Mail Archives: opendos/2001/10/30/08:33:18
On 2001-10-29, Jim Stevenson wrote:
> What is the difference between rx and free dos?
Everything - except for the fact that both are open sourced,
and both are hosted at http://www.freedos.org.
Api Software´s RxDOS is a DOS work-alike developed by
Mike Podanoffsky (not Mark, sorry for my confusion) with
some focus on real-time applications in mind and consists
of a kernel and a rudimentary shell, no utilities. AFAIK,
recent versions support long filenames (and FAT32???), but
I have no personal experience with this DOS issue. It does
not implement all DOS functions and I assume that it is by
far not as DOS compatible as DR-DOS is.
Most parts of FreeDOS (current version is Beta 7) are written
in C to provide some form of platform independence. However,
this might have made sense for a simple DOS API work-alike
for specialized embedded systems applications which was the
original intention for the predecessor of the FreeDOS kernel,
DOS-C. But IMHO it does not make sense for a general purpose
DOS, which must run /existing/ DOS applications of the last
two decades. Without virtualization, these applications will
only work on industry standard PC architecture machines, anyway,
so programming the kernel in C has significant disadvantages.
Although the FreeDOS kernel does not implement all DOS functions
yet, it already consumes more memory than a kernel written in
assembler and aggressively optimized for the x86 target
platform (like the DR-DOS kernel).
FreeDOS has made great progress during the past months,
but compatibility and stability is still limited and in no
way comparable with DR-DOS yet. DOS may be a seemingly trivial
operating system by today standards, but for its memory size
it has an impressive complexity, especially because of the
existance of many undocumented aspects, which make it so
difficult to develop a 100% compatible solution and add
enhancements without breaking some applications.
FreeDOS comes with many utilities from various origins, some
few are already very powerful and mature (for example Brian
E. Reifsnyder´s FDISK), but I´m afraid, most tools are still
in their very early stages and don´t meet professional level
software standards yet.
However, if you can live with the rather inhomogene design
of the various tools, and are not afraid of kernel bugs and
the often different behaviour compared to MS-DOS/PC DOS or
DR-DOS, then give FreeDOS a try. Some kernels already provide
limited support for FAT32. Mind, that the bugs can only
be squashed when people are /using/ the kernel and report
the problems. Nothing for production systems, though...
In my personal opinion, DR-DOS would be a much better thing
to start with, but in the current situation FreeDOS has one
big advantage: It is still being actively developed and
supported, so it has a future, while DR-DOS has not unless
Lineo would develop a new sense of responsibility and have
an understanding in how the model works and publish the
sources, so that we can take over development and - I´m sure -
could soon provide very significantly enhanced source and
binary distributions... It´s a real pity...
Matthias
--
Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany
<mailto:Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>; <mailto:mpaul AT drdos DOT org>
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org
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