Hi Usul, > My main an interest is in designing writing a gui/desktop,
You could make OpenGEM or apps written for it better then. There are other GUIs which look more fancy but they often do not have enough software written for them, which makes improving GEM the better choice at the moment... > and in writing libraries that can be shared and used by > command line application as well as gui. DOS is not typically into using many common libraries. Probably because open source was not widespread in the time when DOS entered the world. However, one example of an interesting library would probably be something like KITTEN but written in Assembly language, maybe in NASM. That could be useful for translating more apps for more users. On the other hand, only frequently used apps with neither too many nor too few messages should get higher priority for translation ;-). Blair has been working on alternative C libraries, for example for almost-drop-in-LFN (long file name) support or for making compiled apps smaller by compiling with a smaller C library. I have the impression that this could use some careful proofreading to improve stability... > But I also have an interest device and similar programming. Certainly an interesting field :-). Lowlevel things which need help at the moment are probably: Fixing kernel issues, porting country sys support from 2037 to 2038 kernel and writing adapters to feed data from USB to KEYB / MKEYB and CUTEMOUSE, for example by implementing int 16 and int 15 PS/2 BIOS services in a driver which queries DOSUSB for input... I assume that DISPLAY and PRINTER could also use improvement. Drivers like HIMEM, HIMEMX, FDXMS, EMM386, JEMM386 are also not perfect yet, but hard to understand for new programmers. > I think FreeDos relies alot on closed software borrowed > from the abandoned and unsupported world. Why do you think that? Our whole CD/DVD infrastructure is open source, for example. Usage of all types of harddisk or flash storage is typically based on BIOS support which is neither abandoned nor unsupported. Network support is open source for older cards and either free closed source (from the card manufacturer) or nonexisting for newest... There are open source adapter drivers which let you use ODI and NDIS network drivers for DOS like packet network drivers for DOS. For general USB support, you can use the closed source DOSUSB stack by Georg Potthast, which comes with open source drivers for things such as USB printers. I think it would be nice to have open source Eltorito and ASPI disk drivers, you could ask Bart of nu2.nu whether he would give us the sources for Eltorito,sys - of course we can help him by cleaning up sources before publishing. Normal apps which could use help include for example: Fdisk, Undelete, Defrag and a Scandisk-based-on-dosfsck which Blair might be working on at the moment... Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
