did you know X was tabled in favor of something new? Wayland.
also, read here for info on competitors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Competitors
>________________________________
> From: Rugxulo <[email protected]>
>To: Technical discussion and questions for FreeDOS developers.
><[email protected]>
>Sent: Monday, May 6, 2013 9:57 AM
>Subject: Re: [Freedos-devel] FreeDOS limits! and FDNPKG v0.93a released
>
>
>Hi, sorry for late reply,
>
>On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 7:46 PM, Charles Belhumeur
><[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for the reply. Glad some of you see things in a way similar to I.
>> Remember the OS on the Amstrad Family Computer. I guess that's what I'd
>> like to see for a user interface for FreeDos. Perhaps a little more grown
>> up for modern Intel boxes. It was a small tidy GUI style OS.
>
>Would GEM (aka, OpenGEM) suffice? That's a good as a GUI as we've
>presently got in FreeDOS.
>
>> Task
>> switching but not multi-tasking. Not a lot of code or effort to create that
>> OS by modern standards. Although I think some of the features were in the
>> firmware on that box. Brings back the remark one of you made about roll
>> your own BIOS.
>
>Not sure how easy task switching would be. (Usually such a thing is
>associated with 286s.) Sure, it can be done (a la MS' DOSSHELL), but
>I'm not sure how feasible it is in FreeDOS stuff without some fancy
>work. Probably easier to use coroutines (or similar) in specific apps
>to simulate the same thing.
>
>There apparently was a GEM/XM (buggy, unfinished) beta (eventually
>GPL'd) for DOS that did task switching, but it wasn't ever finalized.
>Honestly, I'm out of the loop, but I don't know of anyone maintaining
>(any parts of) GEM anymore. At least I can't seem to find Shane's
>homepage(s) online anymore.
>
>> Ah its all coming back to me now. The Adam Home Computer, the Commodore
>> 6060 (BASIC OS like the HP Workstations). Man I spent a lot of my life
>> wrestling with flaky boxes and compilers. Hard to believe I got any other
>> work done at the various jobs I've worked at. Don't have a lot of patience
>> left for flaky overcomplicated overreaching OSs and apps.
>
>I don't know. Most Linux developers seem to rely on X11. FreeBSD at
>least comes without X pre-installed. But I'm not sure how much
>graphical stuff you can do without X11, outside of DOS + VESA,
>naturally. (Svgalib isn't very popular these days, and Linux
>framebuffer ... I'm out of the loop, so no idea.)
>
>> Could the leftover RAM on a modern box be used for a disk cache or virtual
>> drive? FreeDos can do this right. I used to create a virtual drive and
>> then copy my menu app binaries and directory to it at boot. Significantly
>> improved performance with a disk cache as well on my old 12 MHz 286.
>
>I don't know of any decent 286 disk caches for FreeDOS, but yes, many
>of us use things like Jack's (386+) UIDE for UDMA and disk caching, as
>well as a RAM driver for (faster reading/writing of) temporary files.
>Yes, even on modern overpowered machines, it can speed things up a
>lot.
>
>> Just an example of how unused RAM can be used creatively to improve
>> performance.
>> There's likely more. Could you write a ghost BIOS, copy it to RAM and then
>> redirect BIOS calls to it? Maybe not all the BIOS calls, just the required
>> ones. Writing BIOSs used to a bit of voodoo and a black art dealing with
>> hardware timing and such.
>
>Not a lot of people want to write their own BIOSes. I don't (and
>couldn't if I tried). So I think that option is probably unlikely to
>be practical, though indeed a very few have tried and succeeded (in
>limited form) over the years, e.g. monahan dude, SeaBIOS, Coreboot, or
>whatever.
>
>> Oh wait before I go, there's good reasons you can't divy up gene sequence
>> files into smaller chunks. Each segment would need header with even more
>> info than the original header. Bioinformatics is kind of messed up now with
>> all the wankers focused on the IT and not the biology. All kinds of
>> needless screwing with file formats, file structures, compression and so on.
>> (Some wanker got into the game way way way back in the day and we've been
>> stuck with that Big Endian Small Endian crap ever since.)
>
>I refuse to believe you couldn't live with 2 GB files. :-) But
>what do I know. Just use whatever works, whatever's at hand. I don't
>expect FreeDOS to cover everyone's need, but it's quite good at what
>it does (and then some, thanks to some very cool developers and
>volunteers).
>
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