From: dfremlin AT facstaff DOT wisc DOT edu (John Fremlin)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: DJGPP 2.01 + OpenDOS = total clusterfuck
Date: 6 May 1997 02:54:41 GMT
Organization: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Lines: 69
Message-ID: <5km6hh$4cb4@news.doit.wisc.edu>
References: <5kd09q$elr$1 AT NNTP DOT MsState DOT Edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: f180-074.net.wisc.edu
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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In article <5kd09q$elr$1 AT NNTP DOT MsState DOT Edu>,
oml1 AT Ra DOT MsState DOT Edu (Owen LaGarde) posted:
>    I've been coding under a variety of OSs for quite some time, and
>just recently decided to try djgpp 2.01 ... unfortunately, I was also
>trying out Caldera's OpenDOS as well.  I have truly never seen a bigger
>mess than this:  with a 486DX4/100-16M station, 6M temp and 4M swap,
>I dropped in grx20 off the simtel dist site (djgpp/v2tk/grx20.zip).
>It built with no evident problems, but upon experimenting, I found that
>running ANY executable corrupted seemingly random high-mem blocks, usually
         ^^^        
        Any GRX+DJGPP executable? Or any DJGPP executable?
        Or any executable?

>resulting in the top shell crapping out.  It's so interesting to follow
>installation instruction to the letter only to see the following:
>
>   1) <run some djgpp-produced exe>
>   2) program exits (cleanly?)
>   3) that's odd, everything's "file not found"... oh, the path is clobbered

[snip: "nothing works", disk screwed up problems]

>   14) partition table for volume containing djgpp root is corrupted
>   15) fdisk, reboot, format, long re-install..., boot boot boot boot boot

Sounds pretty much like a virus to me.

>
>What fresh hell is this?!?  I'll try PC DOS 6.2 when I get a chance after
>work, but has anyone seen anything even remotely like this, or had any
>success with 2.01 and OpenDOS?

Yes. I ran OpenDos+DJGPP on my computer (386, 4MB) just fine. I
turned off all DPMI support, multitasking and taskswitching (but
with DPMS loaded) and had no problems, but I've never used GRX.

Now I use a special configuration for DJGPP, because it was running
so sllloowww (harddisk paging all the time)

The OpenDos EMM386 does not detect which memory it can write to and
which it can't. I had some horrible, horrible crashes until I
told it to exclude F000-FFFF.

Also you can tell EMM386 to let programs use VRAM to store data.
As soon as you start playing with graphics then VRAM gets used to
store two things - what's on the screen and program data. EMM386
has always given me a warning but I've never tried it with DJGPP
graphics progs (let alone GRX+DJGPP graphics progs, GRX is a
graphics library, right?).


>   Owen LaGarde
>.

Otherwise this sounds exactly like a virus. Get a virus scanner
from somewhere (SimTel. I can't remember any scanner URLs)

If you're sure you don't have a virus then boot clean
(press F5 during boot at the "Starting DOS. . ." message),
set your PATH and tell DJGPP where to find DJGPP.ENV, etc. and
everything should work fine.

-- 
John Fremlin (dfremlin AT facstaff DOT wisc DOT edu)
             (fremdh AT essex DOT ac DOT uk)

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.