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Bunch of questions on FreeDos (memory managers) (Users)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 29.06.2010, 14:02

> > seriously, some things don't have proper hardware support in DOS
> > (ACPI, newer soundcards, file systems).
>
> Wrong. Who said this? Anyone tried to get them working instead of
>
>
> while (1) printf ("no support in DOS no need in DOS get Linux there is no
> BLOAT in Linux DOS doesn't need more than 4gb")
>

It's not easy to get everything working. We don't have any companies (AFAICT) that sponsor any DOS development. Moreso the number of users isn't as high as you-know-which-others.

> Also, filesystems don't need any hardware support, and the FAT crap
> mess is there, why? Because nobody ever tried to fix it, or even
> missdeclares it as a "feature" :-(
I misspoke, I didn't mean hardware, I meant the software doesn't have the proper hooks (often because it's too complex, undocumented, or nobody had the initiative).

> > If you ever install Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora,
>
> NEVER
They aren't that bad. Anyways, I was just listing the big names, the popular ones. (Some littler ones are better but have issues with DOSEMU, at least in my experience, see below.)

> > you can (from multiverse) download DOSEMU + FreeDOS, which in many
> > ways (but not all) is better than Vista's NTVDM (fast but limited) or
> > DOSBox (slow but good).
>
> No real mode, no Ring0, no physical memory, no bloat avoidance, ... :-(
Most people use Ring0 only for the kernel. No physical memory is due to pmode, meant to be safer to multitask. But bloat is indeed a problem for all modern software.

> > I'm not saying pure FreeDOS is bad, it's not. But some things will just
> > work better with some virtualization going on in the background.
>
> Examples + evidence please.
The P4 in the other room I've been using lately (since main previous P4 had/has minor HD and CD issues but still mostly works) runs XP in 128 MB (total, heh). Luckily, when my bro "restored" it, he left the restore (FAT) partition there, so I don't have to resize anything, and I can use FreeDOS natively. I even installed ZipSlack (11) for laughs. However, both of those OSes seem to make the fan run at full speed. It's not really that load, but it's definitely annoying, esp. since XP has some secret way of shutting it up at bootup. I looked at FDAPM, but nothing jumped out at me or worked. I blame ACPI, but who knows. (I did try a few other Linuxes, but maybe they were too old. For sure ZipSlack uses 2.4.x, but even 2.6.x probably doesn't fix the issue, I dunno. Also hard to find a decent Linux for 128 MB RAM. ZipSlack was just easy to install "for fun".)

Sadly, oddly, but I couldn't get DOSEMU to run on that computer under ZipSlack. I even downloaded a specific compile for Slackware 11, but it didn't work (weird errors, e.g. Z:\ wasn't read or something weird like that.) Honestly, it might be because DOSEMU needs 2.6.x nowadays (why??? argh ...). Or maybe I lacked some obvious dependency (since ZipSlack isn't a full install). I probably need to test full Slackware 11 under VirtualBox on my laptop to find out for sure.

Also the other "main" P4 has recently been booting only from USB (since XP borked itself there) running Puppy 4.3.1, but DOSEMU doesn't work there either ("Bus error"), which is a little less than obvious.

So whatever. That's my deal. You may not agree, and I certainly didn't plan any specific OS install, it's "just the way it is" (for now), and it's at least mostly functional. (I'm on my buggy Vista laptop now. Somehow I doubt latest Ubuntu LTS or similar fully works here, but I haven't tried.)

To be honest, what I really want is an ultra small, fairly modern Linux with DOSEMU. I should maybe install DeLi (from .ISO I grabbed a while back) as it had a port, but their website seems dead. :-( (But they used uClibc anyways, which is quirky. And I really didn't want the extra overhead of Unicode from 0.8.0.)

Long story short: it's not that I hate native DOS (obviously), but Intel HDA, EFI, AMD64, ACPI troubles, AHCI, SATA, USB, NTFS or ext[234] or ffs, BIOS bugs, multicore, floppy market dying, etc. don't help. :-/ I really don't think wanting to use DOSEMU full-time in the future (if necessary) is so horrible. Hardware just changes too fast (and not always for the better).

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