Message-ID: <000601bd54d0$bb7ffd60$b37128c3@highscreen>
From: "Ben A L Jemmett" <ben DOT jemmett AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk>
To: "Delorie List" <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: Support for new filesystems: Fat32, ext2, etc.
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 1998 13:34:43 -0000
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Precedence: bulk


>As I understand people considering an upgrade to the newest
>version of Windoze 95 are warned that installing Fat32 as
>the filesystem in place of VFat makes it impossible to use
>prior versions of DOS.  I presume this is because old DOS
>versions will not understand FAT32.  Is DR-DOS 7.x compatible
>with the FAT32 system or only VFAT with lfn?
>
If memory serves, the VFAT is supported by the LFN support, whereas the
FAT32
is not supported at the moment by Caldera's official releases of the DR-DOS
kernel and tools.  FAT32 may have been added by someone else with an add-on
driver - I seem to remember reading something about this, but I am probably
wrong. ;-)

>Back when I more comprehensive release of DOS source code
>was anticipated there was a lot of discussion about adding
>support for non-DOS filesystems particularly the ext2 format
>standard to Linux.  Given that Linux is a large portion of
>Caldera's business is there any plan to add support for ext2
>to DR-DOS in the future.
A while back on either this list or caldera-opendos AT rim DOT caldera DOT com there
was a discussion about adding filesystems to DR-DOS. ext2fs did pop up as
one of the more widely supported options, along with HPFS.  I think the
discussion was about supporting new filesystem type via an add-on driver or
a driver compiled into the kernel, both of which would support modular
filesystem types.


>Is there any chance of more source seeing the light of day
>on the Net once it is freed from Novell's version control?
>To what extent is Caldera worried that OEMs will not
>register if the source is widely available?  Maybe if the
>source for taskmgr was released it could be made more stable?
>
I do remember that quite a few people on both this and the rim.caldera list
were disappointed when Caldera announced that the OpenDOS 7.01 kernel was
the only code to be released (this is the one on the website now).
Personally, I was waiting for TaskMgr and ViewMAX/GEM to be released as
source.

Regards,
Ben Jemmett