Hi :-) > In my opinion historical applications should be advantage for intel devices > not weight for free dos. If NORTON COMMANDER is the condition lets to > rewrite it to c :-)
There already are a few nice free file managers, including clones of popular NC and XTree styles, so that would be easy... > There are new platforms like raspberry with ARM processor and others. Why > not to port free dos also to them? Free dos would be the first OS available > for such new computers. As with Android smartphones, Linux is already a popular OS for those ARM platforms. Often, they have 100s of MB of RAM and 2 or more CPU cores. The latter could not be used by DOS yet... Another "challenging thought": Rayer has shown with www.rayer.g6.cz/romos/romose.htm that it is possible to put FreeDOS kernel a minimalist alternative to command.com in only 64 kB flash. This is almost in range of Arduino-style systems which of course very often always lack graphical or even text-only displays because people simply control some hardware with them and connect to a "big" PC to reprogram the Arduino. Still, if you see what MenuetOS can do in 1-2 MB disk space... There even is a DOSBOX port for it so you can run both DOS and a multitasking, GUI, networked OS with a tiny amount of disk space... So who knows, maybe you CAN actually find systems which are "as weak as a C64" and create stronger possibilities by installing a stripped down (!!) version of a FreeDOS port on them? > Ok, for porting possibility it will be needed: > 1) To have good cross platform compiler > 2) To develop freedos_lib_c supporting networking, other filesystems > and so on. IMHO multi processing is not so interesting feature for dos. A good moment for me to nag about "modern OS" C and networking libraries. Look at MatrixSSL, SharkSSL, WolfSSL and CyaSSL: They all use just a few 10 kB to support many popular SSL aspects while OpenSSL libssl + libcrypto takes 350+1700 kilobytes. Why that bloat? And why do so many apps still only support compilation for OpenSSL? There are some minimalist C libraries without MMU support such as uClib and small C libraries like egclib - discontinued by making glibc smaller and more modular, dietlibc, musl (with C99, POSIX2008 and some more) and others, see this comparison: http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html You see that a hello world can be a few kB, even less. Complete libraries can be at most a few 100 kilobytes. RAM overhead is kilobytes, at most 10s of them. Note that dietlibc lacks compatibility, according to "feature comparison". Also note that the compared libraries support threads, Unicode, often RPC, quite many popular CPU architectures, as well as other goodies. Also note that for example Turbo C comes with a reasonable C library which is also quite small, but of course does not follow any of the modern standards and supports not much hardware at all. Still it was popular in DOS. Now people use more DJGPP (GNU C / C++ gcc / gpp) and OpenWatcom, to easily use many MB of RAM in DOS and to have the feature set of a more modern compiler and C lib. > In this way free dos will keep in and people will > be creating new applications for it. I have the impression that people create new apps for DOS because they can use them together with existing apps for DOS. Porting DOS to a platform where nothing old runs will miss that fun factor. I agree that another fun factor of DOS is how much of it fits in very little disk space and RAM. But it gets increasingly hard to find sufficiently old hardware to appreciate that. So maybe yes, it CAN be interesting to use DOS code to make a DOS-like OS for something really tiny and embedded. Just it will not run any of your collected old DOS tools. If that is okay for you, "Arduino DOS" may be fun. Regards, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Want fast and easy access to all the code in your enterprise? Index and search up to 200,000 lines of code with a free copy of Black Duck Code Sight - the same software that powers the world's largest code search on Ohloh, the Black Duck Open Hub! Try it now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bds _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
