Quick question before I do something silly?

[John Heim]

I messed around with FreeDOS quite a bit last summer. I got it working with 
jaws for DOS. I was planning on making a  bootable CD with FreeDOS, jaws for 
DOS, and the Win XP installation files. But it didn't work because the 
Windows setup program wouldn't work under  FreeDOS.

I got a bootable diskette with FreeDOS and jaws for DOS though. So I had it 
so that my PC would come up talking when booted from a diskette which means 
I could have made a bootable CD that comes up talking. I never bothered 
though because what would be the point? If you could install Windows, it 
would be worthwhile.  But otherwise, grml is better.

Let me tell you though, I was pretty excited for a while there. The Windows 
setup program runs under FreeDOS but it craps out when it comes to 
recognizing the disk. There's something about the FreDOS FAT32 driver that 
the setup program didn't like. But when I ran that setup program and was 
able to answer the first few questions, I was pretty darn excited.  I 
thought all I had to do was feed it an unattended.txt file and I'd be 
golden! But it didn't work.  Maybe by now FreeDOS has that fixed.

There is a very active FreeDOS support email list. I would recommend 
googling for it and joining up if you get into FreeDOS.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Baechler" <tony at baechler.net>
To: "Linux for blind general discussion" <blinux-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2008 1:06 AM
Subject: Re: Quick question before I do something silly?


> Hi,
>
> Linux reads fat32 just fine.  I've used it to recover drives before.  I 
> would suggest using FreeDOS.  It has finally passed the version 1.0 mark 
> and seems fairly stable, at least on a virtual machine.  Also it's shipped 
> with dosemu if you wanted to run your DOS programs under Linux for 
> whatever reason.  Several years ago, I ran Windows 98 and Linux on one 
> machine.  It worked but I think FreeDOS is probably better.  Of course 
> there is OpenDOS but it doesn't seem as stable to me and isn't as open 
> source.  FreeDOS obviously is completely open source and has several CD 
> images to pick from.  It seemed to work well with a screen reader, again 
> on a virtual machine.
>
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