Quick question before I do something silly?

[Tony Baechler]

I normally don't post "I agree" type messages, but I do agree in this 
case.  I had a hard time getting the boot floppy to work with speech.  
Granted most of my trouble had to do with Microsoft Virtual PC which I 
resorted to after I couldn't get Bochs or Qemu to work, but it would 
have been helpful to have something already done.  I see no problem with 
leaving JAWS for DOS on there as HJ released it as freeware in I think 
1997.  It was long before FS bought them.  It might be public domain for 
all I know but probably not.  I had full manuals and zips of the program 
disks at one time but I'm sure FS pulled them by now.  There was no 
activation or anything else required.  The only concern I see is making 
sure kernel.sys and the command shell get updated in a reasonably timely 
manner to avoid FAT32 driver issues and the like.  I played with a very 
early version of FreeDOS which had stability problems, and even the 
kernel shipping with 1.0 could use bug fixes.

Janina Sajka wrote:
> John Heim writes:
>   
>> 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
>>     
>
>
> Any chance you'd be willing to share a dd image of that disk? Even if
> you removed JAWS, it would still be helpful to see the configuration.
>
> I think there will be continuing utility in DOS based boots for simple
> tasks, like flashing as I mentioned in a previous post. I should think
> we should be able to share a reasonable setup for that in the community,
> so that we aren't all reinventing the same thing on our own.
>