Message-ID: <20000702182917.1438.qmail@nw178.netaddress.usa.net> Date: 2 Jul 00 12:29:17 MDT From: Joseph Morris To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: [NOVELL DR-DOS] X-Mailer: USANET web-mailer (34FM1.5.01) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id OAA31533 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com > Bob Maloney wrote: > > I now run the last version of DR-DOS issued by NOVELL (version > 7.0?). I believe I also have applied all the updates issued by Novell. > I am happy with DR-DOS. > > Is there any reason to consider upgrading to the Caldera version or > to PTS-DOS or to OPENDOS or to any other DOS? > > bobm OpenDOS is one step back from the version you're using, because Novell mislaid the source for that version, until late 97/early 98 when 7.02 was released. There is NO reason to go back to 7.01. 7.02 has improvements over the version you're using, mainly the addition of HIFILES= HIBUFFERS= HILASTDRIVE and HIFCBS ..this will help cut back the memeory requirements. Also there are bugfixes in the kernel which allow it to work with the Iomega ZIPtools. In previous versions it hung the system when you ran the GUI tools. At least, I -think- it was 7.02. It might have been 7.03.. If you run on a fast machine, >300Mhz, various utilities will break down because of a bug in the Borland C libraries. In 7.03 these have been recompiled with a fixed version of the library and they will not crash on fast machines anymore. 7.03 has the first version of EMM386 that will work properly with DPMI programs such as DOOM and Quake.. before you had to dick around with EMM386 PIC=ON before DOOM, and EMM386 PIC=OFF before Quake. In 7.03 use the DPMI server provided and you can multitask modern DOS programs, which are nearly all DPMI-based. The DPMI server in 7.03 does not support VESA 2, it will reboot the machine instead. This was to be fixed in 7.04 or 7.10, but it never happened :-( PTS-DOS is totally unrelated to DRDOS. I'm not sure of it's origin, it might have been cross-licenesed from MS in the distant past, or it might have been written from scratch. It supports the HIFILES extensions added in DR-DOS 7.02 (the idea was poached from PTS-DOS) and more recent versions have support for FAT/32, but apparently not LBA (disks larger than 8.4 gigabytes), and they have a bug which prevents you from being able to play music CDs, from what I hear. I found the DIR command to be lacking personally, but that's just my opinion. I'd recommend downloading the demo from PTS or Paragon. ____________________________________________________________________ Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1