:
>
> No issues.

Really? Did you double-check JEMM (JLOAD.EXE + *.JLM) and CuteMouse
(COM2EXE.EXE)

> GAMES:
>
> PAKUPAKU - Unknown License, Dropped.

"Source Code (C) Jason M Knight and released to the public domain."

[Granted, I admit that even "public domain" isn't airtight and the
term can be misused, but here's it's fairly obvious that he's not
restricting it.]

Check his website for more info:http://www.deathshadow.com/

> PEDE - Unknown License, Dropped.

Indeed, I couldn't find any obvious licensing about that. Usually he
puts everything as GPLv2, but here it seems it's an old program that
he co-wrote with two other people, so maybe that's the hangup.

> XARGON - Two Licenses, One COMMERCIAL do not redistribute. AND Freeware
> License??? Dropped.

No idea, haven't looked, but presumably it was originally commercial
and later made "freeware". That's how things usually happened.

> NET:
>
> CRYNWR - Unknown License, Dropped.

Uh ... "most" of it should be (intentionally) GPL, but there are still
some pieces (e.g. RTSPKT.COM) that aren't.

> CURL - Listed as GPL, it is not. No Sources. Dropped.

AFAIK, Curl is BSD-ish (contra GNU Wget, which is obviously GPLv3+),
with sources. I have at least three (unofficial, third-party) DJGPP
builds of it, but I have not rebuilt it myself nor heavily tested it.
At least Mik's latest (2015) build has HTTPS/SSL support (I think??)
and should work better than the (much older, buggy) others.

Once again, the problem is that I can't test every binary (in all
subfunctionality) nor vet every single source file nor (easily)
reproduce the build. So I can't really vouch for it, hence I've not
gone too far out of my way to promote it.

[Of course, having said that, I'd never use any software if I had to
personally vet everything, it would just take too long or is even
impossible in some cases.]

> SOUND:
>
> ADT2 - Fair License? Dropped.

Used to be on SF.net, but now is only back on original site (with
sources). But I don't see any obvious licensing in the (older) .ZIP I
have on my hard drive. The newer Git version doesn't say anything
either (except about non-DOS, SDL's license).

http://adlibtracker.net/downloads.php

> MPXPLAY - Unknown License, Dropped.

SF.net lists it as "Other License", which presumably means some kind
of generic "open source". (Maybe it slipped through the cracks, who
knows, but I just assume everybody knew what they were doing.)

> UTIL:
>
> 4DOS - Listed as Free, No Sources. Kept for now, may get Dropped?

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/user/4dos/

4dos800.zip's LICENSE.TXT seems to remind me of (derivative of) BSD 4-clause.

http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=4dos

"[modified MIT License that does not qualify as open source by OSI;
non-commercial]"

> BIEW - Listed as correctly as GPL, No Sources. Dropped.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/beye/files/biew/6.1.0/

"GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) "

[Though it's been a few years, I seem to recall that his DOS binaries
were 686+.]

> DIALOG - Listed as GPL, No Sources, Dropped.

I assume that is this one:

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/menu/

> DOSLFN - Listed as GPL, No License Messages, Keep?

Debatable. Not honestly sure, which probably means we should be highly
pessimistic.

http://adoxa.altervista.org/doslfn/index.html

> GCDROM - Listed as GPL, No Sources, Based on XCDROM, Removed.

Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 needs you

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 8:50 AM, Dale E Sterner  wrote:
>
> If Jack's drivers are left out of version 1.2 ; is there
> something to replace them.

https://www.kernel.org/

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 needs you

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 12:50 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.
 wrote:
>
> So far, I have gone through all of the ARCHIVER and BASE packages and have 
> corrected their LSM data.
>
> In those groups, these packages have not been solved.
>
> Unknown license information and will probably be dropped from release,
>
> ARCHIVER/ARJ

I don't know about ARJ (clone), I've never needed to use it. I (very
rarely) used UnARJ, which seems "Free" (to my naive eyes, but it's
always hard to tell). So, if you really want ARJ support, include that
instead.

ftp://ftp.sac.sk/pub/sac/pack/unarj265.exe

EDIT: Oops, it's possibly "non-free" (although I honestly have no idea
why). Debian now seems to prefer the full ARJ (from ARJ Russia on
SF.net, which I vaguely think is the same one mentioned above as
"ARCHIVER/ARJ"; at least FD's "UTIL" ARJ is apparently that one).

https://archive.debian.net/search?lang=km=names=unarj
https://archive.debian.net/km/sarge/unarj
https://archive.debian.net/changelogs/pool/main/a/arj/arj_3.10.21-2/arj.copyright

> ARCHIVER/ZOO

ZOO is another older archive format. The only two gotchas that I
(barely) remember are that 2.01 was public domain yet lacked "higher"
compression (LZW, now patent expired). 2.10 had some weird clause
about "don't charge more than $xyz" (against Compuserve?), but that
apparently has been rescinded in recent years (as Linux distros
nowadays sometimes include it). E.g. see below for Debian, which
claims it's "public domain":

http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/z/zoo/zoo_2.10-28_copyright

There's also (public domain) BOOZ, but that's only the unpacker. So
you could also just include that (instead) if desired.

ftp://ftp.sac.sk/pub/sac/pack/booz20.zip

> Missing sources,
>
> BASE/COMMAND

AFAIK, it hasn't changed lately, as there is no maintainer. So just grab this:

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/commands.zip

But I haven't looked closely (thousands of files, ugh!). The only
dependency, AFAIK, is Suppl, but I think that's already included
(unlike in 0.82pl3 sources).

Hmmm, seems "suppl.tgz" is included twice, but the (.tgz) CRC fails.
Yeah, I vaguely remember that error, ugh!

So also grab Suppl from here:

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/suppls.zip

And no, AFAIK, the "newer" FreeCOM version is not stable, it still had
runtime bugs (for me) when built with OpenWatcom. That port was just
never finalized, AFAIK.

> Yet to verify all packages on previously posted list in groups

Too much to do 

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 needs you

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 4:14 AM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> Which other DOS apps have HDA?

Not many! (But don't forget Judas Player's ALSA/HDA/GPL version.)

Sound (or just low-level stuff overall) is probably the weakest link in DOS.

Unfortunately, even with relatively good development tools, we still
don't have enough volunteers willing to kick the tires.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 needs you

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 9:44 PM, Thomas Mueller  wrote:
>
> I think there is only one web browser, Dillo?

Not sure about "official" repo or packages (as there's too many files
to keep close track of, IMHO).

> Are others available as add-ons: Lynx, Links-GUI, Arachne?  I can't think of 
> any other current
> or recent web browsers for DOS.

A port to DJGPP for Links2 exists (but not sure if in proper package
form). At least, I don't see any package for it under
/distributions/1.1/repos/net/ . The full (non-lite) .EXE does support
HTTPS/SSL and both text-only or graphics viewing.

http://links.twibright.com/download/binaries/dos/

> This so far is mainly a matter of curiosity, since my Ethernet has no DOS 
> packet driver,

Easy enough to just use QEMU (under *BSD), which should work fine
(with either PCNTPK or NE2000).

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/emulators/qemu/README.html

> and my sound (Intel high-definition audio) has no DOS support from what I 
> read on this
> emailing list,

No universal or "good" support, but a very very few DOS apps do have
(some) limited HDA support.

> but is good in NetBSD and FreeBSD, and I think also Haiku.

And, just to be clear, QEMU audio is somewhat unstable (in my
experience), so while other stuff works there, don't get your hopes up
that it will fulfill all your DOS sound needs. Honestly, for sound,
DOSBox is probably better.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 Missing Packages and XDEL

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sat, May 7, 2016 at 6:44 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.  wrote:
>
> I could not find your fix at
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/,
> where can I get the fixed version, just in case I need to release some
> future fix…
>
>
> I am not responsible for the packages provided by the Repo.
>
> For now, until the next release that will include xDel, you can retrieve
> the updated version from my server at http://dnld.lod.bz/xdel.zip

I haven't used XDEL in recent years (at least not on FreeDOS; yes, I
still remember the DR-DOS version where DELTREE.BAT used it behind the
scenes).

A quick search on iBiblio shows the following files:

./distributions/1.0/pkgs/xdels.lsm
./distributions/1.0/pkgs/xdels.zip
./distributions/1.0/pkgs/xdelx.lsm
./distributions/1.0/pkgs/xdelx.zip
./util/file/xdel204.zip

I haven't checked all the versions closely, so I don't know the
differences (if any). But if either of you have a preferred place or
specific version of this utility that you want updated on iBiblio,
feel free to tell me.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS 1.2 needs you

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 5:52 AM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.  wrote:
>
> FreeDOS 1.2 needs your help verifying package information. This is one of the 
> main holdups for the
> next OS release. Verifying this data is correct is essential. Especially the 
> the licensing information.
> GPL, GPLv2, MIT, BSD …… Other information, such as website, authors and etc, 
> should also be
>  verified and updated.
>
> So, please select some of these packages that you can verify the 
> APPINFO\.LSM text file
> data. The sooner this is done, the sooner we can have FreeDOS 1.2. :-)
>
> Update this thread to prevent double work and directly email me the updated 
> LSM file(s) (subject
> PKGNAME.LSM to prevent being filtered as spam) I have already removed a 
> couple packages for
> which I know the information is correct.


So you just want us to weed out the license-incompatible ones??


> base\ctmouse

Needs (easy) workaround for closed-source COM2EXE build utility. (I
just made a debug script to create the specific .EXE header.)

> base\jemm

Need to remove JLOAD.EXE and *.JLM.


(Nothing else obvious sticks out as much.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] Something to look forward to when Preview 17 is released.

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 1:12 AM, Thomas Mueller  wrote:
>
> Now I wonder if FDI will run in DOSBox running under FreeBSD, NetBSD or Linux.

Do you have DOSBox installed? If so, what does it not do that you
still need? (Admittedly, that is not using the FreeDOS kernel.) You
can also run QEMU or VBox. What exactly do you need to do? Run
natively? What major advantage (or disadvantage) would that bring
(over emulation)?

> Or maybe boot from GRUB2 or grub4dos.  I would install to USB stick, probably 
> 4 GB; would likely
> use factory partitioning, would have to check cluster size so as not to be 
> [bigger than] 4 KB, might
> have to reformat from NetBSD or FreeBSD.  Possibly install to 
> hard-disk/USB-stick image and then
> dd or rsync to USB stick?
>
> It would be helpful if you could say how to boot FreeDOS using GRUB2, 
> grub4dos or Syslinux;
> then I might be able to run SYS to make a nonbootable USB stick bootable.  Or 
> would the boot be
> via Syslinux?
>
> But when I ran SYS on USB-stick installation of FreeDOS 1.1, the file system 
> was rendered nonreadable;
> I had to start over beginning with newfs_msdos from FreeBSD.

I feel like we've discussed this before, but unfortunately things like
this are so arcane and complicated that it's almost impossible to
debug your machine from afar. So I still don't understand what you're
unable to do.

Try inspecting the following, and see if any of it helps:

1). https://wiki.debian.org/FlashBIOS
2). https://wiki.debian.org/DualBoot/FreeDOS
3). 
http://web.archive.org/web/20160322142625/http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/menu.htm
4). 
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/sys/sys-freedos-linux/sys-freedos-linux.zip
5). http://joelinoff.com/blog/?p=431

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[Freedos-user] 7zdecode 15.14 (was: Re: p7zip 15.09 (DJGPP))

[Rugxulo]

Hi, again,

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 4:05 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Michael Kostylev has built a DJGPP version of p7zip 15.09, so I've
> gone ahead and mirrored it to iBiblio for us.
>
> 1). 
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/file/7zip/15.09/

(Seems iBiblio is even more intent upon deprecating FTP, sigh.)

> FYI, there is still no newer upstream p7zip version (e.g. 15.14) to
> correspond to latest upstream 7-Zip. So we will have to wait and see.
>
> 2). https://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/files/p7zip/15.09/
> 3). http://www.7-zip.org/history.txt

Actually, 15.14 (p7zip) was released about a month ago, and I'm now
also seeing 15.14.1 (not sure what changed, though). No major attempts
at rebuilding that newer version (yet).

What I did do, though, is recompile the latest (15.14) 7zdecode (or
"7zdec", as it's now called) for us. I used DJGPP, both /current/ 2.05
(GCC 5.30) [symlinks] and /current.old/ 2.03p2 (GCC 2.95.3) [smaller
size, presumably better for old floppies].

I've uploaded these (with barely-modified sources, taken from LZMA
SDK) to iBiblio for us:

1). 
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/file/7zip/7zdecode/7zdec1514.zip
2). 
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/file/7zip/7zdecode/7zdec1514-djgpp203p2.zip

However, I'm not aware of any obviously huge bugfixes or new features
since older 9.22. Nevertheless, here it is anyways.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Installing FreeDOS with Bootcamp on a Mac

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 at 7:15 PM, Eric Gorr <mail...@ericgorr.net> wrote:
>
>> On Apr 9, 2016, at 9:40 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> You don't absolutely need an installer at all.
>>
>> fdisk, (reboot), format, sys, (download or copy files)
>
> I am not sure I understand the steps involved here.

1). http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/fdisk.htm
2). http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/format.htm
3). http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/sys.htm

Ulrich Hansen previously pointed us to a nice MS-DOS installation
tutorial he found online, so it may give you some idea of what's going
on. E.g. it mentions fdisk and format (under "Hard Disk Preparation"):
   http://www.legroom.net/howto/msdos

But a VM or bootable USB is safer, if you aren't sure what to do exactly.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Installing FreeDOS with Bootcamp on a Mac

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 10:26 AM, Eric Gorr  wrote:
>
> I was just wondering if anyone knew if it was possible to install FreeDOS on 
> Mac and,
> if it was possible, had instructions for how to do so.

Have you tried bootable USB?

> I have a MacPro Mid 2012 and am running El Capitan. I have an internal 250gb 
> HD which I can
> wholly dedicate to this purpose and can prepare it however I would need to.

250 GB might be overkill.   ;-)

> What I am able to do is create a bootable DVD from the FreeDOS iso and boot 
> from that on my
> Mac. However, when I get to the point of installing the FreeDOS kernel, the 
> FreeDOS installer
> presents me with and error and tells me that it has failed.

You don't absolutely need an installer at all.

fdisk, (reboot), format, sys, (download or copy files)

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Re: [Freedos-user] Drive Mapping SWSUBST

[Rugxulo]

i,

On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 11:58 AM, dosgeek57  wrote:
>
> I am working on a dedicated server. So far I have managed to successfully
> install WordPerfect Office LAN, my LAN PowerMenu and LAN version of Lotus
> 1-2-3 version 2.3. All programs are accessible to at least 2 client
> machines.
> SWSUBST F: C: is loaded during the autoexec & before STARTNET (for
> maintenance and installation of programs). I find myself occasionally
> accessing c: and causing a share lock, crash or something similar.

It's been a few years since I have actively used SUBST. The very few
times in recent memory that I tried under FreeDOS, it sadly just
didn't work, too buggy. I don't know why. (Kernel regression? PEBKAC?)

Unfortunately, there is no current maintainer, and it's dated back to
2002. So I don't know who to point you to for better help.

Try re-reading this, just to make sure you know the usage details:

http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/subst.htm

> My question is this: Is there any way (via ENV variable or other means) to
> null the C: drive and have everything point to my F: drive?

Although I haven't used it, SRDISK ("UTIL") contains a SRDUMMY.SYS
device driver for its own purposes, meant to use up drive letters to
get the desired letter as next freely available. So you could maybe
try that:

http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=srdisk
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/ramdisk/srdisk/srdsk209c.zip

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Re: [Freedos-user] Unable to boot from FreeDOS boot disk.

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 6:44 PM, Oren Balaban  wrote:
>
> When attempting to boot from the FreeDOS boot disk,

Hard disk??

> I encountered the error:
> SYSTEM BOOT FAILURE!
> Insert System Disk, then press ENTER.

Sounds like you need to re-run SYS again (but be careful it's the
correct drive).

> FreeDOS was installed to the drive using Unetbootin.

>From Linux host, I presume?

If on Windows, try RUFUS. Else try this other Linux way:

1). http://rufus.akeo.ie/
2). http://joelinoff.com/blog/?p=431

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Re: [Freedos-user] Booting FreeDOS on HP desktops?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 7:56 AM, Wayne Dernoncourt  wrote:
>
> Does anyone have any advice about getting FreeDOS to boot on an HP desktop?
> I get a message about "Init..." and then nothing happens.  I've been trying 
> to get this
> to work for a two or three months but I haven't had a chance to fool much 
> with this
> for the past three or four weeks.

What have you tried? CD? Floppy? USB? Hard disk?

Does your machine have a traditional BIOS or only UEFI (hopefully with CSM)?

Worst case scenario, you can run an DOSEMU atop Linux or a different
emulator (e.g. VBox) atop a different host OS.

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Re: [Freedos-user] FDI Preview 15, update 2

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 12:28 AM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr.  wrote:
>
> I have tested under QEMU on Linux and have detected the issue and its cause.
>
> It appears to be that SHSURDRV is locking up the system in DOSBox and QEMU.
> It does not seem to have this issue on the native hardware I’ve tested.

Are you sure? I often use SHSURDRV (386, XMSv3 version) as RAM drive
under QEMU with no problems.
Of course, my version is reassembled without the (bloated, unused by
me) ZLIB/"GZIP" stuff (so it's only like 6 kb now).

What QEMU version are you using? I think I'm on 2.5.0 at this point,
but newer versions are coming soon.
(Yeah, some Linux distros, e.g. Ubuntu LTS, still only have older
2.0.0.) I get mine for Win32/64 (precompiled) from
http://qemu.weilnetz.de .

> Drawbacks of not having the RAM DISK or RAM DISK creation failure:
>
> FDI will not be able to import language or target directory settings from a
> previous installation.
>
> FDI will not be able to automatically partition an empty drive in normal mode.
> (False back to running fdisk)
>
> I will look into detecting QEMU tomorrow sometime.

I don't know of a really good way to detect QEMU.

Sometimes the VESA string tells what emulator, but here it's only
saying "VESA 3.0 SeaBIOS VBE(C) 2011".

Another way is to check the processor string (e.g. cpulevel.com | find
/i "This CPU calls itself"), but that's only available in later cpus,
so you can't exactly use "-cpu pentium" (or even pentium2 or pentium3)
and expect it to work. But if you omit any cpu restrictions, by
default (for me) it now says "QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.5+".

Not sure of other ways (though check news://comp.os.msdos.programmer,
I think it was discussed there before). I think you can detect things
like DOSEMU via BIOS date.

EDIT: I'm guessing this is the thread I'm thinking of: "detecting
emulation or console windows" (May 31, 2014):

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.msdos.programmer/l2e4kYnhX-8

> I would hate to have to disable automatic drive partitioning. QEMU seemed a 
> slow compared to
> VMware and native hardware.

QEMU is indeed slower than VBox (with VT-X), but KVM (QEMU with VT-X)
is pretty speedy too. But I think they still use TCG as quasi-JIT, so
it's not as slow as it could be.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot FreeDOS (Black screen/blinking cursor)

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 6:11 AM, matthew berardi
 wrote:
>
> let's assume UEFI+GPT is the problem, how do I fix it?
>
> I do usually boot UEFI

But I'm not sure that all so-called UEFI machines even offer CSM, so
you may be out of luck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#CSM_booting

Though it could also be your particular USB key doesn't support
booting. (Some few don't, but most do.) You may wish to try an
entirely different jump drive. (Or are you only testing hard drives??)

You could also try this guy's USB creation method:
http://joelinoff.com/blog/?p=431

If none of that works, you may be stuck with VMs. (But honestly,
that's not too horrible, they work pretty well these days, e.g. QEMU /
KVM, VBox, etc.) See here:
https://www.lazybrowndog.net/freedos/virtualbox/

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Re: [Freedos-user] Catch "rd" order before command.com processing

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 12:14 PM, Hans-Christian Koch
 wrote:
>
> Nevermind my answer. This may work directly from prompt but not from within
> my program. I guess I need to do it in command.com. So can you recommend any
> good documentation on how to compile freecom and maybe which source?

Is this program something you wrote or somebody else? Is it closed
source? Because this is really sounding like some extreme (i.e. not
recommended) workarounds for a flawed design.

You can recompile FreeCOM, but I wouldn't recommend it. I'd suggest
you fix your program (if at all possible). Of course, that may not be
feasible.

The sources on SourceForge for FreeCOM are for old stable 0.82pl3,
which (AFAIK) needs TurboC (or maybe TC++), but I don't know if that
includes Suppl or not. (I haven't tried lately, plus there is no
active maintainer.)

* 
https://sourceforge.net/projects/freedos/files/FreeCOM/082pl3%20%28use%20xmsswap%20for%20386%2B%20PC%29/com082pl3.zip/download
* 
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/devel/libs/suppl/suppl26a.zip

* http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20841  (Turbo C 2.01)
* http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/21751  (Turbo C++ 1.01)

I don't see any 0.84pre2 sources on iBiblio in the obvious place
(pointed to by read-only Software List, in "BASE"), but I think I can
find it elsewhere.

* http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/command/
* 
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/commands.zip

This one (I assume) already has Suppl inside, but here it is anyways
(just in case):

* 
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/suppls.zip

Jeremy once said that the SVN version of FreeCOM compiles with
OpenWatcom and works fine, but I haven't tested it myself.
Nevertheless, here it is, if you really want to recompile:

* 
https://sourceforge.net/code-snapshots/svn/f/fr/freedos/svn/freedos-svn-1736-freecom-trunk.zip

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDos booting from a USB stick

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 12:26 PM, Thomsen Thomsen
 wrote:
>
> Hello. I managed to create a bootable USB key running FreeDos using Rufus
> It works well and boots fine. I even managed to move files to the USB key.

Good to know that it works for you (too).

> I wanted to install some of the programs from
> http://www.freedos.org/software/.

Which ones in particular? Most are mirrored on iBiblio:

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/

> In general I couldn't get this to work.

Why not? What was the problem (or error)? What exactly did you try that failed?

> Is there a way to get the "full install" on a bootable USB key? I don't have a
> bunch of experience.

"Full install" doesn't really mean much. Sure, you can get "BASE" and
"UTIL" and who knows what else ("EDIT", "NET"), but usually you don't
need all that stuff. If you just want a bunch of stuff to play around
with, then fine. I'm just saying, it's not really necessary to have
ten text editors (for instance).

Anyways, it's been a while since I've tried, but I'm pretty sure that
RUFUS can use an .iso file. In fact, it still lists FreeDOS on its
website under "Non exhaustive list of ISOs Rufus is known to work
with". So try using RUFUS again but specifying the fd11src.iso file.

Or you could use something like 7-Zip (GUI file manager or even
cmdline "7z") to manually extract files from the .iso itself. But most
of this stuff is already available separately on iBiblio in .ZIP form.

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Re: [Freedos-user] qemu freedos and raspberry pi

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Darryl Perry  wrote:
>
> I'm having an issue while running freedos 1.1 in a qemu VM on the Raspberry
> Pi B+
>
> I run qemu like this:
>
> qemu-system-i386 \
> -localtime \
> /home/bbs/doors/qemu/freedos.img \
> -boot c \
> -hdc fat:/home/bbs/text \
> -hdb fat:/home/bbs/temp${NODE} \
> -m 1024
>
> But when I run a program that tries to write to E: (hdc) drive, it gives me
> the following error:
>
> "PANIC more than two near fnodes requested at the same time!"
>
> Am I doing something wrong?  Any help would be appreciated.

I don't think "fat:" write support is as well-tested (officially, if
at all) vs. read-only support. I think it's just a QEMU limitation
(but I could be wrong).

7-Zip ("7z") these days can unpack various disk image formats
directly, so you may wish to just use that, if you need to extract
some files from guest to host. Or use some kind of networking (FTP
server?).

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Re: [Freedos-user] install

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 5:20 PM, Péter Szőke  wrote:
> Dear Members,
>
> Is there any way to install the Freedos from USB stick/Pendrive to HDD.

Why install to HDD? Why not just use a bootable USB as if it were your HDD?

> I have a notebook without optical drive.
> The notebook has Windows 10 certification.

That's not very specific. We need OEM name, model number, BIOS vendor,
cpuid, etc

> I have tried some program for example Rufus, but I could not solve.

RUFUS wouldn't run? Or it ran but didn't find or write to your USB? Or
your USB wouldn't boot natively? Or the USB booted but couldn't run?
Or it ran but couldn't install?

If RUFUS didn't work, did you try anything else? UNetBootIn? Other??

* http://unetbootin.github.io/
* https://wiki.debian.org/FlashBIOS
* http://joelinoff.com/blog/?p=431

> The main problem was that : the pendrive was the only visible drive.

So you could successfully run DOS programs from the booted USB?

> I could change the drive but after every restart, the installer did not find
> my partitions.

Change what drive? Find what partitions? You mean FAT or NTFS?

> So, I could not choose the number '1' option which is start the setup.
>
> May I please beg an explanation.

The normal way to install DOS is: fdisk (create DOS partition),
reboot, format (FAT), sys (create boot sector, adjust MBR, copy kernel
and shell if needed).

You don't really need to do any other fancy methods. But again, if
your USB is booting and working and has DOS on it, why bother with HDD
at all??

P.S. Is your notebook completely barren? Does it have no other OS on
it? Have you tried installing anything else on it? Is that what you're
really trying to do, using FreeDOS at a means to help install
something else? Or is that the problem, that it "only" has Windows 10?
(You know you can also install FreeDOS under a virtual machine, right?
It's not hard.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] install

[Rugxulo]

Hi again,

On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 6:09 AM, Péter Szőke  wrote:
>
> I will try answer to everyone.
>
> So, I have this model:  Asus k501lx-dm045d

A quick search finds this:

https://www.asus.com/Notebooks/K501LX/

They are very reminiscent of Apple with that page. I don't see any
mentions of FreeDOS or even Linux (which is presumably who the minimal
setup is actually intended for).

"ASUS recommends Windows." (They seemingly only offer it with Win 10,
Home or Pro.)

> Its BIOS has Legacy USB support and it is Enabled.

Are you sure it's a proper BIOS and not UEFI? (The webpage does say
"BIOS Booting User Password Protection" under Security.)

> "Why install to HDD? Why not just use a bootable USB as if it were your HDD?"
>
> My service asked me. If I want a repair,
>
> I have to bring back to them the notebook in its original state.

I'm no tech guru, but I doubt they expect you to reinstall FreeDOS (of
all things)! Presumably they just want all the physical parts, papers,
etc. Whoever put FreeDOS on there in the first place certainly knows
how to do it again.

> When bought this notebook it had freedos operating system.

I believe you, but I don't see that option presented online.

> I could make a bootable pendrive by Rufus, but I could not install the 
> freedos from it.

Did it say it wouldn't write correctly? Was there an error message? Or
it just didn't boot properly? Or are you saying that you expected
RUFUS (AFAIK, only meant for USB) to directly install to HDD for you??

> I sent my notebook with a formatted HDD.
> I hope they will not complaining.

I doubt it, they aren't putting FreeDOS intending it for much use.
(BTW, this implies that you tried installing something else later?
What mainstream OS did you try to use instead? Ubuntu? Why else avoid
pre-installed Windows? Maybe you already had a valid license?)

> Any way,I really appreciate your help.
>
> Thank you very much!
>
> However,I am still courius how should I install to HDD. smiley

First, make sure your laptop is not in the mail being returned to OEM!   :-P

FD 1.2 is (almost?) in beta with FDI (installer), so that will
eventually be the preferred way to get the "full" FreeDOS.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Annual Inform

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 5:34 AM, Rafael Angel Campos Vargas
 wrote:
>
> Annual inform:
>
> First, thanks to FreeDos team for the link where you will encounter previous 
> versions of FreeRay.
> I thanks you a lot.
>
> This year package FreeRay2015 includes sixteen new 3D objects LGPL with HTML
> documentation (fourteen are compatible FreeDOS in POVRay 3.1.).

Looks good.

> Would you like to incorporate this package in same directory?
> Indeed, I think are good 3D objects.

Done, see here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/devel/pascal/contrib/FreeRay_2015.zip

> I've finished my new commercial WEB page
> http://juegosenlazaruscostarricenses.com; the FreeDOS v.1.X versions are
> free probe without time limit (don't have music, joystick yet and mouse is
> poor), other systems only one month for probe.
> Because of that I've advanced very slow this year. My new game Palitos
> Iniciales isn't finished yet, and general use code stands by for now.
>
> Jesus and Marie bless you.

Good luck!

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Re: [Freedos-user] Batch file compilers

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 2:31 PM, Don Flowers  wrote:
>
> Do we have access to any "Free"  batch file compilers like BUILDER or like
> Seaware's EBL program?

It's usually not worth the cost to bother compiling a .BAT (otherwise
just use a full programming language like Turbo Pascal or OpenWatcom C
or whatnot). While .BAT is weak and could be improved, part of the
convenience is the easy scripting.

Having said that, the only one I remember offhand (although I don't
remember ever actively using it) is Wiering's BATCHCOM ("freeware", no
sources):

http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/utils/index.php?L=E=BATCHCOM=batchcom.txt

Old Simtel.net archives probably have others, but I don't remember
exactly. Let me do a quick check 

http://www.lanet.lv/simtel.net/msdos/batchutl.html

No idea how well any of them works, though.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Poor mouse pointer visibility in Edit

[Rugxulo]

Hi again, (off-topic)

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:46 AM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> (bunch of crap inserted by Avast!)

(Sigh.) Sorry about that. (Man, is that ugly.)

I was typing the email and saw them pop up a small message box in the
corner, which I closed (but apparently just closing it isn't enough to
disable this new "feature", which I didn't ask for).

I've now gone into the settings and (hopefully) disabled this message intrusion.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Poor mouse pointer visibility in Edit

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

It's been years since I used SETEDIT. Although it was nice, there were
many other (often DJGPP-compiled) editors. IIRC, it's the same editor
core that was used in (DJGPP) RHIDE. Alas, both are basically
abandoned (but RHIDE much moreso). Not sure of the details, but the
last DJGPP build of SETEDIT was circa 2004 (IIRC).

(continued below)

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 2:08 PM, Louis Santillan  wrote:
> Zip
> 
>
> Installer inside of Zip
> 

IIRC, I think the installer (-i.zip) is the full package, but the
other one (-b.zip) is just a replacement main .EXE, so I wouldn't
recommend that one.

> On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 10:43 AM, Don Flowers  wrote:
>> It is in the FreeDOS 1.0 pkg repo
>> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/

1). 
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/edit/setedit/edi054i.zip
   (1.9 MB)

2a). http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/djgpp/current/v2apps/edi054i.zip
   (or presumably any DJGPP mirror)
2b). ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pc/languages/djgpp/current/v2apps/edi054i.zip
   (if HTTP isn't preferred, use FTP)


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Re: [Freedos-user] Cobalt OS 1.1

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:40 AM, Louis Santillan  wrote:
>
> Try Jeremy's Partition Resizer FD Image [0][1].  You'll need an
> zip/archive program that decompress gzip.
>
> [0] http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/
> [1] http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDPRSZR.144.gz
>
> On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 5:19 AM, Wayne Dernoncourt  wrote:
>>
>> I'm planning on installing FreeDOS on a new/old Windows machine I just
>> bought specifically to install FreeDOS.  But it occurred to me that there
>> was almost no way I was going to be able the _hooj_ (insert D Trump voice
>> here) amount of disk space that would be leftover that I could keep Windows
>> and shrink the existing partition and create a FreeDOS partition of a couple
>> of gigabytes and then use a boot manager.

Vista and newer can resize its own NTFS partitions. Perhaps if you're
trying to use XP then you'll need something else (GParted liveCD?).

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/shrink-and-extend-ntfs-volumes-in-windows/

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Re: [Freedos-user] p7zip 15.09 (DJGPP)

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 9:43 AM, Dale E Sterner  wrote:
>
> What is p7zip?

The POSIX port of 7-Zip (here compiled by DJGPP/G++).

> I see 2 files listed. One small & one big.

One is binary and one is sources. (You don't need sources unless you
want to recompile it.)

> What am I looking at?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7-Zip

"
7-Zip is an open-source file archiver, an application used primarily
to compress files.
7-Zip uses its own 7z archive format, but can read and write several
other archive formats.
...
The cross-platform version of the command-line utility, p7zip, is also
available.
"

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[Freedos-user] p7zip 15.09 (DJGPP)

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

Michael Kostylev has built a DJGPP version of p7zip 15.09, so I've
gone ahead and mirrored it to iBiblio for us.

1). 
http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/file/7zip/15.09/

FYI, there is still no newer upstream p7zip version (e.g. 15.14) to
correspond to latest upstream 7-Zip. So we will have to wait and see.

2). https://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/files/p7zip/15.09/
3). http://www.7-zip.org/history.txt

But keep in mind that I haven't tested it much, so any feedback would
be welcome. (So I don't know if it works better or worse compared to
older versions.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] Easy GUI desktop enviroment install

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 5:15 AM, lee jones  wrote:
>
> Firstly ages ago there was an emulator called tosbox which is an atari
> ST emulator.

I was never familiar with Atari computers, so my dabbling in emulators
was very limited.

> It runs in dos but has two intresting features - firstly
> from what I remember it can access dos files directly (so they show
> up) but it also ran quickly on old hardware -- even an old pentium 75
> could run it quickly.

Supposedly Gemulator could run full speed on a 486 in 1992! Darek
Mihocka released the sources for GEMCE900.ZIP a few years ago, and
while I'm not 100% sure, I think? it still has the DOS bits (Classic
version). This might also have his (DOS-hosted) PC Xformer (Atari
8-bit emulator) sources. (An old message of mine on BTTR says it needs
MASM and MS VC v6, not that I have those or ever tried rebuilding.)

http://www.emulators.com/download.htm

> Though it does need an atari st rom file

Again, I'm not that familiar with all the Atari machines, but I think
there are various free (even libre) replacements out there. Perhaps
Aranym has links to the proper ones (AFROS?):

http://aranym.sourceforge.net/

> Development has long since stopped but I found a copy of the emulator
> here --

Yeah, Zophar's Domain had a lot of good stuff in years past (although
emulation has gotten more mainstream since then).

> Last one while I think of it and I guess it really isn't quite the
> right thing but there used to be an emulator (which again ran fairly
> quickly) called "executor" which could run old 68k mac apps. Though
> strangely it did not require the mac system disks, and neither did it
> need a mac rom image -!

Right, it was DJGPP-built and just emulated some partial bits of Mac
OS, not requiring the (unavailable, proprietary) ROM at all. IIRC, I
only used it a few times (years and years ago), and the demo was
limited to like ten minutes. All I weakly remember is some solitaire
card game.

> apparently executor development (according to wikipedia) ended in
> 2005, and in 2008 became open source. Still have a few linux sources
> as well;

I vaguely remember seeing this on Github or wherever. Here's a result
from a quick search (EDIT: Wikipedia links to Github and more):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_%28software%29

> (I did once try to compile these but with no luck).

The DOS version is probably not preferred anymore, in lieu of newer
OSes. Besides, the Github page implies that some crucial (DOS) libs
needed aren't open source. I don't think there's much motivation to
(re)port to DOS.

> Thats all I can think of!

Thanks for the tips.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Easy GUI desktop enviroment install

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 3:01 PM, G. Potthast  wrote:
>
> Apart from the Google code site there is a Sourceforge site for XFDOS:
>
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/fltk-dos/files/

Ah, you beat me to it! I was just going to mention it.   :-)

BTW, didn't Google Code kick the bucket? So it's no surprise you can't
reach it. It's dead, Jim.

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/03/farewell-to-google-code.html

"We will be shutting down the service about 10 months from now on
January 25th, 2016."

P.S. But maybe they are still archiving some of it ("read-only"??) for
the near future:

https://code.google.com/archive/p/nanox-microwindows-nxlib-fltk-for-dos/

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS installation using VirtualBox

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 6:05 PM, francisco ramirez
 wrote:
>
> Today, I turned on the system and when I click on START in VirtualBox to
> start the FreeDOS I get the following error message:
>
> Failed to open a session for the virtual machine FreeDOS.
>
> The virtual machine 'FreeDOS' has terminated unexpectedly during startup
> with exit code 1 (0x1).
>
> How can I troubleshoot this problem.

Try one of Ulrich's pre-installed images instead, and see if the
problem persists.

https://www.lazybrowndog.net/freedos/virtualbox/

It could be something rare (RAM or hard drive problem), but for now
I'm assuming otherwise.

> Is this a VirtualBox issue?

Maybe. Which version (5.x? 64-bit? host OS?) are you using? VT-X
enabled? Other relevant settings (e.g. memory managers loaded? HIMEMX
only? JEMMEX?)?

You could maybe file a VBox bug report, but you'd have to give them a
LOT more details. Besides, I don't think DOS is top priority for them
to fix anyways. Honestly, it's probably user error (more likely than
not) than actual bugs, but you never know.

> Is this a FreeDOS issue?

Highly doubtful. What kernel ("ver /r")? Never mind, presumably
whatever came with 1.1 (e.g. 2040).

> Thanks for anyone's help.

You could also just use QEMU instead. Some prebuilt Windows binaries
(e.g. 2.5.0) are here:

http://qemu.weilnetz.de/

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Re: [Freedos-user] Still having problems installing FreeDOS 1.1

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 11:39 PM, francisco ramirez
 wrote:
>
> Attempted to install FreeDOS again.
> At the very end of the installation process I get the following message in
> the command window:
>
> JemmEx v5.75 [05/21/11]]
> JemmEx loaded
> Kernel: allocated 46 Disk buffers = 24472 Bytes in HMA
> Bad or missing C-
>
> *
> The installation then hangs up

Dunno, I don't recall this problem for me, but it's been a while.
Again, you don't need JEMMEX at all, usually only XMS (e.g. HIMEMX).

> Can someone tell me what is the checksum of the FreeDOS 1.1 file that  is
> downloaded from the FreeDOS website?

I'm not downloading it again, but my local copy is this (md5sum):

2e0ab23bec79ff33071d80ea26f124dc  fd11src.iso

> I have a utility that does MD5 and SHA, so what are the values of the
> original file that I should compare against the downloaded file?

Oh, now I see that the download on iBiblio also has this:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.1/fd11src.md5

... which says this:

2e0ab23bec79ff33071d80ea26f124dc  fd11src.iso

> Also during the installation process I do not get a chance to select the
> memory (HMA, UMB, XMS).
> The installation just barrels through.

Outside of the installer itself, DOS should let you step through (F8)
CONFIG.SYS et al.

> I am doing something very wrong.
>
> I have a VISTA operating system.

I forget the details of your setup (if you even mentioned them).
Anyways, it doesn't matter, you don't have to "install" at all, just
use one of these pre-built images:

https://www.lazybrowndog.net/freedos/virtualbox/

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Re: [Freedos-user] XCOPY

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:31 AM, Dale E Sterner  wrote:
>
> I wonder will xwcopy copy system and hidden files as well.

/K - Retain attributes.

> If it does it could replace Ghost for making backup copies.

Doubt it. IIRC, it is limited to max 65000 files (so potentially bad
for big FAT32 drives).

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Re: [Freedos-user] UltraDMA warning corrected

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 11:38 AM, Jim Hall  wrote:
>
> I am not a lawyer, but over time I have received advice from lawyers.

Jim, at risk of sounding very naive (or very stubborn), there's
absolutely no reason to worry about things like this without some kind
of official court judgement directly applied to us. Everything else is
just a guessing game, letting irrational anxiety control us. Unless
someone can officially prove infringement, then it's not worth
destroying anything just on an unofficial whim.

> I understand it is the direct viewing of proprietary source code that
> matters. If you examine Microsoft's source code, then you become
> "tainted" (legal term to mean information was obtained illegally or
> unlawfully). I am told such knowledge is also called "fruit of the
> poisonous tree." If you only examined someone else's open source code
> that may be (unknown to you) tainted by proprietary source code, then
> you do not become tainted.

There is absolutely no point in legally redistributing (under any
license) readable source code unless you are permitting someone else
to read and learn from it at will. No, you usually can't "copy"
verbatim large chunks of code (since everything is locked down,
copyrighted, by default), but you can still try to understand the gist
of it. If they didn't want you to read it, only compile it, then they
could shroud it (as many have done before).

So it's wrong to say that you become tainted by reading it. Reading it
is the whole point, there's absolutely nothing else you can do with it
(except compile, which doesn't need to be "readable").

As long as you don't "copy" any large sections of it (since small,
obvious bits aren't unique enough to be copyrighted), you should be
okay. Reading but not using is not stealing, and proving damages for
something like this heavily depends on any commercial use (for which
there is none for MS-DOS 2.0).

> While I understand some people think it an overreaction, we must avoid
> any suggestion that we benefit from proprietary source code. I do not
> think it likely that Microsoft would take action against an open
> source DOS operating system in 2016, but that does not matter. The
> right thing to do is avoid proprietary source code in developing
> FreeDOS.

Jim, we don't even publicly know what files (utilities, besides
kernel) were in the MS-DOS 2.0 release. Do you? I certainly didn't
care, it's way too old. It won't even run obvious things like DJGPP.
So it's of extremely limited use. I question the usefulness of them
releasing only ancient versions at all, except maybe for historical
purposes. FreeDOS long ago surpassed MS-DOS 2.0! But even for those
few utilities, how would they even transfer? How would you learn or
improve anything from (I don't know what) REPLACE or MOVE or DEBUG?
Give me a break, there's nothing to learn there, and they presumably
aren't in the same programming language / dialect anyways.

> For any developer who did examine the MS-DOS source code, I ask that
> they do not contribute to FreeDOS programs that replace MS-DOS
> functionality. Specifically, this means programs in the Base category:
>
> However, FreeDOS includes extra functionality not found in MS-DOS.
> These features did not exist in any version of MS-DOS. Even if you
> have studied the MS-DOS source code, I believe you can contribute to
> the non-Base parts of FreeDOS.

Linus Torvalds heavily studied and used Minix sources, which was a
UNIX (tm) clone. It was not free/libre at all, they were commercially
selling it with their text book about OSes. Linux eventually wrote his
own kernel, even reusing minixfs, and made it available under a "free
for commercial use" (GPL) license! Nobody stopped him. If anything, he
thrived because so many people saw the usefulness of it.

I tried to tell you this. People are meant to learn from others.
Schools use source code as a teaching method all the time. All
programming books have source code as example. The only thing you
can't do is copy verbatim large sections of code (and redistribute or
sell it, at least not without permission).

Of course, patents are horrible and purposely overcomplicate
everything. But you don't have to worry about that either because any
alleged patents (from MS-DOS 2.0, circa 1983) are long expired.

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Re: [Freedos-user] XCOPY

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 4:47 AM, daniele  wrote:
>
> is there any news about having FreeDOS Xcopy work with LFN-Support?
> I'm using DOSLFN:
> but when xcopying file names are kept short.

There was a similar thread about two years ago where several of us
gave some suggestions:

http://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/31617470/

Long story short: you may wish to use either xWcopy or DJGPP's (GNU
FileUtils) "cp" or maybe something else entirely.

http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/djgpp/current/v2gnu/fil41br2.zip

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Re: [Freedos-user] UltraDMA warning corrected

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 7:17 PM, Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/14/2016 4:20 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
>> Linus Torvalds heavily studied and used Minix sources, which was a
>> UNIX (tm) clone. It was not free/libre at all, they were commercially
>> selling it with their text book about OSes.
>
> Sorry, but that is not correct. Minix was distributed by Tanenbaum (who
> was at that time a professor at the university of Amsterdam) for the
> explicit purpose for students to read and study a Unix like OS.

Great, but Linus did more than just study. He made his own. Not quite
a derivative work (that's my point!) but indeed similar.

> The charge was only for the book that the source code was published in, with
> a small fee for the media (floppy disks) if you wanted to have it in
> digital form.

It's not money I'm talking about but licensing. Minix was not "free"
in any sense. There was (AFAIK) no right to copy, redistribute, modify
at all. Minix was not "freed" until 2000, and of course it was heavily
rewritten later anyways (v3) to where very little is even similar to
classic v2 versions. Maybe some userland of it was from outside public
domain sources, but overall it was not free at all.

Yes, Minix was meant to be studied (as presumably is all source code
that is published unshrouded), but Minix itself was not even freeware.

> The first version available (1.1) was on 8 360KB 5.25"
> floppy disc, costing something around DM30,- back then. I remember that
> because I bought those (but never bought the book).
> So Linus was full within the rights granted by Tanenbaum (Prentice-Hall
> as the publisher). And the only thing he actually "copied" (kind of) was
> the file system.

I'm not implying he "copied" anything (as it was and still is
copyrighted). He presumably implemented compatible file system support
for minixfs before ext (or ext2) were developed. His kernel was
monolithic, not a microkernel, and many other differences. I'm not
implying that he broke anything, but he did heavily study and learn
from Minix. He was not ever considered "tainted" (AFAIK). That's my
point.

> He started Linux also from the get-go as a 80386/32bit project (while
> Minix at that time was only 16bit, 80286 code), using an early version
> of GCC instead of the ACK (Amsterdam Compiler Kit) C compiler used and
> bundled with the Minix floppy disks...

I'm aware of the differences. Everything is different when you
implement it separately. I'm not saying he used code, in fact I'm
claiming the opposite. You are allowed to write your own, even if you
have studied someone else's. They can never stop you from doing that.
That's the whole point of copyright. You only own what you wrote, not
everyone else's. They are always allowed to create different (even if
compatible) versions. (Of course patents ruin everything well beyond
that, but that's a separate issue. Any alleged MS-DOS patents are long
since expired except maybe one or two for Win95-era VFAT.)

Maybe you can still disagree with me, that's fine. I'm no lawyer. But
I still think we're all overreacting here.

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Re: [Freedos-user] Does FreeDOS boot/work under UEFI?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 3:16 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
>> Will FreeDOS 1.1 boot under UEFI?  If not, is there a software layer
>> that can sit between UEFI and the OS to emulate a BIOS?
>
> If somebody has experience with this, it would be nice if they
> could share step by step instructions for SeaBIOS-ing to DOS :-)

No first-hand experience here, but try reading these:

1). 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#CSM_booting
2). https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=142637

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Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS on a compute stick

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 4:52 AM, Xavier Dury  wrote:
> Thanks for all the feedback! :-)
>
> As I said before, DOSBox is not an option to me as I have already done it 
> before on my PC and my RPi
> (there is nothing hard/challenging in installing DOSBox on windows or 
> linux)... and don't get me wrong:
> I have absolutely nothing against emulators. It's just that I work everyday 
> with linux/windows, hypervisors,
> containers, (java) VMs.

If you work every day with those, then do you know about VT-X?
"Unrestricted guest mode execution"? Hyper-V?

> I wanted to try something different in my free time and somehow go back to my 
> roots (DOS).
>
> I initially wanted to run rpix86 on a RPi2 for its tiny form factor but it 
> can only emulate a 486@20Mhz
> which is a bit slow for the last DOS games like Quake, DN3D, Magic Carpet, 
> Hi-Octane...

Yes, it's slow, especially if you choose such a (relatively) low-end
host cpu. That can barely be helped.
You could try some unofficial forks of DOSBox, but I don't know of any
perfect solution to speeding it
up on a RPi2.

Native x86 is fast, but it lacks sound. Even under DOSEMU, sound
doesn't always work.
(Although I played the heck out of Hexen2 [Hammer of Thyrion] under
DOSEMU in recent years, which is Quake-based.)

Most people would tell you to use a modern source port (e.g. Doom,
Quake, Duke Nukem 3D) compiled for Windows or Linux.
Seriously, if at all possible, the consensus is not to run under DOS
at all, if the .EXE can be recompiled. Heck, even Tyrian
was ported to modern systems.

> So I thought, why not use a recent x86 as DOS was intended to be run on 
> instead of an ARM one.

Sound is the big problem. But if you can live without that, then
you're "probably" okay (more or less).

> I knew beforehand that it was going to be a challenge as I had so many 
> questions
> (how does DOS behave with USB keyboard and mouse,

Depends on the built-in BIOS emulation (if any) and drivers.

> UEFI,

Depends on if CSM is available.

> SATA,

None.

> sound chips?)

Almost none.

> but that's where the fun is.

Depends on your level of patience and skill, but some things are
(almost) impossible.

> And I chose FreeDOS over MS-DOS because I had better hope it could handle the 
> last x86 evolutions
> (the last version is only 4 years old while the last MS-DOS came with windows 
> 98).

Nope, FreeDOS doesn't have extra cpu or driver support at all. And
there are no companies contributing in recent years to DOS at all.
There is no upstream interest in DOS as anything but bare bones (i.e.
minimal bootup to do low-level recovery or BIOS flashing).
DOS is not supported nor recommended by any big companies anymore.
Even hobbyist projects have mostly dropped it,
esp. once NTVDM got buggier and buggier (after XP) and AMD64 became
mainstream (no V86 mode).

> So, that's why I wanted to know if someone already did it:
>
> - If yes then what are the difficulties?
> - If no then why?
> - Is it because nobody thought about doing that before? (I hardly doubt it)
> - Is it because it's not possible anymore?
> - Then, at what point in the x86 evolution have we lost the capability to run 
> DOS (which ruled that platform for years)?

If you have a BIOS, you can run DOS. But 99% of the time, things like
sound don't work. And all the other stuff (power management,
multiple cores) is almost totally ignored or broken. There are no huge
modern enhancements to FreeDOS. If you're expecting
FreeBSD levels of compatibility with ultra-modern hardware, you're
sorely mistaken (sadly).

> Now that I know that current sound chips aren't SB compatible at all, this is 
> a blocking issue.
>
> The 2 options I got left are indeed use DOSBox on linux (and launch DOSBox on 
> boot to have something that looks like
> an old DOS computer) or dig up my old Pentium@166Mhz from the basement (but 
> its size and noise are not so convenient
> and won't please my wife :-) ).
>
> Once again, thank you for the great discussion and information.

I almost forgot that ReactOS has been heavily working on their own
NTVDM, and I just found a video of them playing Duke
Nukem 3D in (unreleased) 0.4 previews. So it's not all hopeless, but
that depends on whether you find that acceptable
or if you still insist on using exactly "DOS only" or not.

P.S. Did you hear about Retro City Rampage DX?

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