Q: What are the minimum system requirements for using DJGPP?
Q: Will DJGPP run on my brand-new Acme i986DX7/900 PC with a SCSI-III
10-Terabyte disk drive under MulticOS/42 v7.99 operating system?
A: DJGPP requires at least 386SX CPU and between 15 and 35 MB of free disk space (see more details on this below), including space for the software installation and some swap space. A minimum of 64K of free system memory is enough for DJGPP to run with CWSDPMI as your DPMI host (most other DPMI hosts will require much more), but at least 4MB of free extended RAM is recommended for reasonably fast compilation of large source files (8MB for compiling large C++ programs); you might see painfully slow compiles for large sources if you don't have at least that much. If your machine doesn't have a numeric co-processor, you will need to install an emulator to run floating-point code (DJGPP provides such an emulator) or link your applications with a special emulator library (also provided with DJGPP).
DJGPP requires MS-DOS version 3.1 or later; any other operating system is OK if it includes a DPMI server and supports some kind of "DOS box". Environments known to run DJGPP besides native DOS: Windows 3.1 & 3.11 DOS box, OS/2 (including Warp) DOS box, Windows 9X/DOS 7, Windows NT (on Intel CPUs), Novell NWDOS 7, FreeDOS and Caldera's DR-DOS (but several people have found the DPMI services of NWDOS and early versions of Caldera's DR-DOS to be incompatible with DJGPP, so they might need to be turned off and CWSDPMI used instead), and Linux DOSEmu environment.
Note that somebody reported that running Caldera's DR-DOS 7.03 with TaskManager enabled causes redirection of standard error stream to not work. In particular, RHIDE cannot display the compilation errors printed by the compiler. A work-around is to turn TaskManager off when compiling.
One user of Caldera's DR-DOS found that using their virtual disk drive,
VDISK.SYS, caused strange crashes in DJGPP programs, unless the
memory manager is Caldera's EMM386 (as opposed to
HIMEM).
Other known problems with latest versions of Caldera's DR-DOS are that Ctrl-<C> and Ctrl-<BREAK> crash the system or require cold reboot; and there are some problems with programs that use the linear frame buffer under VESA 2, and with certain games.