Message-Id: <200104191142.HAA10143@delorie.com> Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 13:43:02 +0200 To: opendos AT delorie DOT com From: florianx Subject: RE: DOS issues #1 Organization: Club Dr-DOS www.drdos.org X-Mailer: Opera 5.10 build 902 X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Hi! >> 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 ... Mh...the source can be published...if a binary...I don't know.... > > 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. I don't think, that the information is so bad. Yes, it is mostly for OEMs, but also for desktop it is useful. > > Furthermore, there is no information about the origins > of ROM-DOS ... but all the clues indicate that this is > actually "our old friend" ;-) M$-DOS !!! From this fact > (?), we can deduce the following : They said on their web page, that they developed all of the stuff. I also don't think, that they would have such nice features, if they would have bought M$-DOS. > 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". DPMS is a very nice feature...but a OS will never have all features it could have :) >> >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. The only problem is, that it only supports 64MB (I read, so maybe i am wrong). > > 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 ... I think, DOS needs a taskmanager, why? Most people like it and who of the windows user would ever use DOS without Taskmanager? Ok...I know... ;) > > 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? Some people have said, that the source code is lost etc. I also think, that we should contact the company, but i haven't found any contact address where I got answerd. bye, flox