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Calum:
well a couple of clickthroughs from a link avello posted and
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/161.html

which is a lot less promising than it looks. FreeDOS version and hardware are radically different from what i hope to use, but i will keep looking.

probably won't be doing this till next month after my next assignment's in.

edit: http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/200.html
bugger! i don't fulfill criteria number 1!

[ September 04, 2003: Message edited by: Calum ]

Calum:
ok, what's the deal with DR-DOS anyway?
i can't figure it out from here:
http://drdos.com/products.html

i got a full download of DR-DOS 7.03 and there was source code too for free, so why are they charging?

anybody know how to find out the licence for DR-DOS? i haven't looked at the disks i now have of DR-DOS too carefully yet so maybe the licence is on them...

perhaps i will be using dr-dos after all depending on how open source it turns out to be and how incompatible freeDOS turns out to be.

mobrien_12:

quote:Originally posted by Calum:


and do these memory managers have to be obtained separately or are they customarily part of the OS?
what's usual procedure for using them if one wants to run programs that need one and programs that need the other?

also the fact of me using FreeDOS may add a new dimension since it is a newer DOS and is written from scratch, it may know how to use more memory than 640k (what idiot thought that would be sufficient) and may not need a memory manager, but will programs which expect a memory manager be able to run on it? will FreeDOS have some interface to those programs which make them all think they are using their favourite memory manager?
i don't know.
in fact i still know nothing about them!    
--- End quote ---

 
The memory managers I mention are specifically part of the freeDOS project and are included with the distributions.  They are described in the included freedos help files.  They must be loaded in the config.sys file, so the mutual exclusivity is a problem:  You must edit config.sys and reboot to change the extended memory manager.  You have the option of using non-FreeDOS memory managers such as the one from MSDOS or a 3rd party memory manager.

FreeDOS is a 16bit operating system.  Like MSDOS, PCDOS, DRDOS, it is limited by 640k conventional memory.  However, like the other DOS, it can use extended memory managers to use higher RAM.  Like the other DOS systems, it can run 32 bit DOS programs to use all computer memory (SEAL is an example of this).

Calum:
hmm, i wonder if there's some DOS howto archive i can look this up at. the DOS stuff on the net seems to be laid out totally differently from the linux stuff...

re: Qube screenies:

http://freshmeat.net/screenshots/20535/

http://www.sourtimes.org/coders/qube.png

that second one looks nothing like what i had, in fact it looks like an old fvwm or xfce screenshot to be honest.

Xeen:
With all the comments made in this thread about the Windows registry, I thought I would add my comment about it:

The Windows registry is the most stupid thing I've ever seen.
Before the registry became a very common thing to mess around with (which happened soon after Win95 and even more with Win98), the way to make programs run automatically upon logon was to put them in the Start Menu\Startup folder. Simple! But with the registry came a key called RUN. Whatever commands you put in run will run automatically when you logon to Windows.  I suspect this was done to give people less control over what is started when they turn on the computer and boot to Windows. Today, 95% of the software that makes itself run automatically upon logon uses the Run key in the registry. The startup folders in the Start Menu are barely used by anyone anymore. Not only does this give you less control over YOUR OWN computer, but also contributes to bloat which in turn contributes to system slowdown.

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