[Fedora-packaging] Binary FreeDOS image

[Lubomir Rintel]

On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 19:19 +0000, Paul wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a
> > tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS
> > utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal
> > (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we
> > distribute sources as well.
> 
> Following this, I decided to look at the source to see if it would be a
> trivial task to get the code running under gcc with nasm. It seems there
> are a couple of big problems.
>
> 1. The use of the FAR/far macros. These are a kickback to the old 16 bit
> days and as gcc doesn't have an 8086 backend, the closest I could find
> is Lambertsen's ia16 backend (from 2007). No idea if it'll do the job.

What came to my mind here was dev86's bcc. I didn't even believe gcc
compiles Intel 8086 code, though I've heard that it's used to compile
Bochs BIOS, so... Anyways, I've not tried to get it to build with bcc,
though I saw a mailing list post (I can't find it now) about it, that
remained unanswered.

> 2. Next is the assembler bits. While nasm will compile 16 bit code, it's
> another pain in the backside to getting the source to build.

I thought they already use nasm for their builds. At least their wiki
says so [1].

[1] http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=FreeDOS_Spec#Programming_tools

--
"Excuse all the blood" -- Dead