Re: [Freedos-user] Eric Auer's "A Fantasy of a future..."

[Bernd B. <bb...@ho...>]

Op 14-4-2010 9:38, Michael C. Robinson schreef:
> I went by nute on the ReactOS forums.  Look and you can see how dicey
> things got.
>    
Ah I remember reading those threads you started, with asking over and 
over again whenever a new/next release would come out. They're releasing 
more often than FreeDOS at least.
I think they got more people working on it. The thing the FreeDOS 
distribution needs is a better installer program (requires real 
programming), updated packages (boring as hell, I don't even like to put 
research into commandline options to archivers anymore nowadays) and 
bugfixing.

Anyway, ReactOS has multiple near-daily built ISO9660 cd-image files 
available which you can test in an emulator. Sadly they only allow 
installation from CDROM yet still, no USB, harddisk or network 
installation options yet. A matter of priority and programming time I guess.
Their releases feature a LiveCD, an installation CD with trunk builds 
and something called ARWINSS, which would be some kind of use of WINE 
(same way of usage as Linux does). This latest thing is claimed to be 
best chance to get ReactOS in a usable state.
Anyway, we're on a FreeDOS development mailinglist.

I'll save my efforts of dualbooting FreeDOS and ReactOS for whenever I 
got more time off work and get bored enough to actually spend time on 
FreeDOS.
Lack of opensource ASPI driver and packet drivers for recent network 
cards is demotivating if you want to try to get anything done :)
Then again, something like 
http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=7843  is very 
motivating (general BIOS flashing program FLASHROM ported from 
Coreboot/Linux to DOS, seems UPX-compressible but might be dangerous)
Same for the opensource ELTORITO driver.

> I would like a direct replacement for Windows 98SE which supports a lot
> of games and other software that is now orphanware.  There is hardware
> for Windows 9x that doesn't work on NT based versions of Windows.  I
> realize that this is not a Freedos 1.1 thing or potentially even a
> Freedos 3.0 thing.  An alternative is to revive Freedos 32 and develop
> a simple GUI for it that will attract open source programmers.
>    

Not worthwile I guess, use Windows98. There's not even a replacement yet 
for Win3.1