Message-ID: <01FD6EC775C6D4119CDF0090273F74A4022035@emwatent02.meters.com.au>
From: "da Silva, Joe" <Joe DOT daSilva AT emailmetering DOT com>
To: "'opendos AT delorie DOT com'" <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: RE: DOS issues #1
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 18:43:38 +1000
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Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com

Thanks, Florian.

See below ...

Joe.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	florianx [SMTP:dos DOT fire AT aon DOT at]
> Sent:	Wednesday, 11 April 2001 18:49
> To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com
> Subject:	Re: Power consumption #1, DOS issues (was Power measurement)
> 
> Hi!
> 
> >Firstly, do you have some idea of how likely it is, that Lineo
> >(Caldera) will release DR-DOS as open-source, and in what
> >time-frame?
> 
> Mh...not so fast, they cannot, because of their DOS-competitors and
> because
> of the OEMs....
> 
	[da Silva, Joe]  

	Hmmm ... Well, that's not so bad (even if they are only
	interested in OEM applications), provided that :

	1. They apply sufficient resources to fix the bugs
	    and complete the unfinished work.
	2. They make updates of this stuff available for ALL existing
	    users (they haven't provided an update since V7.02).

> >
> >Have the various problems with EMM386.EXE been resolved, in
> >the meantime? Eg. are there still DPMI problems with DJGPP,
> >or VCPI problems with Causeway and others?
> 
> Ask Matthias ;))
> 
> >
> >How "close" is the code to supporting LBA, FAT32 and LFN stuff
> >properly?
> 
> BTW: I read, that Lineo wrote a tool to support Win9x on top of Dr-DOS
> 7.03,
> it is somewhere
> avaiable or hasn't it been released?
> 
> >
> >Are there any M$ patent problems with using FAT32 and LFN
> >together? If so, would the US government department which is
> >pursuing M$ for anti-trust, help to revoke such a patent? Why
> >does the patent office grant patents for stuff that is clearly not
> >innovative, anyway???
> 
> In an open source program no problem. BTW: Datalight ROM-DOS also supports
> FAT32 and LFN, so that
> shouldn't be that problem.
> 
	[da Silva, Joe]  

	Are you sure about that open-source bit? For instance,
	InfoZIP and Ghostscript have both deleted support for
	LZW decompression, because of the Unisys patent ...

	As for Datalight ROM-DOS, their web site does not
	provide a lot of information. However, it seems fairly
	clear that this is only available for OEMs.

	Furthermore, there is no information about the origins
	of ROM-DOS ... but all the clues indicate that this is
	actually "our old friend" ;-) M$-DOS !!! From this fact
	(?), we can deduce the following :

	1. Most of us have already got the equivalent of ROM-
	    -DOS 7.1 ... as Windoze 95B or 98 (don't know about
	    M$W-ME ... perhaps that's 7.2?).
	2. This does not provide as much free conventional
	    memory as DR-DOS 7.0X, partly because the
	    kernel is very large, partly because it doesn't have
	    the DPMS "goodies".
	3. All versions of M$-DOS and PC-DOS I have tried
	    (up to 6.22, IIRC) have a bug in the timekeeping
	    stuff, such that if left at the DOS prompt or within
	    an application for more than 24h, they sometimes
	    forget to update the calendar. I haven't tried this
	    with M$-DOS 7.XX, so it's slightly possible they
	    fixed this - if not, then this can be a problem for
	    embedded applications.

> >
> >Is Free-DOS any good? How advanced is it on these issues?
> 
> 
> FreeDOS will (I think) never have such a good memory manager, Taskmanager
> and DPMS server. DPMI, yes....there  are many avaiable :)
> 
	[da Silva, Joe]  

	We have previously established that the Novell and
	OpenDOS 7.01 DPMS servers can be supplied free
	with DPMS clients, so that may solve one problem.

	As for Taskmanager, all this ever did for me was
	lock-up the PC, so I wouldn't miss this too much. :-/
	Well ... as a task switcher it seems stable - it's just
	the multi-tasking that has never worked for me ...

	WRT a memory manager - I wonder, what's the status
	of QEMM ? If this is a discontinued product, perhaps
	the copyright owners (Quarterdeck?) could be persuaded
	to release it as "freeware" or even "open-source". Would
	this benefit FreeDOS for memory management?

	Anyway, they're just some thoughts about FreeDOS ...

> Bye, Florian
>