Dear WINE Users/Programmers/Developers,
I am currently starting a new project called BoxOS. We are going to try
port the WINE System to a FreeDOS Enviroment.
Here is a more information on the project:
The BoxOS Kernel is based upon FreeDOS Beta 7 ("SPEARS"). That version
of
FreeDOS includes the Kernel 2023b and sys updated to 2024h and the FreeCom
0.82 updated to 0.83beta28. We have edited these Kernel's a fair bit.
We are then going to port the Linux Redhat 2.4 Kernel into the FreeDOS
Kernel. Thus giving the Kernel support to communicate with Linux-based
filesystems.
The next step is to make the newly made kernel able to run WINE
(wine20011004). This will involve a lot of tweaking, etc.
Once that is complete we are going to build a Graphical User Interface and
a Console User Interface. These will be built in both C++ and QBX (Quick
Basic Extended). The reason for QBX, because it's fast, simple and if used
correctly has a fair amount of power.
We will design the GUI and CUI to look and feel like like all Microsoft
Windows(tm) like operating systems. But ofcourse we will try to give our OS
more power.
We will also look into porting the ReactOS project into our BoxOS. The
ReactOS (0.0.18) project is an effort to try make an OS compadible of
running Windows NT applications and drivers.
Once completed we will add support for different file systems. This will be
accomplished by making seperate files for each file system. For example
fat32.fs, fat16.fs. These files will contain all the needed information
about the file system and will be loaded on boot via the Kernel. This will
add support for new file systems as they arise.
More technical information can be found by contact me via e-mail.
At the momment we are trying to attract FreeDOS and WINE programmers and
ex-programmers. If you are interested then please contact us.
Please do not regard this e-mail as spamming your newsgroup. It is
relievent and would help out the WINE community if the venture is ever
completed.
Thanks for listening!
Sincerely,
Chris Hocking (hocking@planet.net.au)
Greetings, Getting the FreeDOS Kernel via Linux code to work with WINE will be almost impossible. FreeDOS and Linux are two entirely different operating systems, both having extremely different code structures and different I/O interfacing methods. I use FreeDOS often and whilst it's an excellent OS as a MS-DOS replacement, Wine will never work on it. FreeDOS works well as a DOS operating system. This means that it's not going to have multi-threading, multi-tasking and gettng WINE to use a UI besides X will be an issue (although not as impossible as other parts of the OS). For starters, C++ is a good base for this type of development, but Qbasic is long-dead and using it now will not be a very good idea. It has memory limitations (can't easily use memory above 4Mb) and won't be suitable at all for this type of program. If you want fast, don't even consider QBX (or any QB variant), QB is extremely high-level code and by the time you get an output, it's too congested and execution time will be slow, particularly for larger programs. Should you wish to genuinely start such a project, I suggest starting with a completely Linux Kernel without the FreeDOS and using a stripped-down Linux distribution to build your environment. This will work much better than a Windows-DOS-Linux mix and will be more likely to succeed than using a mixture of two OSes and an emulator. Please don't get me wrong, I think it's a terrific idea, but I thought I'd just give my two-cents. Regards, Jonathan Thorpe
Chris Hocking <hocking@planet.net.au> wrote: : Dear WINE Users/Programmers/Developers, : I am currently starting a new project called BoxOS. We are going to try : port the WINE System to a FreeDOS Enviroment. Yeah! Wine for World Domination! :-) -- Uwe Bonnes bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de Institut fuer Kernphysik Schlossgartenstrasse 9 64289 Darmstadt --------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------