[PLUG] Freedos-user - What do you need from Windows world...

[Michael Robinson]

On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 00:22 +0200, Eric Auer wrote:
> Hi Michael,
> 
> > Concerning ReactOS, please, it is only a hobby project for a few
> > developers who have no idea when it will come out of Alpha status.
> 
> FreeDOS is also only a hobby project for a few developers,
> in the way that nobody is paid for writing FreeDOS...

So what, that doesn't mean that Freedos is a project that it's
developers have no intention of advancing.  With ReactOS, I get 
the impression that there is low morale or something and huge 
problems.  That doesn't seem to be the case, at least not yet, 
with Freedos.

> > I've tried all the remakes of the gaming engine for Linux, they were
> > abandoned and don't work.(For Westwood Command and Conquer Red Alert I)
> 
> You can run the Windows versions in Linux directly, using Wine.

I tried that, I couldn't get it to work after I got it to install to a
bottle.

> Even a project to create a free set of replacement updates for say
> Windows 3.x or Windows 9x would be appropriate.
> 
> The people who write ReactOS had the idea that until they would
> be done, Win9x would be too outdated, I think, and this is
> probably why they made a replacement for NT/2000 instead...

They haven't completed a replacement for NT/2000/XP/etcetera.
First off, ReactOS has a moving target for what it is supposed
to be like.  Second off, it is probably easier to release bug 
fixes for an old operating system than it is to clone a new 
one from a few limited specifications.  Calling ReactOS anything
at this point and using it in an argument against working on a
GUI for Freedos that could partially replace the old dos based
versions of Windows is totally unfair.  You are lucky these days
if ReactOS works at all on your hardware and even under vmware 
it is unstable.  At least opengem, which is a start frankly,
works. It doesn't run Firefox, but it works.

> The list idea is still a good idea even if people want to argue with
> me that Blake Stone and W3D work in Freedos.
> 
> What do you think about the USB keyb theory, could that be the problem?
> Can you check whether PS/2 keyboards work better?

I think my version of W3D, version 1.1, doesn't work with Freedos.
I went and downloaded a new copy from dosgamesarchive and lo and
behold it was version 1.4.  1.4 starts up and works just
fine under Freedos, although the sound seems to lag as I play.  
Part of the problem may be my tar archive of 1.1 where arachne 
doesn't seem to handle downloading tar archives properly.  
Ultimately, I ended up using firefox under 98 to download a 
new copy and I unzipped it with 7zip.

As far as Blake Stone, I haven't checked if that works since my
486 running Freedos died.

> > It will create a picture of what dos based Windows software
> > people want and maybe just maybe something can be cloned or 
> > ported
> 
> Sounds interesting, but then, porting to GEM would be like
> reinventing the wheel now that Wine already supports the
> original Windows versions of many apps and now that those
> of the apps which are open source also have Linux versions.

Well, those who run Freedos often do not or cannot run Linux.  
It is as bad to tell people who want to run dos that they need 
to run Linux as it is to tell them that they need to run 
Windows.  WINE is not an option under dos.  I have crossover 
Linux and it is not a panacea for every Windows program that 
I don't want to boot Windows for.  Many programs install 
with crossover linux, but they run so poorly that they aren't
usable.

> Love to have a Freedos compatible gui that runs Firefox.
> I would say Linux - it runs dosemu where freedos runs fast :-)
Only if you are on a computer that is fast enough to run 
Freedos fast under emulation.  For simplicity sake, there 
are a lot of reasons to avoid emulation altogether.  
DOSEMU is not the easiest project to work with.  Straight
dos is beautifully simple, if I want to run Linux I'll run
Linux.

> runs in Linux and that it runs in Windows, but if it would 
> run in Freedos on a machine that can't run modern Linux or 
> modern Windows, that might be useful to someone.

> I tried several browsers for Linux and opened the FreeDOS
> homepage with them... The memory usage was: 150 MB, 32 MB,
> 12 MB, 120 MB, 8 MB, 100 MB and 8 MB respectively, but all
> browsers with RAM usage below 20 MB were text based only.
> Smallest RAM usage graphical browser was DILLO  at 32 MB.
> Maybe you can have a look at that instead of Firefox :-).

I know about Dillo.  It has some of the same problems 
that Arachne has.  No, I need to run firefox because 
there is a filtering plug-in for it where even the 
2.x versions are usable.  My PIII running 98SE can run 
Firefox 2.x no problem, but 98SE is a proprietary 
unsupported bloated mess.  Now, my PIII is slow but it 
has more than 256 megs of ram so ram usage is not an 
issue so much as processor speed.

I have a PIII that I don't particularly want to run a 
modern Linux on as it isn't even 1.2 GHZ, the minimum 
to run Dirk Dashing secret Agent under Linux.  Why 
Disk Dashing needs a processor that fast is another 
issue for another day.

Well, there are plenty of PIII's out there that one 
doesn't want to run a modern Linux on which are more 
than capable of running Firefox 2.x under Windows 98SE.  
It seems it should be possible to build something that 
is lighter than 98SE that can support Firefox on top of 
Freedos.  That would save the trouble of messing with
DOSEMU and the trouble of rebooting to get into 98SE.

Could X Windows run on top of Freedos?
Could Freedos be an X client?  This would relieve
the Freedos box of having to be "powerful enough"
to run firefox.  The X server would have to be 
powerful enough, but the Freedos client box would 
only have to be capable of drawing what the server
serves up to it.

A lite version of Linux that runs from the Freedos
C:> prompt with X Windows and Firefox is another 
possible option.  I'm thinking something slightly
better than TWM, tab window manager, might do the
trick for a light window manager.

There are versions of Linux that run on top of dos,
but I don't know what the status of them is today.

I think a list of what people lose if they can't run
Windows on top of Freedos could be useful.  For some
things on the list, there might be substitutes.  For
other things, replacing Windows to some degree might
make sense ( maybe with an X Windows client ).