Message-Id: <s479d5ee.025@calderauk.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 19:30:21 +0000
From: Matthias Paul <MPaul AT calderauk DOT com>
To: opendos AT delorie DOT com, paul-ma AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de
Subject: Re: questions about loader. 1/2
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<Sorry for any inconvenience, but it appears to me, that my reply of last
<week didn t made it through the mailing list. Though Joseph had also <answered in the meantime, my mail might contain some additional info 
<which could be useful to some of you. And since it s now already written, 
<let me just resent it...  
<At present I m fighting with my mail configuration, that s why I have to 
<split this file into two sections, send seperately... 
<
<Matthias

Hi Sam, hi all,

>Now how do I tell loader where the command.com shell is for the
>version of dos that gets loaded when I press f1,f2 etc.
This is not a matter of LOADER, but of the BIOS kernel (IBMBIO.COM 
for OpenDOS, and IO.SYS for MS-DOS) which parses CONFIG.SYS:

In CONFIG.SYS you usually have a SHELL= directive specifiying the
command interpreter to be used. If there is no SHELL= directive in
your files, you should add it, since you can avoid alot of trouble
using this directive.

>I do have loader working and the right dos comes up when I press the
>right f key.
That s good.

>But, the caldera dos says improper command com type the filename ...
>when I type c:\opendos\command.com it works great.
Of course, without any SHELL= directive (or with a wrong SHELL= directive), 
you usually fall back to IBMBIO.COM asking you for the correct path to the
command interpreter, since you cannot enter any commands without
a shell loaded. One major problem is that Windows95 COMMAND.COM is
not compatible with OpenDOS, and since it s usually located in 
C:\COMMAND.COM many people run into a crash without any SHELL=
directive in CONFIG.SYS. Hence, my IBMBIO ALPHA3 first asks for
the correct path to COMMAND.COM *before* attempting to load it. Unfortunately COD 7.01 and 7.02 B1 do it vice versa. However 7.02B2, (coming *really* soon), will use the latest SHELL= directive found in CONFIG.SYS as default (even in <F5> mode), and if none was specified, 
it will first ask for the correct path before trying to load c:\command.com. 

For OpenDOS your SHELL= line could look like this:

SHELL=c:\opendos\command.com c:\opendos /E:2048 /P:autodos7.bat

Using this, AUTODOS7.BAT will be executed instead of AUTOEXEC.BAT,
so that you can run different AUTOEXEC.BAT files for different configurations
or shells. 

Although you can merge OpenDOS  & MS-DOS  CONFIG.SYS and
AUTOEXEC.BAT files, I recommend to maintain them in seperate files. 

<part 2 following...

------------------------------------------------------------
Matthias Paul
eMail: <Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Web: http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html