Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
Thanks Rugxulo for such a considered - and considerable - reply! You have given me much to work on regarding FreeDOS memory management in - dunno - Pentium-vintage hardware, but I haven't been able to extricate myself from real world issues to digest/work through it all yet. You've reminded me that I have to review my FDCONFIG and AUTOEXEC more thoroughly - perhaps my earlier meddling in those configs solved problems with some games (e.g., Aladdin - see http://www.computing.net/answers/dos/xms-memory-to-run-dos-game/7359.html for the solution path I will be re-taking ) that, since upgrading to FreeDOS1.1 have remained problematic... Certainly have to immerse myself there to get the CD player going automatically for various DOS MPG player utilities, and Access' built-in player functions operating finally. EMSMAGIC is a great tip - I am thinking that I might be able to use it (or JEMMEX) with their specific switches from Access' game-specific command-line options, to work around other memory allocation problems games might throw up, without the need for re-writing batch file executables (I know it should be all straight forward - but I am trying to get familiar with Linux too - so if something can be done wrong, I seem to be the poster-boy for it...) Thanks also for the 'heads up' on PLOP too, by the way. That would be a useful addition to the other boot loaders I find on UBCD and Hiren's (from memory). Just confirming though that grubflop (from Murga's Puppy Linux Forum) works great for projects like FDOSGAME135, found in the FreeDOS ISO achives. But for now, it's back to the trenches for me :) Cheers! P.S. I have collected HEAPS of dungeon crawlers - spotted Stone Soup because of the non-ASCII tiling system it uses - but I have other nethack derivatives (erm, EagleEye from memory?) to take its place in that respect... shamefully my kids don't 'dig' ascii games much, I think due to modern game bling-related imagination deprivation :( -- Andrew Robins arob...@fastmail.fm -- Master SQL Server Development, Administration, T-SQL, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS and more. Get SQL Server skills now (including 2012) with LearnDevNow - 200+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only - learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122512 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
Hi again, On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 5:58 PM, Andrew Robins arob...@fastmail.fm wrote: You've reminded me that I have to review my FDCONFIG and AUTOEXEC more thoroughly - perhaps my earlier meddling in those configs solved problems with some games (e.g., Aladdin - see http://www.computing.net/answers/dos/xms-memory-to-run-dos-game/7359.html for the solution path I will be re-taking ) that, since upgrading to FreeDOS1.1 have remained problematic... Sounds like the game doesn't work well under various Windows (no surprise). More specific to DOS, though, is that the game may be making bad assumptions about total available XMS and EMS. Some games actually choke if they see too much. I don't remember offhand the syntax, but you can choose some settings to limit that. At least, that would be a first guess. P.S. I have collected HEAPS of dungeon crawlers - spotted Stone Soup because of the non-ASCII tiling system it uses - but I have other nethack derivatives (erm, EagleEye from memory?) to take its place in that respect... shamefully my kids don't 'dig' ascii games much, I think due to modern game bling-related imagination deprivation :( I suppose you mean old Falcon's Eye, which does compile for DOS via DJGPP, and gives 3D-ish isometric graphics for Nethack (though it's only for older 3.3.1, IIRC) via Allegro, I think (but no sound). Vanilla Nethack 3.4.3 has some graphics, but it's very very small tiles (though you can switch to bigger, perhaps, not sure if I ever tried that). SLASH 'EM has even better default gfx support via Allegro, so you could always let them play that. Though I'm mostly a noob at Nethack because it's so complicated, heh, so I'm not sure if they're more patient or not. http://users.tkk.fi/jtpelto2/nethack.html http://www.nethack.org/ http://slashem.sourceforge.net/ You've probably already seen it, but maybe they'd also enjoy Boreal's slightly improved Star Trek port, which at least isn't plain text: http://www.xpl0.org/TREK-N.ZIP -- Master Java SE, Java EE, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, JavaScript, jQuery and much more. Keep your Java skills current with LearnJavaNow - 200+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Java experts. SALE $49.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122612 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 7:39 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: Though I'm mostly a noob at Nethack because it's so complicated, heh, so I'm not sure if they're more patient or not. The question with Nethack isn't whether you'll win: it's what novel and interesting way you'll find to get killed. You have reached the center of the Earth! Unfortunately, this is where Hell is located. You burn to a crisp. You die I've played it with and without graphics, and prefer ASCII character mode. I don't need a fancy drawing of a monster to be afraid of it. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Master Java SE, Java EE, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, JavaScript, jQuery and much more. Keep your Java skills current with LearnJavaNow - 200+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Java experts. SALE $49.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122612 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
Hmmm yes there are seems to be an infinite number of ways you can be dispatched in Nethack that my kids approve of. My son likes to die by repeatedly kicking a wall or a boulder (??? don't ask), being eaten by a black pudding is also memorable - the random gender/species allocation also gets a giggle. Many thanks for those Rogue links, Rugxulo! Yes - Falcon's Eye was the 3-D perspective version I was thinking of, but there are also plain tile versions too that I downloaded somewhere but haven't dug out again to install and test on my lab rats. You are quite right Dennis - the ASCII versions are preferable to many of the modern graphical offerings around - abandonware or no - and to paraphrase a famous movie quote I'm tempted to ...go MegaZeux on yo' brains. Forlorn hope that they might develop an interest in coding their own games or stories (a la Storymaker, Cartooners etc). Actually, the biggest problem is definitely keeping them focused on a single task or game for extended periods. Master 9 is particularly bad - flits between 'Albion', 'Lion King' (yuk - can't really name a good Disney game), 'Command and Conquer', 'Sky Roads', 'Decent' etc etc at only minutes per game - Blakendaal's Access gui has that drawback that you can drop in and out of dozens of games (on an old 1.4G HDD) nearly instantaneously. They haven't yet developed the desire to actually complete a game (except Pepper's Adventures in Time and Ping and Kooky's Zoo, maybe Treehouse and Playground, but those aren't really highly goal-oriented...) and that concerns me. I won't put Doom or any similar first-person shooter on for them - though I guess you could seriously debate the inclusion of Decent' or 'Magic Carpet'. The kids just don't seem to take to any of the Sims genera, but maybe DinoPark Tycoon will bite them yet... Thanks again Rugxulo for the EMS/XMS tips - I have a lot of experimenting to do - and I haven't started on tinkering with memory environs for Allegro - I occasionally see allocation errors with it, but mostly on newer hardware running the Access shell, BFN -- Andrew Robins arob...@fastmail.fm -- Master Java SE, Java EE, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, JavaScript, jQuery and much more. Keep your Java skills current with LearnJavaNow - 200+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Java experts. SALE $49.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122612 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
...why do I only spot my typos after I post, and not in the 3 re-reads I make befpre pressing 'send'?? -- Master Java SE, Java EE, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, JavaScript, jQuery and much more. Keep your Java skills current with LearnJavaNow - 200+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Java experts. SALE $49.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122612 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 12:47 AM, Andrew Robins arob...@fastmail.fm wrote: ...why do I only spot my typos after I post, and not in the 3 re-reads I make befpre pressing 'send'?? ^^^ Like this one? :-) Don't feel bad. I am in the final stages of producing the souvenir book for an annual convention. A draft PDF was circulated for scrutiny, and I'm getting a boatload of nitpicking corrections. I don't mind the corrections. I *do* mind that we are already past deadline and will be charged more by the printer, and the copy I was working with really *should* have been vetted earlier in the process. Typos R Us, and I will get to bed in the wee hours of the morning because this needs to be ready to go the the printer yesterday. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Master Java SE, Java EE, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, JavaScript, jQuery and much more. Keep your Java skills current with LearnJavaNow - 200+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Java experts. SALE $49.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122612 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
Hi, Sorry for delay, not sure if this is what you wanted to hear or not, oh well! On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 12:24 AM, Andrew Robins arob...@fastmail.fm wrote: Coincidentally I've been reading older posts of yours on other threads/forums re memory management (DOS/32a) and your involvement with the Stone Soup dungeon crawler, amongst other things - many thanks for your encouragement, but this is not an experiment I will give up so easily, please rest assured. N.B. Stone Soup hasn't been compiled for DOS (that I know of) in almost three years, and they never mirrored my (barely hacked) 0.6.0 build [DJDEV 2.04, G++ 4.2.3], which was the first one with (untested for DOS, hence broken) new build process. (Though at least magic worked, and I didn't need to fix it!) No idea if newer ones would build, haven't tried. Depends on how gnarly their setup is and if they require Unicode in console builds nowadays (doubt it but who knows). There are plenty of other roguelikes, though I really think the jury is still out on whether the modern netbooks and RAM architecture etc, while 'cheap' - will be shown to be as durable and thus sustainable as the laptops of the last technological epoch (i.e., noughties) Dunno, I heard ASUS won't even be making any netbooks this year. My aunt still enjoys hers (not ASUS, but I forget the brand) for lightweight use. http://www.osnews.com/story/26657/_The_netbook_era_has_come_to_an_end_ - so I give my preference to Win95-era reject machines over a new box of gimmicks any day (nod to the OP). Older hardware was better documented. These days, there are so many competing new technologies that you're lucky is any OS supports it. Not a lot of stability. :-/ Alas no - BIOS permits boot from FDD and HDD only, though rather than your kind suggestion of Smart Boot Manager, I've used a grubflop image boot floppy I found on the Puppy Linux forums with great success. There's also PLoP Boot Manager, but I'm not sure how much extra help it will be here. (For instance, a year or two back I was using it via floppy to USB boot to Puppy Linux on my older P4.) Even SlitaZ Linux was (last I checked) indirectly using this for their boot floppy! http://www.plop.at/ I've yet to do the brain transplant back into the old machine, but will do so shortly as many old dos games generally complain about the lack of Soundblaster16-era hardware. There's no good answer there. Hopefully you can live without sound (as it's not crucial to most games) or live with PC speaker (if supported)! ;-) So, I guess all I need spoon-feeding with now is an Absolute Dummy's Guide to understanding modern solutions to DOS memory management (i.e., JEMM/JEMMEX, HX, DOS4GW, DOS/32a, XMS, UMBs etc etc ) - which FreeDOS startup choice is best (1, 2 or 3) and can additional memory management parameters (e.g., full cache utilization for certain game requirements - whatever is meant by 'cache' in this instance) be co-opted within the Access GUI configurations for specific games. Or, whether a better workaround is provision of a new batch file to call up specific memory requirements, per game. Doing my research - but any sources that illustrate DOS memory management in a graphical form would be appreciated, if any are to hand, Err, graphical form? Heheh, sorry, no flow charts here. DOS memory isn't that tricky, but different apps support different types (if anything beyond typical conventional 640k). So it really just depends what the app supports, what works best, and what your target computer can support. FDCONFIG.SYS should probably?? always have DOS=HIGH, UMB and DOSDATA=HIGH,UMB. Similarly always use a good shell like FreeCOM 0.84-pre2 XMS_Swap or 4DOS, as those are able to not need the kludges to swap out upon each command (VSPAWN or KSSF). But you need at least a 286 for XMS. HIMEMX is popular, but I personally like XMGR [by Jack Ellis, e.g. in UIDE drivers download] for no other reason than it seems to work fine. (Both of those are XMSv3 only and 386+, so you'll have to use FDXMS286 for old 286s, which I doubt your using here.) While there are lots of EMS apps, most people don't have any real physical EMS RAM. Jim Leonard's 8088 has 2 MB (and a Sound Blaster and hard disk and ...), but most classic (16-bit) computers won't be able to use EMS outside of various unofficial TSRs like EMM286 or EMSMAGIC. For 386+ machines, the common answer is EMM386 (or, in our case, preferably JEMM386). If you always want to run EMS, you can use JEMMEX, which is basically HIMEMX + JEMM386 combined, but it lacks some flexibility (and won't load if other XMS server is already loaded). JEMM386 X=TEST I=TEST is probably a safe default. There are other options, but it shouldn't matter. Though honestly, unless you always need EMS or UMBs (and can't use UMBPCI), I'd just not enable it and LOAD and UNLOAD it at cmdline when needed. Most good apps don't exclusively need EMS (outside of a few rare ones). That's
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
P.S. Starting from here of course http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDOS#Memory_management -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122712 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
Hey Rugxulo! Coincidentally I've been reading older posts of yours on other threads/forums re memory management (DOS/32a) and your involvement with the Stone Soup dungeon crawler, amongst other things - many thanks for your encouragement, but this is not an experiment I will give up so easily, please rest assured. I really think the jury is still out on whether the modern netbooks and RAM architecture etc, while 'cheap' - will be shown to be as durable and thus sustainable as the laptops of the last technological epoch (i.e., noughties) - so I give my preference to Win95-era reject machines over a new box of gimmicks any day (nod to the OP). Alas no - BIOS permits boot from FDD and HDD only, though rather than your kind suggestion of Smart Boot Manager, I've used a grubflop image boot floppy I found on the Puppy Linux forums with great success. I think I've even used it in the past to load Willy-Billy's (?) 2006 offering, FDOSGAME135 iso, in my early investigations of a FreeDOS4Kids model. I won't even contemplating again bootups from PCMCIA/PC-CARD cd-roms - will do drive transplants in future, and just silly-putty any post-install problems in such FrankenDOS setups. I've made some progress, having moved the SD card to a 40-pin adapter in a desktop with a well-appointed K7S41GX mbo and dvd burner. The FreeDOS 1.1 (SRC) install disk works *exactly* as I had hoped - automatic (re)format to FAT32, mbr re-writing, sys transfer, no GRUB required - so my little 'wish list' in my last post only highlights where the wheels came off the cart for the 430CDS. I did skip the install for WATTCP and WGET as I think some issues are outstanding on those, if I understand recent posts on FDOS1.1 installs correctly. (Wasn't just the install disk by the way - other FreeDOS images eg boot floppies, XFDisk and related apps in UBCDs 4.11, 5.17 tended to break at the same place - at InitDisk with flashing cursor loop.) I've yet to do the brain transplant back into the old machine, but will do so shortly as many old dos games generally complain about the lack of Soundblaster16-era hardware. Another strange quirk I've noticed in the 'new' environment is that I cannot get Ronald Blakendaal's Access GUI to import game menu icons as I had in the 430CDS (FreeDOS1.0 with the kernel upgrade). So, I guess all I need spoon-feeding with now is an Absolute Dummy's Guide to understanding modern solutions to DOS memory management (i.e., JEMM/JEMMEX, HX, DOS4GW, DOS/32a, XMS, UMBs etc etc ) - which FreeDOS startup choice is best (1, 2 or 3) and can additional memory management parameters (e.g., full cache utilization for certain game requirements - whatever is meant by 'cache' in this instance) be co-opted within the Access GUI configurations for specific games. Or, whether a better workaround is provision of a new batch file to call up specific memory requirements, per game. Doing my research - but any sources that illustrate DOS memory management in a graphical form would be appreciated, if any are to hand, Cheers :) -- Andrew Robins arob...@fastmail.fm -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122712 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
Hi, On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 1:01 AM, Andrew Robins arob...@fastmail.fm wrote: I was the gent Dennis McC mentions having Puppy Linux running in an old machine in the thread Install basic Puppy on a computer with 16 Mb RAM. Sad that nobody cares for old machines anymore. There are way more of them than new ones. But I guess new is cheap enough and (sometimes) works where old doesn't. Now very recently I *finally* acquired a 44-pin IDE adapter for a 16GB SD-card, to replace the original 1358MB PATA. This was done for greater performance, cooler running etc. Avoided the CF-card route, thanks also to earlier discussions in this forum. Now all my searches suggested that the latest BIOS for that Toshiba would handle the FreeDOS 1.1 installation from CD, and even despite scaling back to a 2GB SD card, and trying a similar install on a 196MB RAM Portege 3480CT - I still ran into problems (Very difficult getting around the PCMCIA CD-drive issue in the latter case). So your BIOS won't boot from CD? You could maybe (?) try Smart Boot Manager (via floppy), which claims to subvert that need. Even formatting the hard drive via the early instal steps on the CD failed to There were some unusual, but mostly cosmetic error messages returned that didn't appear with the installation of FreeDOS 1.0. I made notes - misplaced during the Christmas buzz - but can dig them out again if anyone wants. DOS is not difficult to install. But multi-boot can (over)complicate everything. If it worked in FD 1.0, it should also work in FD 1.1. If not, that's probably an accidental regression (which is sadly too easy with so few testers). After some trial-and-error I realized that I was missing a bootloader all along. I installed GRUB4DOS and away I go now - but for the install of a single OS, Grub etc shouldn't be normally required? No, it's not needed. Is there a bootloader stage in the latest install process that has been omitted somehow? Doubtful. SYS.COM is used to copy the boot sector (and usually kernel and shell files: KERNEL.SYS, COMMAND.COM). My main machine was using BOOTMGR (from BTTR) fine (with three OSes) installed to the MBR (with appropriate partition tables), but the fan and hard drive just died a few days ago (yuck), so now :-P I wasn't able to install FreeDOS 1.1 from the CD, but I cloned the original PATA drive to the 2GB SD with no further issue. So I have just a few requests for the installation process as a FreeDOS user: 1) clearer instructions on how to do the copy CD onto HD route for installation. There's info buried in the ISO, but I only found it once, It's something like just normal file copying, concatenating back into one piece, and then using SHSUCDHD (possibly with SHCDX33F or whatever loaded). Sorry, never tried personally. Some suggested grabbing via network (if existing packet driver works) might be easier for upgrades if booting from CD is inconvenient or if copying lots of stuff via floppies is too tedious. 2) some installation workarounds for the if you have a PCMCIA cd-rom..., and Yuck, heh. Dunno, most of us have never messed with PCMCIA. Or at least I never did. 3) improved format /system HD / bootloader process. a). fdisk (create FAT, active, bootable) b). reboot c). (quick?) format FAT d). sys a: c: (copies kernel, shell, and boot sector) e). manually install other stuff (unzip, xcopy, etc.) That's about all the feedback I have for the time being. Apologies if some of the above issues have been addressed elsewhere and I've skimmed over it, Hope this helps (or someone chimes in better). Sorry if it's not good enough. Sometimes good ol' InnerTubez tech support just doesn't cut it. Try searching some FD-related FAQs or wikis. (I don't know which is up, up-to-date, or available, so I can't say for sure. It's too many little pieces to keep up with honestly, sorry.) Just don't give up. There's bound to be (some) answers out there. Thanks, and Happy New Year You too.o|:-P -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122412 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
On 12/28/2012 2:30 PM, dmccunney wrote: On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 7:23 AM, kurt godel wb2...@gmail.com wrote: XP2 will run in as little as 100 mb. I'll assume you've done so and will take your word for it, but I'm assuming a flexible definition of run. How long did it take to boot? What could you do under it once it had? It likely boots much faster than a normal desktop because you get the memory usage down by turning off unneeded services and devices which take time to start up. We sell an industrial data collection machine based on XP that runs in about 80MB of allocated memory. We turn off the server service, themes and a couple others, along with unneeded devices, and have only tcpip v4 networking enabled. Doing a warm reboot takes about 20 sec IIRC from the time I click shutdown to the time it's back up taking data again. It still is manageable remotely with either remote desktop or pcanywhere, and runs 3 applications simultaneously that do our functionality, and send out the data in a continuous stream over the internet. The applications do have GUIs, though they are quite simple, being mainly status displays. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Master HTML5, CSS3, ASP.NET, MVC, AJAX, Knockout.js, Web API and much more. Get web development skills now with LearnDevNow - 350+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122812 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122912 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 1:09 PM, David Kerber dker...@warrenrogersassociates.com wrote: On 12/28/2012 2:30 PM, dmccunney wrote: On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 7:23 AM, kurt godel wb2...@gmail.com wrote: XP2 will run in as little as 100 mb. I'll assume you've done so and will take your word for it, but I'm assuming a flexible definition of run. How long did it take to boot? What could you do under it once it had? It likely boots much faster than a normal desktop because you get the memory usage down by turning off unneeded services and devices which take time to start up. We sell an industrial data collection machine based on XP that runs in about 80MB of allocated memory. We turn off the server service, themes and a couple others, along with unneeded devices, and have only tcpip v4 networking enabled. Doing a warm reboot takes about 20 sec IIRC from the time I click shutdown to the time it's back up taking data again. It still is manageable remotely with either remote desktop or pcanywhere, and runs 3 applications simultaneously that do our functionality, and send out the data in a continuous stream over the internet. The applications do have GUIs, though they are quite simple, being mainly status displays. Sweet. I've done a fair bit of optimizing memory usage in 2K and XP by pruning stuff run on startup and closing down unneeded services, but I've never gotten RAM usage that low because I was configuring a general purpose machine, not a dedicated one. (The XP box I'm posting from at the moment takes about 270MB for XP itself from a standing start. I could prune that more if I had to, but it would mean compromises I'd rather not make, and since the box has 1.5GB RAM, I don't have to.) Along those lines, a chap on the Puppy Linux forums got a working Puppy installation in 16MB RAM. To do so, he had to take out everything that *could* be removed and still have a working bootable Linux image, and he had to actually build the image on a more powerful machine, then transfer the drive to the ancient target system, The end result was a dedicated media server that performed the intended function on a box with 16MB RAM that he had lying around and wanted to use. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122912 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
On 12/29/2012 1:31 PM, dmccunney wrote: On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 1:09 PM, David Kerber dker...@warrenrogersassociates.com wrote: On 12/28/2012 2:30 PM, dmccunney wrote: On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 7:23 AM, kurt godel wb2...@gmail.com wrote: XP2 will run in as little as 100 mb. I'll assume you've done so and will take your word for it, but I'm assuming a flexible definition of run. How long did it take to boot? What could you do under it once it had? It likely boots much faster than a normal desktop because you get the memory usage down by turning off unneeded services and devices which take time to start up. We sell an industrial data collection machine based on XP that runs in about 80MB of allocated memory. We turn off the server service, themes and a couple others, along with unneeded devices, and have only tcpip v4 networking enabled. Doing a warm reboot takes about 20 sec IIRC from the time I click shutdown to the time it's back up taking data again. It still is manageable remotely with either remote desktop or pcanywhere, and runs 3 applications simultaneously that do our functionality, and send out the data in a continuous stream over the internet. The applications do have GUIs, though they are quite simple, being mainly status displays. Sweet. I've done a fair bit of optimizing memory usage in 2K and XP by pruning stuff run on startup and closing down unneeded services, but I've never gotten RAM usage that low because I was configuring a general purpose machine, not a dedicated one. (The XP box I'm posting from at the moment takes about 270MB for XP itself from a standing start. I could prune that more if I had to, but it would mean compromises I'd rather not make, and since the box has 1.5GB RAM, I don't have to.) Yep, that's about as low as I've gotten a general purpose XP desktop as well, ~250MB or so, including an antivirus. Along those lines, a chap on the Puppy Linux forums got a working Puppy installation in 16MB RAM. To do so, he had to take out everything that *could* be removed and still have a working bootable Linux image, and he had to actually build the image on a more powerful machine, then transfer the drive to the ancient target system, The end result was a dedicated media server that performed the intended function on a box with 16MB RAM that he had lying around and wanted to use. Now that's cool. I've never tried puppy linux, but I have heard it's good for that kind of application. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122912 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122912 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 1:36 PM, David Kerber dker...@warrenrogersassociates.com wrote: On 12/29/2012 1:31 PM, dmccunney wrote: We sell an industrial data collection machine based on XP that runs in about 80MB of allocated memory. We turn off the server service, themes and a couple others, along with unneeded devices, and have only tcpip v4 networking enabled. Doing a warm reboot takes about 20 sec IIRC from the time I click shutdown to the time it's back up taking data again. ... Sweet. I've done a fair bit of optimizing memory usage in 2K and XP by pruning stuff run on startup and closing down unneeded services, but I've never gotten RAM usage that low because I was configuring a general purpose machine, not a dedicated one. (The XP box I'm posting from at the moment takes about 270MB for XP itself from a standing start. I could prune that more if I had to, but it would mean compromises I'd rather not make, and since the box has 1.5GB RAM, I don't have to.) Yep, that's about as low as I've gotten a general purpose XP desktop as well, ~250MB or so, including an antivirus. I don't run A/V. I thought about it and realized I didn't need it. The only thing A/V had actually caught in years back when I *did* run it were false positives. Viruses are infections, and infections have vectors by which they enter the host. Ward the vector and block the infection. The main vector for viruses is email. I use GMail as my primary email account, and read mail via the web interface. I have no need for a local copy, so I don't download via POP. My mail, including attachments, lives on Google's servers and never reaches my machine. Google has viewers for the majority of file types used as attachments, so I don't need to download them to see them. Other downloads are all from known-good sources that scan on their end (and most are open source as well.) I stopped running A/V on Windows a while back and have had no cause to reconsider the decision. I don't run A/V because I don't do things that are likely to infect me with a virus. Along those lines, a chap on the Puppy Linux forums got a working Puppy installation in 16MB RAM. To do so, he had to take out everything that *could* be removed and still have a working bootable Linux image, and he had to actually build the image on a more powerful machine, then transfer the drive to the ancient target system, The end result was a dedicated media server that performed the intended function on a box with 16MB RAM that he had lying around and wanted to use. Now that's cool. I've never tried puppy linux, but I have heard it's good for that kind of application. I found Puppy because I was given an old Fujitsu Lifebook p2110 by a friend who had upgraded but loved the old box and wanted it to go to a good home, not a dumpster. It has an 867mhz Transmeta Crusoe CPU and a whopping 256MB of RAM, of which 16MB is grabbed off the top for code morphing by the CPU. It came to me with XP SP2 installed and was frozen snail slow, requiring 8 minutes to simply boot. Once up, it did a good imitation of mainframe death by thrashing, spending more time swapping than working. I went looking for a Linux distro suitable for slow, low-RAM hardware, and Puppy was one of the candidates. What I wound up doing was swapping in a larger 40GB HD from my SO's dead laptop, re-partitioning, and setting up a multi-boot system, with Win2K Pro SP4, Puppy Linux, Ubuntu Linux, and FreeDOS. Win2K is on a 20GB NTFS slice. (I got its memory requirements down to about 180MB.) Puppy and Ubuntu are on 8GB ext4 slices, with a shared 512MB swap partition. FreeDOS is in a 2GB FAT32 volume. Puppy and Ubuntu are configured to mount each others slices, and I did some fiddling to have one copy of large apps living on one side or the other and shared between them. I found an open source driver that lets me read and write the ext4 slices from Win2K, and the Linux systems both grok NTFS and can see the Windows slice, All can read and writer the FAT32 partition. FreeDOS can't see anything else, but I don't care. Puppy was a straight install from an ISO. Ubuntu was trickier. I started using Xubuntu, a version intended for lower end gear, but it was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums indicated too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and that Ubuntu had a steadily increasing idea of what low end was. They recommended what I did, which was install from the Minimal ISO that would produce a working CLI inlstallation, then use apt-get to install only the bits I needed. That produced a Ubuntu installation that was usable and almost as quick as Puppy. Puppy is fun but quirky. Among other things, it is explicitly single user, and you *always* run as root. (The code that lets you have other users was ripped out - you *must* be root.) I started using Unix before Linux was even a gleam in Linus Torvald's eye, and the notion of always being root gave me hives. It gets
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
On 12/29/2012 dmccunney wrote: ... a chap on the Puppy Linux forums got a working Puppy installation in 16MB RAM. For the following, TUI and GUI interfaces are in use. Heap shows less than 4 MB in use. No malicious software ever reported in an Oberon system. Regards, ... Peter E. = ETH Oberon / PC Native 05.01.2003 System.Watch MY: 172MB of 295MB free SYS: 60736KB of 100284KB free Heap has 28531KB of 32382KB free (25347KB contiguous) System.ShowTasks NetSystem PC = 13074 safe 6281 ready Oberon PC = 5021 safe 19008580 waiting 62918ms SaveScreen PC = 1118 unsafe 18948120 waiting 2458ms System PC = 19341 safe 0 ready NetSystem.Show Host: 172.24.1.2 / cantor.invalid / invalid Device0: open 00:20:AF:07:85:43 / FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF Route0: 172.24.1.2 / 255.255.255.0 / 172.24.1.1 - 0 arp DNS: 172.24.1.1* / xxx.82.1.1 / xxx.103.1.1 PCITools.Scan Bus 0, device 0, function 0: class/rev 0602, vendor/device 10395597, status/cmd 2207 Class: Bridge, Sub-class: Host bridge Vendor: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS], Device: 5597 [SiS5582] Bus 0, device 1, function 0: class/rev 06010001, vendor/device 10390008, status/cmd 0207 Class: Bridge, Sub-class: ISA bridge Vendor: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS], Device: 85C503/5513 Bus 0, device 1, function 1: class/rev 01018AD0, vendor/device 10395513, status/cmd 0007 Class: Mass storage controller, Sub-class: IDE interface Vendor: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS], Device: 5513 [IDE] IRQ11, INTA 8B I/O at E400 - E407 4B I/O at E000 - E003 8B I/O at D800 - D807 4B I/O at D400 - D403 16B I/O at D000 - D00F Bus 0, device 11, function 0: class/rev 0C031010, vendor/device 1045C861, status/cmd 02800017 Class: Serial bus controller, Sub-class: USB Controller, ProgIntfc: OHCI Vendor: OPTi Inc., Device: 82C861 IRQ10, INTA 4KB 32-bit memory at E680 - E6800FFF Bus 0, device 12, function 0: class/rev 0348, vendor/device 10024754, status/cmd 028000A3 Class: Display controller, Sub-class: VGA compatible controller, ProgIntfc: VGA Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc, Device: 3D Rage I/II 215GT [Mach64 GT] IRQ11, INTA 16MB 32-bit memory at E500 - E5FF 256B I/O at B800 - B8FF 5 devices found -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 12 Tel +13606390202 Bcc: peasthope at shaw.ca http://carnot.yi.org/ http://members.shaw.ca/peasthope/index.html#Itinerary -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122912 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 3:33 PM, peasth...@shaw.ca wrote: On 12/29/2012 dmccunney wrote: ... a chap on the Puppy Linux forums got a working Puppy installation in 16MB RAM. For the following, TUI and GUI interfaces are in use. Heap shows less than 4 MB in use. No malicious software ever reported in an Oberon system. I used to run a Windows hosted version of Oberon. It can be quite compact run native. The problem is what you *do* with it. Regards, ... Peter E. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122912 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] old machines
XP2 will run in as little as 100 mb. -- Master HTML5, CSS3, ASP.NET, MVC, AJAX, Knockout.js, Web API and much more. Get web development skills now with LearnDevNow - 350+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122812___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] old machines
On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 7:23 AM, kurt godel wb2...@gmail.com wrote: XP2 will run in as little as 100 mb. I'll assume you've done so and will take your word for it, but I'm assuming a flexible definition of run. How long did it take to boot? What could you do under it once it had? __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Master HTML5, CSS3, ASP.NET, MVC, AJAX, Knockout.js, Web API and much more. Get web development skills now with LearnDevNow - 350+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122812 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
