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DJGPP

• FUNNY!!!
  
  The Monty Python parrot bit is good. I laughed when someone trolled with a phrase from "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash. Even a post run through jive or kraut would be cool the first time. DO SOMETHING CREATIVE.
• Some dumbfuck trollbot so at least there was some thought into auto-replying to slashdot. You may have had to read some perldoc .pod about libwww or whatever, and spent 5 or 10 minutes checking CGI docs. But even these are pathetic... the nut has already been cracked. The great skill in posting to a forum specifically designed for people to post has somehow been acquired before you picked up "learn Perl in 21 days".
  

Bloat and complete lack of usability? I thought we had viper-mode for that.

I've been waiting for a vi v's emacs thread for this one. Stuff both of them OpenBsd uses Ed.

For those more interested in technology (than flames) read this article with Bill Joy about Ed.

I'm currently investigating pitching a move to FreeDOS once I play with it and see if it can allow a program to use more than 640k of RAM

The easiest way to use more than 600 KB of RAM in a program is to use a compiler that supports protected mode. The most popular free compiler targeted for PC DOS protected mode is DJGPP, a port of GCC with a runtime that implements a surprising amount of POSIX. And if you want to put graphics in your program, that's easy too; just install the Allegro library.

I mod'd my players to fit through the doors, so you might have to use noclip mode. Sorry, no furniture.

We have no jewelry, money, or anything worth putting in a fire safety box, and I'm always home. Make sure you get the right house, as most of our neighbors have shotguns (ex-military/police).

to be honest, i don't understand the motivation for using vc++ in a non-professional (read: outside of work) capacity in the first place. i realize the $99-$129 "professional version" price tag that i've seen, and the even cheaper academic pricing, are not too shabby compared with "enterprise" pricing... but they're still more expensive than $0! there are more than several freely available alternative compilers for win32 machines - cygwin gcc, borland (debugger also), djgpp, open watcom, lcc, MinGW, and Digital Mars (nb: haven't examined the license in detail) to name a few. can anyone else shed some light on why a developer might prefer vc++, or under which circumstances vc++ might be considered a clear-cut better choice than one of the alternatives listed above?

PIC?s and STAMP?s

IIRC, Quake I was compiled using DJGPP, or at least that was claimed on the DJGPP web site.

Not at all.

Ever heard about text based browsing? Speech synthethizers? ALT tags?

Go to your linux box and fire up lynx, or try this.

I'm part of a list with several VIP (Visually Impaired People) and they do pretty well browsing the web, sending email and in lots of other things, probably even better than some of us non-VIPs.

I'm guessing that since you've made it through the book, it might be a little simplistic for you, but it would have made a good primer.

As far as books, I probably wouldn't bother. QBASIC is so well documented on the net, you can probably find what you need there.

I've a question for you though. Why QBASIC? In fact, why BASIC at all? There are some excellent C compilers for free (DJGPP anyone) and C is a little more useful, though maybe not as easy.

Why should we be forced to use DOS (nothing against MS here) when I am sure that an OSS project could be implemented and go on to become as popular as DOS boot disks.

How are "DOS" and "an OSS project" mutually exclusive in light of FreeDOS (which several others have mentioned) and the DJGPP compiler suite?

Just some random thoughts.

DJ Delorie has had a public access compiler up for years. It's based on DJGPP. You could type in a little snippet of source code and get a DOS-extended executable. But you couldn't use C++ and you couldn't set the compiler flags. Probably just as well.

This kind of service is primarily useful for very small programs. If your Java program is ten lines long, and you have the JRE, this kind of web service is much better than downloading a 40 megabyte compiler. However, I would prefer to download the source for the service and have it on an internal (or secure) webserver that I can control. Java's libraries are large enough that maybe some pretty short programs can do useful things. On the other hand, you usually have to call dozens of functions for even simple stuff.

This is also made possible by the fact that the compiler is not Turing-complete or anything. Languages like Forth and Common Lisp can be compiled to produce executables, but they make the runtime available at compile time, so you could theoretically write code to open up /etc/passwd and e-mail you a copy during the compile. Even simpler, you could just allocate huge gobs of memory at compile time and try to bring the server down. Here, Java's lack of macros and #include, which to me is usually a disadvantage, can turn into an advantage.

The embedded tools version of Microsoft Visual Studio is included free with the eMbedded Visual Tools 3.0 sdk, available from here.

Download MVT 3.0, the PPC 2002 SDK or Smartphone SDK and you have everything for embedded mobile development. Assuming you have a Windows PC on which to install it.

However, I agree it sucks for them to not have a free compiler available for their OS, but I suppose that reflects the focus of their company. Which explains the presense of GCC on Win32 I suppose.

Talking of which, there are a few free compilers for Win32. LCC-Win32, MinGW and DJGPP (for DOS, based on GPP) are particular notables. I think Cygwin includes a port also, amongst the unix toolset.

The Xbox SDK is a subset of the Win32 SDK. Nintendo doesn't publish SDKs for it's gamecube, Sony doesn't publish (full) SDKs for the Playstation (I know the Linux kit contains a few of the docs though). So why should MS publish the Xbox SDK?

(I also believe MS shouldn't stop people from trying to mess with their Xbox, but that's another issue).

as soon as I can compile and use a good 32bit dos extender with gcc

As soon as now.

Let me respond to your posting and try to work out a list of sites. As you say, gnusoftware.org is down and has been for quite some time. The links on opensource.org aren't a great deal of use but I did find O'Reilly OSDir's Windows section with 18 apps listed, and BerliOS's Windows category with 11 projects. OSSBlacksheep is just a CD you can buy with some free software for Windows - similar to some mentioned on Slashdot recently.

More useful than these is the old favourite Cygwin, a Unix-on-Win32 layer with gcc and tools, and its offshoot Mingw (aka Ming, Mingw32, Minimalist GNU-Win32) which is a native gcc and toolchain, without a Unix emulation layer. You can use Cygwin to port lots of Unix apps, and you can use Mingw to build the Win32 ports of things like perl and Mozilla. Actually I don't think you need both since Cygwin's gcc can build native executables too, but Mingw is slightly 'cleaner' if you have no need for emulated symlinks and other cruft.

Hmm, what else can I think of? Well a lot of the big applications like Emacs and Mozilla have native Win32 ports. Don't forget the old DOS stuff, DJGPP which is a GNU-based development environment for DOS - everything except fork()!. There used to be a rival called EMX but it seems to have faded away.

You're right that allowing Windows free software on Freshmeat but not Windows proprietary software is something of a double standard; but then so is allowing PalmOS (a wholly proprietary platform and not Unix). I don't think anyone expects Freshmeat to hold to a particular set of principles, it's above all a practical and useful site. So allowing Windows software but only when it is free might be a pragmatic compromise.

Maybe one day, one of the Freshmeat staff will be forced to use a Windows box for a few months, and then I'd expect a Windows section to appear pretty rapidly :-).

gcc is cross-platform, can cross-compile to different platforms, and for those who feel the need to use Windows, gcc has been ported, to the ever-popular development suite called DJGPP.

GCC
DJGPP

If we ever got legislation mandating open formats for all public documents, Microsoft would be a minor player in the software world within five years.

I doubt that MS would have a problem with this. Look at one of MS's major products, Visual Studio. Anybody could download a copy of DJGPP or Borland's compiler, and just write the code in vim. Instead many people purchase Visual Studio because they prefer the IDE and it's tools. The same with MS Word, you could just as easily write the document in WordPad (of which the source is available). But they don't, because they actually perfer the interface.

A lot of people attribute MS's success to their "closed" formats, but they do actually make some good tools. If there was a mandate for open formats, MS would probably just focus on building better tools to work with those formats.

Just as the FreeDOS disk will be useless to most people who buy these Dell PCs.

FreeDOS might be just what the doctor ordered. There's still a lot of legacy custom software for DOS that some corporations need to run. And until the company's IT team gets around to putting FreeBSD on the machines, the developers can still write and test code using DJGPP (GCC for DOS) and spend time playing games such as Doom Legacy, Quake 1, or Tetanus On Drugs.

DOS will never die.

It does not work everywhere. Grow up. ANSI C has main returning int, so return an int already. I don't see you passing struct timeval as the first argument to printf. Standards exist for a reason.

In principle, can't it be replaced by a web page with radio buttons that say "do you want your download to include/exclude $FOO, $BAR, $BAZ", and upon clicking "submit", give you a page with the corresponding packages/zips/tarballs/whatevers?

To an extent, RealPlayer did this (small, medium, and large downloads), and AOL's Winamp still does. Any more than a S/M/L scheme, and you have to store 2^n packages on the server, one for every possible subset of the n components. Or you get a set of separate zip files, which is hard for the average point-and-drool user to install correctly.

And don't forget that for the longest time, the gnu.ai.mit.edu machines had no root password; anyone with an account could su to root. And of course, if you wanted an account there, all you had to do is apply for one. RMS doesn't believe in security...

As others have already mentionned, Cygwin is a good choice.

DJGPP is another port of GCC for DOS. It uses the protected mode, so you're not limited to 64K segments. If you want an IDE, RHIDE (available at the same place) is very similar to Borland's.

Also the the IBM EE (Easy Editor) will give you terminal braindamage (pun intended). Warez MS EDIT.COM and avoid at all costs.

If you get edit.com, don't get the edit.com from DOS 5 or 6, as that requires QBasic, can only have one file open, can't edit binary files, and can only edit up to a 64 KB file. You want edit.com from Windows 95, 98, or ME.

If you don't want to pirate anything, you can get DJGPP, which is a port of the GNU system to PC DOS platforms (MS-DOS, DR DOS, FreeDOS) with an i386-series CPU. It includes a port of GNU Emacs. And if you don't like Emacs, there's always GNU Nano, a clone of Pico that has also been ported to PC DOS, or SETEDIT, a free clone of the Borland editor for DOS.

No, but djgpp does. djgpp is one of those "when will gcc be ported to dos?", "never, it's not possible", ... "hey, here are some patches for gcc in dos" :)

Anyone else notice that he's dropped GNU/Linux altogether? Now it's just GNU. No credit given at all to the kernel. I guess it's just not important.

That's because the issues are the same, whether you run GNU/Linux, GNU/Solaris, GNU/Win32, GNU/DOS, or any other port of the GNU userland.

He isn't pro-Free software in the least. He is simply pro-GPL and anti-everything else.

He's pro-free software. He understands that BSD-class licenses (especially for noddy programs under 2 KLOC or for software used in embedded systems), weak copyleft licenses (especially for free clones of common libraries), and GPL-class strong copyleft licenses all have their place.

Here's a quote from the djgpp faq

The core of DJGPP is the MS-DOS port of the GNU C/C++ compiler, GCC, and auxiliary utilities, such as assembler, linker, librarian, Make, and a hypertext docs browser. The DJGPP C library was written specifically for DJGPP, mainly by DJ Delorie himself, with help from a small group of volunteers. This core set of utilities and libraries is still actively developed and maintained.

Here's a quote from the djgpp faq

The core of DJGPP is the MS-DOS port of the GNU C/C++ compiler, GCC, and auxiliary utilities, such as assembler, linker, librarian, Make, and a hypertext docs browser. The DJGPP C library was written specifically for DJGPP, mainly by DJ Delorie himself, with help from a small group of volunteers. This core set of utilities and libraries is still actively developed and maintained.

Windows NT did a fantastic job with many Win16 apps. (They ran in sort of a VM so that NT was protected from their crap.)

NT also claimed to run DOS in a VM. However, the WinNT and Win2K VMs always had severe, reproducible problems with DOS support, such that DOS apps could crash the virtual machine. This is like a DOS app being able to damage the motherboard; the virtual machine should be engineered well enough that this doesn't happen.

DJGPP FAQ 3.3

I think it is great that there will be a cygwin-w32 architecture available through the Debian packaging system. However, what I would really like to see are native ports of GNU & other freeware packages. I've used Emacs, Vim, and MiKTeX on windows, as well as many file-utils and devel-utils have been ported, partially listed here or here (compiled primarily the MinGW or DJGPP compilers), but they are not centrally available or managed. I would also argue that the Debian branch for cygwin programs should be called w32-cygwin, and the native programs be under w32.

Just some more thoughts to fuel the fire.

i think there is a port for windows also of gcc and maybe g++ (not very sure).
you may wanna check this side right here(djgpp)

Or just download one of the precompiled binaries from nethack.org, and play that.

Here are just a few of the tools that are considered traditionally in UNIX/Linux/BSD territory that are available for Win32. In all actuality, there's enough out there to get as much of Linux running on Win32 as Win32 running under WINE.
XFree86: http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/xfree/
KDE: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
GTK/PHP/Libglade: http://gtk.php.net/download.php

Apache: http://www.apache.org
PHP: http://www.php.net
PHPTriad: http://www.phpgeek.com
Perl: http://www.activestate.com
Ruby: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads/ ruby-install.html
Python: http://www.python.org/download/download_windows.ht ml
TCL/TK: http://www.pconline.com/%7Eerc/tclwin.htm

MySQL: http://www.mysql.com
MySQL ODBC: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc.html
PostgreSQL: Included in cygwin (only works on NT)

ATT's U/WIN* Unix for Windows: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/
Cygwin: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/
DJGPP: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/
Native UNIX command-line binaries: http://www.wzw.tu-muenchen.de/~syring/win32/UnxUti ls.html

vi: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html
Emacs: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs .html
OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org

Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org
GIMP: http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/

List of GNU software for Windows: http://www.gnusoftware.com/
And so on . . .

There's a list over at DMOZ.org of a lot of this.

I haven't played with it myself, but 'miniRuby' is available for the AgendaVR3 PDA (which also runs Linux).

Then again, NetHack and Apache are available on the Agenda, too. ;)

And you're right, we haven't benchmarked against GCC because it's not a contender on Win32.
This raises an interesting question, what are DJGPP (GCC for DOS) and Cygwin (GCC for MSWindows) like as compilers?
I've used DJGPP (a few years ago now) and it seemed to produce fast enough code for me, once you get used to a UNIX enviroment. It came with a Borland-like deleopment enviroment, which easies the transision.

• The C-parser was buggy. Some absolutely correct piece of source code were misinterpreted by Watcom. For instance, it refused some "const" pointers that were indeed pointing to constant values.
• The compiler was buggy. When some optimizations were turned on, it produced wrong code, sometimes reusing a register while it was still in use by someone else. And it simply ignored the volatile keyword, that was needed for interrupts hooks.
• DOS4GW was cool, but sometimes slow. It was way faster to allocate a big memory chunk at startup and then mess in it, than allocating multiple small chunks.
• Inserting assembly code used a totally different syntax than Borland C.

Chess. If they are on-line, you can play at chess.delorie.com Have a nice day and a JonKatz-free weekend.

Or simply try this header viewer.

cygwin is better than command.com but even better is the bunch of utilities that have been ported with the DJGPP compiler. As far as I know they run without any emulation layer and the speed difference is very visible ('ls' takes forever in cygwin).

cygwin is better than command.com but even better is the bunch of utilities that have been ported with the DJGPP compiler. As far as I know they run without any emulation layer and the speed difference is very visible ('ls' takes forever in cygwin).

I'm not on Linux (I miss tab completion the most), so I can't grep for it

If you use Red Hat Cygwin (GNU software for Windows) or the full version of DJGPP (GNU software for DOS), you get bash and grep.

Back on topic... lack of tab completion in the WinDOS distributions is what keeps us using easy-to-type 8.3 names.

For starters, it's 9x that hold all the legacy code that is supposed to make DOS programs work. The whole *point* of 9x is to move DOS style applications to NT style applications. I think that MS would've been overjoyed if it could've dumped DOS & 9x all together long ago, it has a far superior product in its hands (NT).

So why is Microsoft charging twice as much for NT as for 9x? And why couldn't they have just done more work in the DOS virtualization department? For example, Windows 2000's VDM chokes on 32-bit programs that conform to the DPMI spec.

I'm not sure if Linux is suffering from the same problem (having to maitain compatability with legacy code, so you can't solve problems the most efficent way)

Linux has a legacy (POSIX; Single UNIX Spec; X11) but it's a quite well-designed legacy. DOS is nice as an embedded OS, but anything complex is ugly.

In Windows, use win+r for the RUN command

This opens a single command line. History? Tab completion? cd? Hardly. It does not open a shell window. To open a shell window, you have to type command or bash into the dialog box that the Run... command creates. (To get bash and friends, download and install DJGPP (DOS/Win9x) or Cygwin (9x/NT).)

A few composite replies to some of the statements that have been made here:

fleener wrote:
Either the W3C standards will change to somehow radically change the makeup of pages on-the-fly for blind users, or another Jakob Nielsen will rise to power and make a lot of money.

Actually, the W3C standard to change the makeup of pages on the fly exists; it's XSLT -- XSL Transformations. We use it at Reef (formerly Edapta) to do dynamic edaptations of the user interface to meet the needs of various audiences, including people with disabilities. If you want to see the semi-non-public demo pages from last year, drop me a note in email. (I'm not at liberty to get us slashdotted at the moment!)

Argy offered great advice, including:
As to what you're looking for, I'd spend some time browsing your sites using lynx.

If you haven't used Lynx for a long time, and don't want to bother to install it, you can also try Delorie's Lynx Viewer, a web-based lynx simulator script.

GC wrote:
You do not have to change your website at all. Your website does not define the media which will be used to define it. Your website will just send down the Internet pipe what it is requested for. The accessibility concerns are fully dependent on the equipment used to communicate and receive the information at the users end and this is not within your power nor should it be your concern.

I beg to differ here; it's a common fallacy that assistive technology can solve all of the problems of access. In fact, I included this on a list of Common Myths About Web Accessibility because many people seem to think that a screenreader or braille terminal can fix everything.

The problem, however, is a simple "garbage in, garbage out" scenario. Assistive technology needs enough information to be able to cobble together an alternate access method. That information is encoded within the HTML file. If the HTML file is poorly done, then it may prove impossible to get even the minimum information from a page.

If you don't want to simply believe me because I say it's so, then you could do a test yourself -- download a screenreader and try it out on a web page and see how it works. You may be disappointed to find that it's not as easy as you'd hoped -- and then remember that for many people this is their only way to access the web.

A few quick links to screenreader (or screenreader-like) technology:

1. IBM Home Page Reader 30 day trial, runs on Windows
2. emacspeak download from Sourceforge, runs on Emacs

Enjoy!

--Kynn Bartlett

since most users won't have a compiler on their system, it shouldn't compromise "security" too much

The DOS and Windows versions of GCC are quite easy to install (unzip, set a couple environment variables in autoexec, reboot, and you can gcc files). Seeing as you have to compile your own MP3 encoder, I see the free DJGPP compiler gaining a wide userbase.

> I don't even know if there is something to do makefiles in Windows anyway

Any operating system can have a utility for compiling projects with makefiles. A makefile is, after all, just a set of instructions to be passed along to the compiler about how to compile (what options to use, etc.) the project. Any decent C/C++ compiler will have a make utility (for Windows/DOS, DJGPP comes to mind).

Do you have any thoughts about why the shell concept has not caught on with other operating systems?

Probably because Mac OS and Windows are designed around an assumption that newbies are very afraid of a command line.

I'm thinking of NT and Win2K in particular, but it seems to be true in general.

Bash and Fileutils have been ported to DOS (you'll need at least bsh204b.zip, fil316.zip, and txt20b.zip to get a useful shell). So has a lot of other GNU software; start with DJGPP, the DOS port of GCC.

Install Red Hat Cygwin and you get Bash, GCC, and other things you may be used to on GNU/Linux, BSD, or UNIX systems.

installing [the Allegro library] is a kind of rocket science

What's so hard about this?

1. Download and unzip DJGPP (djdev, GCC, Binutils, Texinfo, RHIDE, etc.) and the Allegro library.
2. Set two environment variables in your autoexec.bat and reboot.
3. Allegro 3.9.3x comes pre-configured for DOS. cd into .../allegro/ and
   make
   make install

4. The virtualized DOS machine (VDM) allows only two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs (NT 4 and all Win9x systems allow several dozen). The DJGPP environment requires at least three (make, gcc, cc1plus) nested DPMI programs.
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In Microsoft Windows 2000, both 5.0 (boxed) and 5.01 (sp1), there is a limit of two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs in a single VDM (virtualized DOS machine). This severely limits the usefulness of DJGPP, as it relies on three nested DPMI programs (GNU make, gcc, cpp/cc1/as/ld) to build programs.
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