[arachne] Re: OS advocacy

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Ah, another Linux user who does not dare to tell us his full name! Or is
it "Steve" again? ;-)

>> Apart from the fact that DOS also has this, just try to rename "usr" to
>> "user" on Linux and see what it breaks.

> Yah, and rename your dos directory to sumthin' else and see what
> happens.

My "DOS" directory, as you like to call it because you do not (and
cannot) know what it is called on my machines, is called "DR-DOS" on
some of them, and "OpenDOS" or "NWDOS" on others. Whatever I call it, it
does *not* break compatibility with my applications. On the other hand,
I can tell that *you* cannot do the same with your "usr" directory, at
least not without recompiling a large portion of your software. :-)

>> Well, try to write a program for Linux in Assembly language in a way
>> that it will also work on other kernels and you will see what I mean.

> Ever heard of POSIX?

Yes. So if you pretend to know so much about Linux, please show us a
code snippet of an Assembly program calling a function of the Linux
kernel. Just two to five lines of code would be sufficient, since that
is what I need to call a DOS function.

> All that's needed is the name of the program, in Slack,
> "removepkg nameofprogram", RPM is just as easy.

So how do you uninstall a component that you have *not* installed with
PKG or RPM? Let's say you have compiled it yourself, then your
"removepkg" trick would only remove the source directory. I am not
impressed. ;-)

> All I do to access a floppy is type "fd", no harder than "a:"
> "ufd" to umount.

Ah, but that is just calling a script that does the mounting for you.
This does not invalid my argument. Also, you still do not have anything
like "A:" in your system because your floppy disk is now a part of your
root partition. No matter how you try to do it, Linux simply does not
support mounting two separate root devices. And since everything is one
drive, you do not have separate working directories for each logical
drive like in DOS, either. :-)

> I run Slack on a Packard Bell with 32Megs RAM and a 66Mhz cpu, That's
> hardly bloated.

That *is* bloated - DOS needs only a fraction of this even with a GUI
running. If you want to know another fine example of a GUI system that
does not need nearly as much memory, the AmigaOS 1.3 only uses 256 KB in
ROM plus about 100 KB for graphics mem and data structures. Yes, that is
KB, not MB. :-)

>> and of course, the inability to run PC software other then in
>> an
>> emulator -

> I don't have to run any emulators. But I don't run DOS programs in
> Linux, I run Linux programs.

That is like saying "I do not need to eat, since I am not hungry". ;-)

Well, if Linux wants to be a replacement for the PC OS, it will have to
be compatible with it. And I would never replace DOS with anything that
cannot even run my PC software natively.

> You've never met a DOS program you didn't want to rewrite?

I said that I would prefer a program that I would *not* need to
rewrite, not that there are no programs that I would not want to.
The programs I want to run on my system typically do not come with
source code, since they are commercial software.

However, commercial software for Linux typically does not include the
source code, either. If you disagree, then please show me the source
code for games like "Myth II:Soulblighter" or "Civilization: Call to
Power" or other games that Lokigames has ported from Windows to Linux.

> Also all
> the source code for my Slack system came with it.

Then it probably does not include the Nvidia drivers - other Linux
distributions like Suse do this.

> One last question. If DOS is the OS of the future, why are you only
> going for 32bit? Everyone else is going 64bit. No one else is using
> 4, 8, 12, or 16bit anymore 'except in DOS', and 32bit is going the
> same way.

The idea behind my project is it make DR-DOS the best OS for as many PCs
as possible, not to leave as many users as possible behind. If the
proportion of 64-bit machines increases, it will of course also support
this. However, there is no point in making it 64-bit *only*.
Nonetheless, it already supports 64-bit file operations.

Regards,

Udo

-- The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project - http://www.drdosprojects.de

-- This mail was written by a user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/
                  Arachne at FreeLists                  
-- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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