Mail Archives: opendos/2000/03/14/13:37:23
On Thu, 09 Mar 2000 19:49:12 Charles Dye wrote:
> Has anyone else found all the older kernels to be completely
> munged? It looks to me like everything pre-Novell-7 has been
> FTPed in text (not binary) mode. At any rate, I've never
> managed to get any of them to work.
Today seems to be "day of confirmation". Yes, I ran into the same
problems, when I downloaded this stuff a while ago. Just yesterday
I downloaded it again, just to make sure this wasn t a transmission
error. The .ZIP archives are broken, and even if you can extract
the files, they won t be bootable. Seems they have been uploaded
in ASCII mode or something like that...
Also, the archive named DR DOS 3.41B (or was it T???) actually
seems to be either some incarnation of the rumored DR DOS 3.42,
or am early beta of DR DOS 5.0 Leopard .
However, I do have at least some of these DOS issues from other
sources, including (if I remember correct right from the memory)
a full file set of DOS Plus 1.2, DR DOS 3.31, 3.35 (from various
OEMs), various issues of DR DOS 3.41, 5.0, 6.0 (including most of
the patches), various issues of DR PalmDOS, DR DOS Panther ,
Novell DOS (updates 4-9 are missing from by backups, though),
NetWare Lite, Personal NetWare, and probably all the OpenDOS 7.01,
7.02 Betas, DR-OpenDOS 7.02, DR-DOS 7.02, and finally 7.03 issues
and updates.
My personal much enhanced issues of the kernel, COMMAND, FDISK,
FORMAT, SYS, LOADER, DISKCOPY, DISKCOMP, DOSKEY, NLSFUNC, EGA,
COUNTRY, DISPLAY, NWCDEX, and many more, are feverishly waiting for
Lineo to hopefully release DR-DOS under GPL (or something similar)
so that the net community can ramp up new DOS desktop development
for better migration and integration into a Linux and Win9x world.
If this might become truth, I hope the potential free DR-DOS and
existing FreeDOS developers will either team-up in friendship or
at least will help each other in technology and resource exchange.
(Although my personal favorite would remain DR-DOS, as it s much
advanced in technology and proven on a multi-million installed base.)
We would only need around 10-20 active experienced developers to
have the ultimative multi-purpose DOS within a year, I m sure.
BTW. There have been many queries about Caldera s/Lineo s FAT32
support. In the current issue of the German computer magazine c t
(06/2000), they compare variour Crash Recovery Tools developed
by Ontrack, Powerquest, and others. What they all have in common,
is that they use DR-DOS to boot their stuff. At least the Ontrack
product (free evaluation download at www.ontrack.com) includes
the DRFAT32.SYS/.EXE drivers to access FAT32 partitions via the
redirector interface. So, if you want to have a look, this is
where to go to... ;-)
For an overview of all the available options of the DRFAT32.SYS driver
(to be loaded in CONFIG.SYS) just give it an invalid parameter line so
that the driver shows its internal help screen, or have a look
at the end of the binary in the file viewer like inside the NC.
DRFAT32.SYS supports CHS and LBA access, however, the DRFAT32.EXE
redirector (to be loaded in AUTOEXEC.BAT similar to NWCDEX) has some
limitations with partitions beyond 8 GB, and unfortunately DPMS and
EMS support are disabled in this release...
The advantages of the redirector approach are, that people without
FAT32 drives are happily off with a small unbloated kernel, that
virus contamination etc. of the FAT32 partition is much more
difficult as the partition can be write-protected, that this solution
works with *any* DOS 3.3+ (and DR DOS 5.0+), as long as run on a 386+.
And it is compatible with all old DOS disk tools not knowing of
MS-DOS 7.10+ FAT32 changes in the kernel. Of course, this also has
disadvantages: You cannot boot DR-DOS off a FAT32 drive, if loaded
it consumes more memory than a native solution, and it s slower...
Matthias
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Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany
eMail: <Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Web : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html
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