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Windows ME - The End Of UMSDOS And BeOSfs Over Vfat?
Juan Rojo writes: "I recently got a copy of Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (which
is suppossed to be the next generation of the Windows 9x series, supposed to mantain 'backwards' compatibility with older versions. In them all the ports and memory access are unprotected). I was really surprised that "pure" DOS access was simply removed. You can't enter into pure DOS in any way. No more 'Command Prompt' option when pressing F8 at the startup.. No more 'Shutdown to MSdos' and no more shorcuts to DOS mode. I even tried removing the Windows directory and it crashes at the startup instead of going back to a DOS prompt (like Win98 or 95). The only possible way seems to be booting from a disk with a Win98 DOS kernel installed. This seems to be a serious problem for UMSDOS based unix distros, for the BeOSfs that runs over Vfat and even for using LoadLin, which many users still may need.
I wonder if Microsoft did this on purpose.. or if they have some 'excuse' about it." That doesn't sound very "backwards" compatible to me either. Considering the source, is anyone really surprised?
Don't be so sure about that. Loadlin depends on
the system being nearly uninitialised (e.g.
if I loadlin from the dosprompt after shutdown of
win98SE( type mode Co80), my network card doesn't work.
Hardware initialisation done by WinME will make this tough. Specially if the Linux drivers are
reverse engineered from an cleanly booted machine.
The only way is to kill 98, keep a dos partition, and install winME in another partition
(to keep loadlin, there is of course also LILO)
IIRC, PSP stands for Program Segment Pointer and is part of the old DOS program loading scheme, probably serves as a pointer to the program segment (sorry).
There's an easy workaround to this:
/mbr
Put the line:
C:\windows\command\fdisk
into your autoexec.bat file. This is a particularly good way to protect against boot sector viruses on dual boot machines. Every dual-booting Linux user should add this line before the next time s/he boots into Windows. I recommend that anybody reading this su into a root account, mount the Windows partition, and do this one right away.
What Microsoft should be doing is slowly removing the Windows98 specific code and replacing it with DOS code instead. When was the last time that any version of DOS crashed on you for no apparent reason, now when was the last time Windows98 crashed on you for no apparent reason. Point made.
This is funny. The PC market did not (and has not) gotten rid of the legacy market for one reason: there has not been enough pressure.
:)
If everyone decided to replace their PC tomorrow and said they weren't going to buy anything with ISA/floppy, sure, they'd stop making them.
You'll note that this is different than the Apple fist-of-vengeful-old-god tactic: "YOU MAY NOT HAVE A FLOPPY DRIVE BECUASE WE DEEM IT UNWORTHY!"
However, my system can boot off an LS-120 or ZIP drive pretty easily.
Microsoft is trying to get us to stop using the DOS prompt.
This is because Windows 2000 does not have it and they are expecting to move people off of the 9x architecture into Win2K very soon. They want the transition to move as smooth as possible.
Evidence of this:
- Removal of the DOS prompt.
- Adding more Windows 2000-like features to ME
- Changing the naming scheme of the OS. Windows 2000 took the naming scheme from this product line.
- The next version of Windows 2000 will include a consumer edition that will be sold for the same price as Windows 9x.
Microsoft has been promising to end the Windows 9x product line for 4 years now. They are finally starting to follow through.
I do have to add, that personally I think that removal of the DOS prompt is very premature. I feel they have to develop some decent recovery tools before taking the DOS prompt away.
I'm no Windows expert, but maybe the conspiracy loving maniacs are wrong this time.
Afaik they killed dos because
- The luser doesn't need it, and the power user should use Win2000 in their view.
- The quickstartup shutdown feature is incompatible with the normal dos booting way.
Also maybe there is some util on the CD for real users to tweak things so that an dos prompt remains an option
:P
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Assuming you're running with SysV startup, setup init level 5 to be a graphical login and such. Now rm -rf /usr/X11R6. Now reboot. Okay, sure, it didn't work too well did it, but you can boot into single user mode no problem. You know, the command-line only one, that's the unix equivalent of hitting F8 on boot.
----------------------------
Hey guys.. If you want a DOS prompt, why don't you just make a new command interpreter? Also, you can probably still run Bash in WinMe (though I know that Bash on Win32 is horiffically slow..).
Now, for the more interesting problem of 16-bit DOS, effort should be put into the FreeDOS project.
I know WinMe is going to cause trouble. There are a *lot* of devices out there that need bios upgrades, this, that, and the other thing, which are currently only currently possible through DOS. I had to upgrade my BIOS last night, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to boot into DOS, since I didn't have any disks with it. My roommate did have a 98 boot disk, though he runs Win2k these days.
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Ski-U-Mah!
I just realized that many Java compilers and utilities for Windows run from the command line. This isn't the end of the world (you could probably make some batch files or something, or have they disappeared too?), but it may cause difficulty..
Oh well, for those that just need a command line, there will always be one, be it Bash or something like OS/2's and WinNT's CMD.EXE.
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Ski-U-Mah!
You're right. Back when I ran PC DOS 7.0, it was a very good DOS. They put a lot of effort into giving as much free memory in the lower 640kB as possible, which was nice. IIRC, I was running with over 600kB free when sitting at a prompt. I didn't run all sorts of fancy things, but it had Doskey, the CD-ROM drivers, mouse, and maybe another thing or two (it's been quite a while).
Hmm.. Looks like it sells for $50-60. A tad spendy, but not too bad (I think they actually include an AntiVirus package, and it also comes with the REXX scripting language).
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Ski-U-Mah!
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
"You people"? I wasn't one of those people, although I did hear a lot of it. Yes, Apple has done a lot within the last two years, and there have been some short-term problems with compatibility because of it, but I thought the idea of getting rid of the floppy drive was great two years ago.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
It has been my (admittedly limited) experience that NT is, in fact, more stable than Win9x. However, only NT is more stable. The applications that run on NT (including Internet Explorer) are still flaky. I use NT at work (uggh) and I must log off and back on about twice a day to clear the system out, or things will just stop working. But I almost never have to actually reboot.
It's also worth noting that Windows is so inconsistent, it's not even consistently bad.
Another thing - it's my impression that Microsoft doesn't mess with the NT APIs too much (compared to Win9x), so NT should be easier to emulate with projects like WINE. OF course, most of the people working on projects like WINE are using Win9x, but in theory, wouldn't it be easier to emulate NT than Win9x? Are the APIs better documented? Perhaps a better question would be, are there as many undocumented APIs in NT as there are in Win9x?
Sorry for wandering off on a tangent; this is something I've been curious about.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Consider: many new motherboards have no ISA slots, and soon the ISA bus will be completely removed on all new motherboards. Does this benefit the consumer? What about consumers who have ISA modems? The answer is, yes, it benefits the consumer in the long term, at the expense of a minor inconvenience in the short term. Once everyone has switched completely over to PCI and USB, we can start using motherboards that have no ISA bus (not just no ISA slots, but no PS/2 ports, no floppy drives, and no other devices that still run on the ISA bus). This leads to a more efficient design, which gives us faster, cheaper, more efficient motherboards - and that benefits everyone.
It's sad, really. This is yet another example of Microsoft's technological achievements(successful migration of the PC industry from DOS/Win16 to Win32, excavation and elimination of DOS legacy code) being marred by the relentless drive of their business side to quell competition.
Wait a minute - what? you're saying moving from DOS/Win16 to Win32 is a good thing, and yet removing DOS is a bad thing? Think about this for a moment.
DOS is not just a lower operating system--it's a basic environment that can be entirely overwritten by whatever code happens to run underneath it. Much has been said about the ability to run alternative operating systems being quelled by this design; the faults generated are actually much more devious.
So, DOS doesn't completely control your system; rather, it lets other software do whatever it wants. This quells the ability to run alternative operating systems? That makes absolutely no sense. This design is what makes LOADLIN possible - LOADLIN can completely remove DOS, and replace it with something else, while the system is still running.
DOS lets the user replace anything with everything; under the Windows model, Microsoft holds the final say on what calls you're allowed to issue, what memory you may rewrite, what partitions you may generate.
Wow, that sounds remarkably like UNIX. Applications can't directly muck around in hardware (unless they're running with root permissions, in which case the OS selectively grants them access).
Even the simple requirement to rewrite applications such as Partition Magic in full Win32 code--and that's presuming a hard drive partitioner could be allowed to function through the API--at minimum makes the code much less portable across OS's, and gives Microsoft leverage over yet another critical element of system configurations.
Hmm, making software companies rewrite old applications that require a backwards-compatibility layer so that they're more efficient and work better is a bad thing? Windows NT is 32-bit only, and is much more stable than Win98, so Microsoft wants to migrate everything to NT. The more 16-bit apps that get rewritten as 32-bit apps, the more likely this plan is to succeed.
This isn't just about Microsoft making it harder for their users to run alternative operating systems; it's about Microsoft closing off direct access to a user's own system to the point of forcing the OS to crash before giving the user a command prompt.
Uhhh, who said anything about forcing the OS to crash? Where the hell did that come from? And by the way, someone else pointed out that you can still get to a command prompt by (surprise!) opening a command prompt window.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Unfortunately you have to leave protected mode to start Be (you are, after all, booting another operating system). Win ME no longer allows programs to enter real mode, nor does it allow booting to a command prompt. Basically a linux-over-windows/be-over-windows/*-over-windows install simply cannot work now.
different strokes for different folks.
I'm not going to teach my aging parents 'awk'.. are you?
Erik
Do they care if you have IE installed? Any other app? No. Fact is both work with or without windows, since all they care about is the filesystem.
This is a troll. (well, either I'm trolling or the guy who "asked slashdot" is).
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The problem is in getting to a raw DOS session like what you can do with "Restart in MS-DOS mode" on Win95/98. Unless you're in raw DOS, you can't run loadlin (well, at least without getting a clean shutdown for Windows, if at all).
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Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
There are two mutually exclusive complaints here and there is no hypocracy involved.
On the one hand, you have people talking about the architecture of the system. Win95 is not a true 32-bit OS, neither is Win98 *OR* WinME. This means you still run into problems with applications being able to scribble in parts they shouldn't. They still have a single path to the display layer, and so forth.
It's important to realize that *NONE* of this has been fixed. If you want a pure 32-bit OS from Microsoft, you need to get W2K.
The other complaint is that they have now made it next to impossible (until someone figures out a way to do it) to get back to a pure DOS session so you can use loadlin or similar tools. No, this isn't a "problem" to people already using LILO/GRUB/(insert other boot loader), but people using loadlin to start their boxes can't use WinME.
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Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
My definition of backward compatibility does not include working with older versions of OTHER PEOPLE'S software. Nor does it include 'working in exactly the same way as the old version'. Or even 'keeping certain boot procedures the same so that other entirely unrelated 3rd party software works the same way as it used to.'
This IS NOT a backward compatibility issue.
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DOS mode & company were hacks anyway.
The correct way to provide backwards compatability (or the ability to boot other operating systems from Windows) is good virtualization software. NTVDM and the OS/2 DOS box were steps in the right direction, but VMware or Plex86 are really the proper solutions for operating-system-within-an-operating-system needs on x86. It's too bad that most architectures (including x86) are not so easily virtualizable.
(That's not to say that an option to boot up Windows without the GUI wouldn't be useful, but with the absence of Win32-console versions of Regedit and Control Panel, it currently isn't useful to boot to a command prompt.)
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
I don't know; I'm a little nervous about keeping my eggs in one basket like that. I mean, it has its advantages (out of room to install Descent2 for Linux? Clean out the /dos/windows/temp directory. And vice versa. But that's also the danger. And what about if your FAT32 partition gets badly corrupted?
Perhaps it really *is* time to start considering Linux as a desktop OS...or, if not, getting to work on an alternative.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
C:\WINNT\system32>cd \new folder
C:\New Folder>
C:\New Folder>cd \WINNT\system32
C:\WINNT\system32>cd "\new folder"
C:\New Folder>
try it before you spout off garbage.
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DOS should not be loading before Windows.
It shouldn't, I'm happy it's not, it's excellent that they've pulled out yet another layer of headaches, huzzah.
The problem--and it's a real one--is that they're preventing DOS from loading at all.
There's *no good reason* for F8 not to allow a DOS session to start up. Yes, there's a good reason for DOS not to load when Windows is loading--but from a pure troubleshooting point of view, access to the core filesystem is inordinately useful for system repair and there is no benefit to the customer for such functionality to be removed.
It's sad, really. This is yet another example of Microsoft's technological achievements(successful migration of the PC industry from DOS/Win16 to Win32, excavation and elimination of DOS legacy code) being marred by the relentless drive of their business side to quell competition. DOS is not just a lower operating system--it's a basic environment that can be entirely overwritten by whatever code happens to run underneath it. Much has been said about the ability to run alternative operating systems being quelled by this design; the faults generated are actually much more devious. DOS lets the user replace anything with everything; under the Windows model, Microsoft holds the final say on what calls you're allowed to issue, what memory you may rewrite, what partitions you may generate. Even the simple requirement to rewrite applications such as Partition Magic in full Win32 code--and that's presuming a hard drive partitioner could be allowed to function through the API--at minimum makes the code much less portable across OS's, and gives Microsoft leverage over yet another critical element of system configurations.
The philosophy of the DVD contracts was to achieve restrictions over consumers in excess of what the law would impose by preventing any vendor from being able to legally provide entire realms of fair use functionality to consumers. By doing an end run around the law, the studios hoped to effectively reverse entire swaths of public policy. Considering the anticompetitive and intrusive charges against Microsoft, this code extraction is similarly an end run around the technological capability of the generally open PC platform to run operating systems and environments other than those prescribed by Microsoft.
I don't like it, I'm not happy, and I do believe formal complaints should be issued in this circumstance. This isn't just about Microsoft making it harder for their users to run alternative operating systems; it's about Microsoft closing off direct access to a user's own system to the point of forcing the OS to crash before giving the user a command prompt.
Crashing is not a feature.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Now when they bring out WinME and DOS is gone, people suggest that they have to have an "excuse" to do it...
You got it wrong. It is a question of software architecture.
People complained that Win 9x wasn't a new OS, but a GUI on top of DOS (pretty much like Win 3.1 except for the use of protected drivers instead of real-mode). Now, WinME STILL is a shell on top of DOS with a more restricted access to the plain command.com, but don't say that DOS is gone, 'cause it's still there. and while it's there, I'd prefer to have access to the command prompt.
Could you show me how to do this? What do I need to type in the IE Address bar to get DOS commands to execute?
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
In fact there is a registry setting you can do t enable auto-complete in the CLI like with BASH, tcsh, and other popular UNIX shells. Futhermore there is another registry setting that will allow a window to take focus with just the mouse over it...
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
If you want a real OS, I'm sure either the NT based OSes or a *NIX will do the trick for you instead. Sure, BeOS too...
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Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
What people here want is the ability to keep the GUI from loading and keep all that additional software from loading. Why? When it fucks up, which it always has, does, and will do.
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Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
> we still have BootX which works just fine to
> load Linux
Bad example: BootX quit working for many LinuxPPC machines sometime around Mac OS 9, which forced them into a special booter called yaBoot, a sub-OS requiring a special partition and everything. In other words, Mac OS changes (even before the oft-mentioned Mac OS X) have pushed us into similar territory, boot-wise.
what do you mean "made a face"? did he stick out his tongue or what?
I apologize, I should have clarified.
When I wrote that he "made a face," what I meant was that he used the godlike powers of Windows 2000 to create a human face out of nothingness. The face hovered in midair for seven seconds and then he destroyed it with the click of a mouse button, proving that Microsoft views the laws of physics the same way as it does the laws of the United States. Because Windows 2000 is so Easy To Use (tm), he was able to do all of this with Drag-n-Drop and fancy icons.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
A while back I talked to a Microsoft technical drone who told me that Win2K will contain full command line support. He explained that everything that can be done from the GUI can be done from the command line. I recounted for him the story I read about another Microsoft spokesdroid stating that "the command line and scripting were weaknesses of UNIX." His response to that was to make a face at me.
So if what he says was true (and, of course, all his words are suspect as he was a Microsoft employee), then future versions of Windows will definately contain some kind of CLI support (which will probably be MS-DOS based).
Can someone clarify this matter?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Huh? When did DOS start doing this? The last i remember, a program got whatever you put on the command line, with no interpretation other than parsing words separated by spaces as separate arguments. To expand wildcards, you had to call an MS-DOS interrupt with a 'find first' and then 'find next' functions. Admittedly, the last time i did this was MS-DOS-4.x, but still ... has the architecture changed that much?
:: "I am non-refutable." --Enik the Altrusian ::
Microsoft wants everything to be Win32. Pure Win32, no legacy Win16 or MS-DOS. Do we have a problem with that? Of course not! If everything is pure Win32, then the WINE developers can focus on Win32 instead of having to figure out and implement a bunch of legacy cruft.
WinME is still a 32/16 hybrid, and we know it; they've merely put heavier drapes over the DOS layer. Again, so what? You can dual-boot using a 'real' boot manager, the same way you'd do if you had Windows NT and Linux on the same computer. Or you can use WinME as an opportunity to take the plunge and ditch Windows altogether.
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Unless your current directory is on a different drive, in which case it won't. For DOS compatibility, the command prompt maintains a separate current directory for each drive.
Yes it will. All Win32 file-systems have to support both short and long filenames, for compatibility with 16-bit programs. Type "dir /x" to see them.
... will DosEmu be ported to Win ME?
how does removing dos command mode stop umsdos and other such things? they play on the fs, right?
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
HELLO!!!! UMSDOS does NOT use DOS. It doesn't require DOS or anything like it! UMSDOS simply puts Linux on a DOS _disk_. And they are not changing the filesystem format. Even if they did make an incompatible change, its their business. I use Linux, because if Linux makes an incompatible change I don't like, I can /* comment it out */
Engineering and the Ultimate
By removing the autoexec.bat, config.sys and other old DOS config files, startup time has been dramatically reduced - they dont need and excuse, but there's one (oh and you can still get to DOS, it's still there, just not obvious).
Ewan
actually, doom and quake will run, but thier installers won't.
Somebody get our flag back!
Having no wish to install WinME to try it, what hapens if you put BootGui=0 into your MSDOS.SYS file? (for those who don't know, this means the system boots to a command prompt rather than autostarting Windows). Also, does LOGO=0 in the same file suppress the graphical display?
Personally, I used to love the way old versions of Win9x said "It is now safe to turn your computer off" - and if you typed MODE CO80 blind at that point, you got the C:\> prompt....go ahead, find an old W9x and try it!
All your ghosts are just false positives.
Well, there's a simple solution to this. Don't upgrade to ME. Problem solved.
I suppose the same could be said of the underlying OS, but that's another story.
--- http://foo.ca
Have they also dropped the "rescue" floppies? AFAIK Win9x allows you to make a floppy containing COMMAND.COM and some basic utilities.
Maybe WinME can boot completely from CD. That would be cool, then I wouldn't have to waste a partition on Windoze any more for the approx. one time a month I need it.
Microsoft want to to do away with the CLI because they like thier customer stuck in their way of thinking. Microsoft does not want thier customers think outside the box. Hey this just an assurance that they keep thier customer base.
Maybe we can convince them to put BASH in the next Windows OS. <grin>
The old DOS code is still there (as has been noted by many here); it's just more difficult to get to a command prompt. But old DOS applications will definitely still work and, yes, the title of this article is misleading.
What are you talking about? Haven't you ever heard of the First Amendment? I can damn well say anything I want about Microsoft's products. It won't do anything; but I can say it.
MDOS was buggy as hell under NT. It looks like
it's from OS/2 1.5. If you are to use a French
Canadian keyboard for instance and perhaps it does
the same with non anglo keyboards, you would get
regular crashes or just lose useability of the
keyboard under the dos shell. Many function keys
become regular characters or funny looking stuff
and most of the keyboard is useless except
alt ctrl del which seems to still work.
I don't think microsoft has made any fixes on
it for years. Instead of fixing it they are
flushing it.
No... you are wrong sir... it is not there. Command.com runs on top of Windows to give you a shell, but nothing is loaded at startup now. No config.sys drivers, no autoexec.bat, and no Command.com. Take a good look at the PSP and you'll see that.
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
I've done this, and you don't quite get a Dos prompt... there is infact much more to it as it in turn calls vmm.vxd (I think that is right I did this several months ago) and then you get a dos prompt, BUT it doesn't do you any good. It's really a stupid prompt that doesn't let you do anything better than the EBD, and most importantly, you still can't get it to read config.sys or boot windows from that prompt. This is the problem that I was having with SoftIce. Until NuMega comes out with a newer version, I won't be ussing their debugger. Most companies that are affected by this fundamental change in the way windows handles are already aware of this and need to step up to the plate and make changes or just not support Me. The 9x codebase is dying anyway, so what is the one version that they don't support going to cause?
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
No, no, no... This is not the case. First of all Command.com is NOT DOS (This is not directed at you, but is a general response to all the inaccurate posts I've seen). It is only the shell. The former IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS of < Windows 95 were changed to hide DOS. The intent was to remove it then, but this broke to many programs of the time that relied on MSDOS.SYS to be there. The result is that MSDOS.SYS became an INI file with a .SYS extention. This is also why it has to be a certain size as indicated by the blocks of X's at the end of the file. With Me, DOS is completely removed. IO.SYS is nothing more than a loader, but that would be like saying Redhat is still using LILO... can't they get rid of it. IO.SYS does not provide the same funtionality that it used to.
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
Umm, ever heard of a rescue disk? That disk Windows asks you to make upon installation?
Yeah. Try that.
Compatibality done backwards.
Gilad.
cd "Program Files"
start "\My Documents\foo.doc"
I think there is a more sinister reason. This IS Microsoft after all. Could this have to do with gaming? Time to force EVERYONE to write games to Windows API's and then in 3 years when xbox ships all the Windows games vendors can port easily to the platform. Or MSFT will list all game vendors for the PC as building for xbox because they were sent free (non-functional) SDKs since they all now have to license MSFT's software to write games? MSFT can now track the competitions product sales and use xbox "upgrades" to keep ahead of the others. After all, a PC turned into a game console is not a PC so the courts can't touch it.....
Sorry, there is a reason for this and it isn't because MSFT wants to build a better product or that "the customer" has asked for this. The press will hear these things but they aren't why MSFT is pulling the covers over DOS.
IMHO.
Any other ideas?
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The biggest stability problem for Windows, especially Windows NT, is device drivers. Video drivers in particular are renowned for their BSOD prowess. NT doesn't have a Safe Mode but you can boot up with just a VGA driver for exactly that reason.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
> Every time I try to type mode co80 at the logos.sys (It is now safe to switch off your computer) screen, my computer always loses power before I can finish typing.
Try turning off power management in the BIOS, lemme know if this works. I suspect not, it probably issues a HALT or something.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Most of my friends using Windows as their main platform have long since upgraded to W2k. It's more than compatible enough with older MS OSes already. It runs Transport Tycoon, so it supports DOS with VESA, it runs all DirectX games we've cared to throw at it without problems. The only difference from older Windowses is that it is a lot more stable. (I still get the occassional BSOD, but that apparently never happen when I'm not around. Figure. :-)
I would have upgraded to W2k for gaming myself, if it wasn't for the annoying fact that it requires just those few MBs of diskspace too much to fit on my current windows partition.
Oh. It's possible to boot W2k from regular LILO as well. Works like a dream. :)
- the Crazy Fraggle
It's not that you can't get a DOS prompt - you can - but more that they've done much to stop the "it's a 32-bit GUI running on a 16-bit shell written for 8 bit hardware...."
Having said that, quite what WinME offers that W2K doesn't, apart from pricing, I don't really know.
I guess it depends on whether WinME will require WDM drivers or not - after all, one of the primary problems with W2K is that much legacy hardware is flat out not supported, due to cobwebbed 16-bit drivers, which may or may not install in WinME.
And finally, StarDock's WindowFX looks MUCH cooler in W2K than anything else...
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Peter
"Windows ME is essentially Win2k pro with the 98 kernel"
Not really. It's more like the 98 kernel with the W2K shell. And there's a WORLD of difference between the two.
You couldn't chop out the kernel of W2K and replace it with 98's kernel - they're just too architecturally different.
It's 98 with no boot-to-dos functionality and the W2K shell.
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Peter
There's a new search gizmo, which is better. You get alpha blending, which means your menus can fade in and out.
Obviously a new-ish icon set has appeared, and the networking has been replaced with the My Network Places paradigm.
If they transplant the W2K shell wholesale,
All of this is just chrome.
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Peter
CMD.EXE is the recommended command processor to use under NT.
And it can do tab-completion of filenames, too.
Exercise for the reader:
Use REGEDIT.EXE to find a key called "CompletionChar", set the value to 9 (ASCII for "TAB") and bob's yer uncle.
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Peter
Check out the way you can type anything into the address line of the taskbar in w2k. How about typing most anything into the Address line of ie.
The command line isn't going away.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
Hmm, since the last DOS game I played was Duke Nukem 3D, I'd say that DOS gaming is pretty much dead. Has there been a major title released for DOS in the last 3 years? Not that I can remember, so I highly doubt that MSFT has any designs on the gaming market with this move.
In my opinion, Windows ME is for people who want to run crappy programs on new PC's. If you wanted to run good programs on a new PC, you'd run Windows 2000. Win2K doesn't work well with some older games, but it works fine with most newer ones. I've played Rogue Spear, Age of Kings, Diablo, Diablo II, Unreal Tournament, SimCity 3000, Jedi Knight, Quake 3, Alpha Centauri, and many others on my Windows 2000 box just fine. I'd say that covers many of the "must-have" games for the last 2 years or so.
If you can give up your DOS programs, Windows 2000 is the way to go. I was a hardcore DOS user back when Windows 95 came out. I refused to adopt it until well into two years after it's debut, simply because it was too slow, and I had DOS down to a science. That said, I haven't tinkered with an autoexec.bat or a config.sys in a long while, other than to make a DOS boot disk with network access here at work. I'm betting that 99% of Windows users will never need or miss DOS from their machines.
The only places DOS is really needed are shops that run DOS programs from 1992. You'll find a lot of places with some proprietary ISA card which uses some ancient DOS program, all manufactured by a company that is out of business or hasn't updated their software in five years. The solution is simple here, DON'T UPGRADE!
That's right, don't upgrade to a new machine. I've got a few of these situations here at work. Try finding a new machine with ISA slots from Gateway or Dell. You can do it, it's just a pain.
If your program was written 5 years ago to run in DOS, does it really need a Gigahertz Pentium III? No. Use your old boxes until they die, then find another old box. Upgrade to a different product, or insist that the vendor produce a 32-bit version of their software. Whatever you do, don't buy a brand new PC and then try to run your ancient software on a shiny new OS.
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
I've taken a look at a WinME beta, and command.com is still there, it still runs on top of it, you can still start the ms-dos prompt from inside windows, it's just you can't get the dos prompt by itself. They've gone out of their way to turn that off.
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I'm a Brit... :)
Over here, the initials ME stands for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (Chronic FAtigue Syndrome to most people these days).
I'm just wondering if MS have named the latest windows, and let people know that it's just a tired old kernel that doesn't feel alive much, and just wants to lie down and go slow..
Malk
There is a tweak to enable tab completion in cmd.exe too. There is also popup command histories and everything. If you want to know more, email me.
~GoRK
I wish I'd have seen this when it was fresh. Perhaps my comments could have made it to the top. The person who submitted this to slashdot is *obviously* not a MS beta tester, or else he would have known the answer to his own gripe. Thus he probably has "secured" his copy illegally and even though it IS microsoft, I don't think he has any room to gripe. 1) WinME is the (purportedly) final step towards bringing consumer windows (3.1/95/98) into sync with the NT kernel (3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, 2000) With this comes the obvious (and necessary) absolution of the GUI as essentially an application on top of DOS. DOS applications run in VM's just like in NT and OS/2. 2) The filesystem is the same FAT32 we've always had access to. If you boot to DOS (more on this later) you will have access to all the files. WinME *DOES NOT BREAK* the vfat or usmsdos filesystem drivers!!!! 3) WinME uses the NT Bootloader *WHICH CAN BOOT DOS, LINUX, AND BEOS FROM NATIVE PARTITIONS!!!!!* or it can boot seperate windows/dos versions from the same partition. Seen the 98/2000 dual boot configs? How about a 98/ME/2000/Linux running all off of one VFAT partition. It's not that difficult! I cant honestly believe that this thing was posted (boy there is always someone to make that same complaint every article isnt there?). Windows was never supposed to BE dos. Ever. Now that they've finally seperated the two, complaining "I can't boot DOS!!!" is totally idiodic and stupid. It's not the same OS, for god's sake. If you want to boot DOS, install DOS! I should also note that there *is* a recovery command prompt in WinME (It's also there in Win2K) where you can boot up to a 32bit command prompt and run Win32 CLI binaries without having to fire up a GUI. This is the same interface that Embedded NT and Embedded Windows2000 use when you don't need/use GUI support. ~GoRK
Folks,
I think this whole issue is a tempest in a teapot.
The reason is simple: there is this program called Partition Magic that allows you to run FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS, Linux EXT2, etc. on the same hard drive. I'm sure the publisher of Partition Magic will update the program so Windows ME users can also load a second operating system on the same drive on a different partition such as commercial Linux distributions. I won't be surprised that Caldera will release an update to OpenLinux e-Desktop 2.4 that does this.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
People have been screaming for YEARS, ever since Win95 was released that it was "just" DOS with a pretty face and how it still had 16 bit code and this and that...
They finally remove it and now it's a completely different story. It's a conspiracy.
Sheesh.
I was under the impression that their official line was that 98SE was going to be the last iteration of non-NT Windows. I thought ME was some sort of fat-free version of 2000, without a lot of the Enterprise stuff (networking, security, etc). With all the work they seem to have put into making 2000 a semi-decent games platform, it seems that it would have made more sense to move 2000 towards the consumer, rather than 98 towards the entrprise. You know, without the 800 MB installation footprint and 128 MB RAM requirements.
But instead it's just another Win98 sibling, 98TE maybe. I guess Win98 is too lucrative a platform to let go of. Oh well...
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
You can still set BootGUI=0 but Windows doesn't pay much attention. You still end up in the GUI.
As far as I can tell it makes no difference whatsoever.
It's a pretty pathetic excuse for a command line compared to, say, bash, but you can do what you ask.
Type
cd "c:\program files"
and the logical thing will happen.
The problem, of course, is that the long directory names they use are too hard to type, and there's no shortcut mechanism at all - you can't hit tab to complete the name, and you can't say "cd \progra*" to have the shell expand the name, because there's no file name expansion.
Ironically enough, for a lot of those file names, typing
cd c:\micros~1
would be easier. Unfortunately, NTFS is a "real" file system, so that won't work if you're using it (as I am on my NT system).
Hope that helps; I do 99% of my work in Linux, BeOS or MacOS nowadays, but I remember all too well the days when I had to use a Windows system all the time.
D
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I looked for it on my NT Server 4.0 system and it wasn't there - is this new for Windows 2000?
Maybe it really is time to upgrade, although all that silly fading in and out stuff drove me bats when I saw it.
D
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Wow, it works!
Wonder why they didn't just make that the default.
D
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NT on RISC used SoftPC and SoftWindows 16-bit (by Connectix? It's changed hands a few times.) Later on DEC wrote a 32-bit emulator.
NT on Intel's "DOS VM" came out of OS/2 v1, I think. It emulates some of DOS 5.0's system functions, but doesn't do any CPU emulation, of course.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
On my box, WOW doesn't load until a 16-bit app is launched.
And WOW is a safer approach. It translates Win16 calls into Win32 calls. That means that illegal Win16 calls can be caught by the WOW layer and the app can be crashed.
Compare this to 9x's approach. The core OS still contains the whole Windows 3.1 core. The 32-bit stuff is kludged on above, aside, and underneath it with thunking layers. App makes an illegal Win16 call and the OS either crashes or becomes unpredictable. Furthermore, you still may be suseptible to Win16 bugs in the core OS which date back 10 years or more.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I can say "device drivers", and after three years of running NT 4.0 as my primary desktop OS, I never found a non-USB peripheral for which I could not say "device driver".
Sure, there's some consumer stuff out there with no NT drivers (such as parallel port stuff), but it's easy enough to avoid. And I can understand their point of view -- as long as Microsoft hasn't committed to NT as consumer platform, why should they?
(PS: Gaming drivers are an issue, I agree. However, even then NT4 + Matrox drivers were good enough for my modest needs: Age of Empires, SimCity, Quake, etc.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I can say "device drivers", and after three years of running NT 4.0 as my primary desktop OS, I never found a non-USB peripheral for which I could not say "device driver".
Sure, there's some consumer stuff out there with no NT drivers (such as parallel port stuff), but it's easy enough to avoid. And I can understand their point of view -- as long as Microsoft hasn't committed to NT as consumer platform, why should they?
(PS: Gaming drivers are an issue, I agree. However, even then NT4 + Matrox drivers were good enough for my modest needs: Age of Empires, SimCity, Quake, etc.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yup, the Windows NT project started out as a project to rewrite the OS/2 kernel. This was before the IBM-Microsoft divorce, and both companies ended up owning the technologies that they co-developed (OS/2 v1 and Windows v3.0). Consequentially, there's a bunch of OS/2-isms in NT (CMD.EXE, NTFS, the entire SMB networking system, etc.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Right, they planned Plug'n'Play and Power Mangement for NT4, and they just plain missed the feature cut. Fine. That's no excuse for putting the technology on the shelf for four years.
When IE4 and the Option Pack (IIS + Transaction Server) rolled out in 98 or so, there was a lot of compliaints even from the Microsoftie fan base that they really should have shipped NT4.5.
In my view, the only reason they didn't was that they were lying through their teeth about the difficulties they were having with Active Directory, and consequentally the NT5 ship date kept shifiting from 1997 to 1998 to 1999 to finally early 2000.
Basically, workstation users like me got screwed, and server admins got screwed (By NT4+Option Pack's convoluted install process), all in the name of marketing to super huge corporations with thousands of nodes and NDS envy. NT4.5 could have been the "universal OS" -- it certainly would have been a step up from 95/98.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The entire Win32s for Windows 3.1 and Windows 4.x series (95, 98, 98SE, ME) has existed for one purpose: get all applications replaced by Win32 versions and migrate everyone to NT.
The original intent of Win32s and Windows 95 might have been to be a stepping stone to NT, but Microsoft has been strangely really lax about the execution. They've almost purpously kept NT out of the mainstream market by keeping things like Plug'n'Play, USB support, and DirectX on the shelf for 3 to 4 years after the 9x folks got it.
I wonder if this is a situation similar to Apple in the 1980s, where the "Apple II forever" people kept the lineup on the market for years past the point where it was competitive. It's almost as if iinternal forces inside Microsoft are conspiring to keep the 95/98/ME line going, and when upper management looks at the revenue figures, they can't argue.
Don't forget, these guys have a monopoly on the desktop. If they wanted the world to run the NT kernel, they could get us there. Instead, they want to treat Windows 2000 as an upsell and continually pedddling crap like Windows ME. The sell of Windows 95 was "Just like NT, except with backwards compatibility". But now the sell of ME seems to be "Just like 98, except without the backwards compability". Bizarre.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Companies have started creating ROM flash programs that only work in Windows. They don't work in DOS, Linux, et al. I had that problem a while back with a Zoom modem--they're FlashROM updater only worked in Windows.
Now that DOS is going away, more or less, I foresee more and more hardware manufacturers are going to be providing Windows-only Flash ROM updaters. Where does this leave us who don't run Windows and Linux on the same machine? In a lurch, I'd say. When I update stuff now, most of it is in nice DOS-based updaters, and I can boot with a nice DOS 6.22 bootdisk. When the updaters are made to work only in Windows, I will no longer be able to do this. We need to start bugging our hardware providers NOW to either:
The last item was what I had Zoom do for me. I was so indignant that I was going to have to install Windows just to upgrade my modem that the tech support finally suggested they send out a new chip. I still had to crack my case, but at I didn't have to either screw up that Linux machine by putting Windows on it, or crack the case on my Windows box (thereby cracking two cases).
We need to let our hardware manufactures know what OS we run, and start demanding support for it. And we need to give our money to the ones that do support it (i.e., the ones that do more than just putting a stamp on the box saying "Linux-compatible").
Just my $.02
Matt
Matthew Vanecek For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow except me. I'm always getting i
But this change will make some important procedures harder (fixing the BIOS, installing old games, etc.). Microsoft may think that most of their customers aren't doing that; but many of their cutsomers hire people to do that sort of thing (or ask friend to do it for them). This makes dealing with Windows machines even more of a pain than it already is. Of course, since CD-ROMs started being inaccessible from DOS mode under standard Windows installations, DOS mode had gotten significantly less useful anyway.
IIRC, it's an emulation in the sense that DOS is no longer the "guts" of w2k, but DOS is an application that runs over w2k (kinda like a file manager with support for dos commands). I know that's a bit incoherent, but I just got into work, give me a few minutes ;)
Mark Prindle, the most underappreciated genius on the web.
D) You call the DOS prompt a CLI?
You don't call DOS a CLI? Let's break this down...CLI == Command Line Interface. There's no doubt, I'm sure, that DOS is Command Line. If you wish to argue that point, you've obviously not used it. It is also most DEFINATELY and interface, by its very definition. If you put it all together, DOS is a Command Line Interface, or CLI. Now, as to whether or not it's a good one, that's a whole new topic; although, for the system it ran on, it was exceptionally well done.
It makes sense. I don't LIKE it, but it makes sense. MS has been promising to make DOS a thing of the past since 3.1, they've just finally delivered. No more legacy 8 and 16 bit processes should mean more stability. Would you be the one to say that Windows doesn't need all the stability it can get?
As I said, I don't like it, I prefer to do half my work CLI style, but I've seen it coming for 6 years now.
Ah, the PSP. That's Program Segment Prefix, which was (is) used by .EXE programs (but not .COM, DOS makes a PSP for the .COM files at load time.), and can facilitate task switching (TSR style (terminate and stay resident.). The PSP had some other stuff in it, like segment pointers and such, but I don't remember much about it.
:)
.sig
Fellowship 9/11
Not entirely correct....
Win 95 boots from Dos like Win 3.x dose..
From there Win 95 runs Dos in a VM the way 3.x dose..
The diffrence between Dos under Win95 and Dos under 3.x is that Dos on Win95 is hardcoded to boot Win95 automaticly.
This is for two reasons. 1. Present the illusion that Win95 is booted directly, 2. To intigrate Dos and Windows so Microsoft can legally continue to bundle Dos and Windows together as one pacage.
Removing Dos from WinME isn't some evil act.. It's giving the consummer in WinME what they prommised in Win95.
I attribute more mallance and incompatence to Dos being included with Win95 than I do with the exclusion from WinME.
I don't actually exist.
Microsoft has continuously clamed Windows 9x as a compleate operating system but anyone willing to challange Microsoft will notice that Windows 9x runs on top of Dos just as Windows allways has.
:) This can be done with Sys command (if memory serves.. this was a long time ago).
/windows if you can find a program like win.exe... run it... Dose Windows ME boot?
:)
Windows is obsolete. This has been my assertion for a long time. It's not an operating system itself but a batch of enhancments to Dos (multiasker, graphical interface, and network driver...).
As such Microsofts cheaf compeditor wasn't Apple or Linux or IBM but Dubble Dos and Deskview and every Dos enhancment pacage out there.
This being part of why Windows won the market. Why switch to MacOs, Unix or OS/2 when you can continue to use Dos? The industry standard for 10 years...
Microsoft couldn't remove Dos... Dos is what put Windows in the marketplace.
Now Microsoft CAN and they DO. There is no omnus motive to this. So an old obsolete Dos ultility won't work on WinME... blah... LILO still works...
Linux dosn't run under Dos it reboots out of Dos into Linux. UMSdos still works. It just needs the stupid file system nothing more.
My worry isn't that Microsoft removed Dos from WinME. My consern is that 5 years of Windows computer experts successfully ignored it's the fact that it's there becouse Windows is still a Dos App...
The question is.... Did Microsoft really remove Dos or did they just do a better job of covering up it's existence?
Experement... this will mess your Windows up a tad but try this anyway...
Install a Dos upgrade (IBM Dos or DrDos... MsDos upgrade won't do it...) or just install Dos by hand
If it works it'll boot dos... not proff... That's got Dos installed on a Dos FS... like Linux installed.. it may not have been there before...
Then go to cd
Even if it has some nasty behavure and crashes if Win.exe runs and TRYS to boot Windows.. you have your varification... Thow it dosn't boot under any stock version of Dos.. this to be expected... I'm supprised that Win 9x ran fine under Dos 5.x
If however it dosn't even give a graphic "Booting Windows" or anything like that.. Dos really has been removed...
I'm saying all this while I have no access to WinME... so just experement and post responce..
Oh yeah and ummm reinstall becouse nodoupt this'll really mess up Windows
I don't actually exist.
The posting says there is no "pure DOS", not that there is no command shell. I'd be very surprised if WinME had no command shell. Many of the postings are reacting to the absence of a command shell.
win.com is really just another DOS program. Like Windows 3.1, ALL windows up to WinME are just DOS programs. Of course they put the system into protected mode and do all the handling of hardware themselves, but this doesn't change the fact that they still run on top of DOS.
It's not really a bad thing - Netware runs on top of DOS, too.
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you're not listening to anyone, you're just stating the same inaccuracies over and over. I never said that win9x doesn't run directly on the hardware. I actually SAID that it takes control of the hardware. Never mind, it's useless to have a pointless argument with someone who doesn't listen.
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It figures, M$ can't get their lazy ass programmers to get up off their ass and make a OS based on a GUI much less get all the bugs out of it. NT is 6 years old, and STILL has hundreds of exploits, and is closed source. I can only imagine the # of them when they make it open source.
Moderators, please mark this as troll material.
>"Microsoft has the right to produce whatever kind of program it wants to, and we have no right to judge its endeavors."
Actually, we have every right. The quality of a product is judged not by those who develop it but by those who use it.
As far as "backwards compatability" is concerned and as an administrator, I have since win95b considered having to be familiar with winblow$ having to be backwards compatable. Removing this makes dealing with users client machines that much more inefficient and unnecessarily difficult to maintain. All the more reason to use Linux or BSD exclusively.
...Of course I look at the very bright side to this. My company has been replacing Winblow$ and SCO servers for months now with Linux, now is the chance to really make some headway into clients desktop machines.
>when Windows Millennium Edition ships, I'll be standing in line for my copy.
That makes one of us.
>and I'm not going to pretend I'm some how more important than Bill Gates.
You've got to be kidding. This isin't actually *too* bad. it does *kind of* look like a fear tainted/ignorant newbie point of view. on the other hand though, it is pretty ignorant....definitely thinly veiled troll material.
-- "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."- Albert E.
Windows Millenium, n. : 64 months of work to clean up the 32 bit graphical shell for the 16 bit extensions to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit processor, by a 2 bit company that doesn't have one bit of respect for its customers, and will stand for not a bit of competition.
At the post office, DOS is where most of the record keeping is done. They are still using W95, and see no need to go to 98. I'd rather work in DOS than Windows. DOS is stable, and doesn't make you jump through a bunch of hoops. So goodbye DOS. This just make Windows even more boring. OSX and Linux is the way to go for me.
AT the post office, the real heavy lifting is done in QNX.
photosMy Photostream
It's based on NT, not DOS. They started trying to merge the two but moved more in the NT direction - remember, it was supposed to be the next NT? Well it's running on NTFS, not VFAT as far as I know. UMSDOS based 'OS's might be able to run if you make a VFAT partition - I believe NT can read VFAT. Anyone know for sure? That's as much as I know.
-Leo
I don't understand the complaint. For years, people have been complaining that "Windows 9x is just DOS with a fancy GUI." Now that Microsoft has removed DOS, people are STILL complaining about it. My take is this: If you need DOS, don't install WinME. Microsoft isn't twisting your arm and forcing you to upgrade. You can only maintain backwards compatibility up to a point. After that, it's legacy code and needs to be dropped or replaced.
I see this in my business (network engineer) constantly. People always want the newest and best, but they don't want to upgrade everything. They insist on running Windows 2000 but they refuse to upgrade the 486 they're trying to install it on.
If you have software that requires DOS, you either get new software or keep using DOS. Why would you upgrade one and not the other?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
CMD.EXE starts the Windows NT command interpreter, while COMMAND.COM starts NTVDM - the NT Virtual Dos Machine. I guess that there are probably diffrences between the two, but I'm usually running CMD or bash.
Couldn't they have accomplished what they wanted and still gave us a CLI.
I mean I prefer using the CL for text searching and a number of other things.
> They announced two years ago that they would be removing DOS mode.
Actually, they announce it every time they come out with a new version.
The question is, did they really remove it this time, or just hide it better?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> I can see it now, if they had left dos in then the story would read "Microsofts 20th attempt at a graphical OS still relies on the command line".
Actually, many of us are perfectly happy to run a GUI that is layered on top of a "command line OS".
The reason for any such cynical headlines that you suggest would be that MS has previously lied about removing DOS from Win9x, and got caught out at it. If they are lying again, we'll probably see headlines very like what you suggest.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> They would love to dump Win9X and significantly cut down on their development costs, as well as deliver a more stable product to their customers.
Interesting. I had always assumed that they didn't really want to dump it at all. It is essentially paid for, and they darn sure aren't putting much into it for the returns they're getting on it. (Didn't we hear of a proposal to re-introduce Win 3.1 as a device OS last year?)
Nor did stability ever seem to be of much interest to them, until Linux started breathing down their neck. (Or, more correctly, until the media noticed the difference and started commenting on it.)
> Just like any other vendor with a large installed customer base, they are a slave to backward compatability.
Yes, it's a regular albatross.
OTOH, the real issue is the APIs. It seems that you could retain the API and change out everything underneath, and the customer would hardly know the difference. And if you needed/wanted to change the API, you should be able to run two APIs (call them "old" and "new") on the same platform, and warn everyone that "old" is no longer supported after such-and-such a date.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
People have been screaming at MS to get rid of the remnants of DOS for YEARS. So, they finally did it, in preparation for merging the Win2k/Win98 lines, and now you're saying this is some kind of conspiracy against BeOS? Come on, if Microsoft really wanted to kill Be, they could buy and sell the company several thousand times over. But, to be honest, they couldn't care less.
The question is, did they really remove it this time, or just hide it better?
Apparently, all they have done is modified IO.SYS to always invoke WIN.COM, instead of COMMAND.COM like it used to. I'm curious as to what would happen if you replaced WIN.COM with a copy of COMMAND.COM.
All the old standbys used to test Win9X still crash WinME, from what I understand. If you fire up a DOS debugger and overwrite the first 64 KB of memory with zeros, the system will halt instantly. Why? Because Windows still depends on the real-mode DOS kernel for certain critical tasks.
Granted, WinME has not been released yet, and this is third-hand information, so take this with a good amount of salt. But extrapolating from Microsoft's past performance, I think this is a safe bet.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
DOS should not be loading before Windows. It shouldn't, I'm happy it's not, it's excellent that they've pulled out yet another layer of headaches, huzzah.
The problem is, they didn't pull out DOS. By all reports, WinME still uses the real-mode DOS layer to boot and for various critical system operations. Microsoft has cut back on their DOS habbit, but they haven't kicked it.
All Microsoft has done is modify the real-mode startup code to always load WIN.COM (or its moral equivalent), rather then giving you the choice between WIN.COM or COMMAND.COM like it used to.
Hardly the picture of progress some make it out to be.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The former IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS of pre Windows 95 were changed to hide DOS.
...
MS Windows 95 was basically MS Windows 4.0 and MS-DOS 7.0 packaged together. DOS 7.0 was modified such that after processing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, it automatically invoked WIN.COM. (There were other changes, but they aren't relevant to this discussion.) Once Windows was actually up and running, you saw some real changes over Win 3.x, but early on, the boot process is almost exactly the same.
The intent was to remove it then, but this broke to many programs of the time that relied on MSDOS.SYS to be there.
That is bordering on Microsoft propaganda. Some of those programs that "relied on MSDOS.SYS to be there" include COMMAND.COM and WIN.COM, I've found.
When MS was getting ready to release Windows 95, there was still a lot of hardware out there that needed real-mode DOS device drivers to work. If Microsoft got rid of DOS completely, all that hardware would be non-functional until new device drivers could be written. That was one of the biggest problems with OS/2, and Microsoft knew it. So, instead, they kept the existing system of loading Windows on top of DOS, complete with backwards compatibility with drivers loaded in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.
(There is also a good deal of real-mode DOS activity even after Windows 4.0 is running, but for the sake of brevity, I'm ignoring that here.)
If you edit MSDOS.SYS to include the line BootGUI=0, then Windows 95 and 98 function exactly like the old DOS+Win 3.x combination did. You boot to a command prompt, and can start Windows by invoking WIN.COM.
With Me, DOS is completely removed. IO.SYS is nothing more than a loader
This, again, borders on Microsoft propaganda. DOS isn't completely removed in WinME. Instead, the DOS kernel (such as it is) was modified to ignore CONFIG.SYS and COMMAND.COM, and instead start the Windows 4.X boot process immediately.
Rest assured that the real-mode DOS kernel is still present, functional, and quite critical in Windows Millennium.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Many motherboard manufacturers (and other hardware manufactureres) use BIOS update utilities that can only be run from MS-DOS. They will not work from within a command prompt running within Windows, these utilities require that the user reboot, hit F8, and go to the command prompt without loading Windows in order for the utility to work correctly. If the update utility malfunctions in the middle of the flash update, it could leave the system completely dead until the BIOS chip on the board is replaced.
Clearly, this step by Microsoft was inevitable, as the reason why the Win9x/ME series has so many stability problems is because it runs on top of legacy MS-DOS and Win 3.x code. (Try using Nuts & Bolts or some other utility to look at the running processes that don't show up when you press Ctrl-Alt-Del -- major parts of Windows 9x/ME are still 16 bit code.) This legacy code has no memory protection (very bad, especially when the legacy code is part of the OS core), switches the system from using preemptive multitasking to cooperative multitasking - causing more performance problems and stability problems, and is a major headache for everyone from customers to Microsoft to Linux hackers.
Microsoft has been looking for years for a way to get rid of all this legacy garbage, and it appears they have finally found the way to wean users off of old 16 bit code and move them permanently to the NT/2000 kernel. The hardware manufacturers are going to have to rewrite their update utilities so they can run within Windows, but in the short term, everyone is in for some major headaches.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
You can still do this, you just have to create a Startup Disk (or just use a pre-existing Win98 boot disk)... Microsoft didn't really get rid of DOS, they just tried to hide it. Their explanation is something along the lines of "less confusion for beginning users"...
But isn't it still a shell over 20 year-old DOS code, just now without access to the underpinnings of the shell?
No, it's not, and hasn't been since windows 3.11. Dos is to windows as lilo is to linux, with one exception- In windows, if you have some freaky disk hardware without drivers, you can access it through the dos/bios combination. In linux, you're just stuffed....
If I have a program (msdos) sitting in memory, does that mean that everything else is just a shell on top of that program? Rubbish! Gfunk007
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Well shoot, I guess I should lay off the cough syrup then, coz I've done it hundreds of times. Guess that makes me a newbie too, huh?
Gfunk007
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Microsoft uses dos to boot windows: "Microsoft sre shit, they still have msdos in windows"
Microsoft get round to writing a non-dos bootloader (and lets face it that's all it has been for the last 5 years): "Microsoft only did it to make it hard for Linux users. It's a conspiracy! They should have left dos support in!"
I love you guys, I really do. You guys remind me that comparitively, I actually am somewhat grounded in reality.
Gfunk007
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Well not exactly I doupt my PIX will run 8bit code as future 64 bit intel won't even run 32 bit code right. (it'll run it, but as an emulation)
Okay, maybe I'm just using the Wacky Edition of Windows ME, but I can still get into a DOS prompt the same way I always do:
Click on the Start Button.
Choose Run.
Type "command".
Press Enter.
Shazam! It's a CLI!
This is a monumentally stupid move. Who is taking marketshare away from MS? Linux (and probably OS X soon). And if you asked a random person to characterize Linux and OS X:
Linux: That command line thing
OS X: MacOS with a command line
All the up-and-comers have command lines--in fact, all up-and-comers are BASED ON command lines with a removable GUI. MS is apparently trying to steal from Apple's idea file again, but accidentally went into the archive vault to do it.
Ahhh, well. I'm sure there are people who are praising this idea as a "quantum leap forward". I'll be running circles around them computationally--in the Internet world that's darwinian death.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I don't see why this would affect BeOS, unless they changed the structure of the VFAT filesystem. The BeOS installer, at least with the Linux-friendly version, is a boot disk, and the Be filesystem resides on the Linux ext2 filesystem. It doesn't use Linux OS services at all, and Linux isn't running. I'd imagine it works the same way under Windows.
--
It is still easy to find major pieces of software that don't support NT/2000. First off, unless you are using DirectX, USB or PnP, porting anything that runs on Win95 to NT 4.0 should be trivial, and yet many companies still don't do it. Now aside from the fact that most developers are idiots, the main reason for this is probably that there just isn't much demand for it.
:(
I've kept Win9X installed on my machine for years for the sole purpose of playing games (and other software packages) that don't run on NT. I'm hoping this will get better with Windows 2000 to which I am slowly migrating, but I'm currently having difficulty getting even all the stuff I ran on NT to work on W2K...
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Sure we do. We call it a review usually. They are about the only form of feedback we have to Redmond. Given that PCs will ship with Windows ME, whether we use something else or not, it won't be noticable enough to their bottom line for all UNIX-like users to refuse to buy it. But we can still raise a stink on the 'net and point to the features we don't like. Goading MS into making a system that we'd actually want to use should be considered a good thing.
Now, this new feature doesn't actually sound like a bad thing. They've been saying they'd do this for a long time; good for them that they finally did. One poster seems to misinterpret this as the end of the command prompt, but that's not what this is
MS Marketing Manager: This is terrible! Everyone is so concerned about DoS attacks! (turning to engineer) do we have DOS available in Windows?
Engineer: Well... sure... We've had the ability to run exclusively in DOS since Windows 95.
MS Marketing Manager: ARG!! Well... as of the next version you must remove the ability to run in DOS mode! That way we can be DOS free in our marketting literature!
;)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Is there any evidence that the actual architecture of the system has changed? I'm very dubious; I suspect all that has happened is that they've removed the options to boot into DOS mode...
:-)
(And hence not the "end of Windows over DOS", obviously. That's Just What They Want You To Think
(Score:6, Poetic)
I have an old MSN CD-rom sitting around for this very purpose.
Adam
...not exactly. Ever tried running a glibc 2 binary on a system with only v1 libraries?
Yeah, yeah, I know - we have the compat libraries but I think the point is still valid.
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Light him on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life
OHMIGOD, Microsoft has finally lived up to a promise from many years ago and removed support for MSDOS? Those bastards!
</SARCASM>
This is about a non-story if I ever heard one. On the one hand, MS is blasted by the non-MS community for maintaining legacy 16-bit code. Then, when finally cutting it free, the same community suddenly realizes that they've been benefitting from the old 16-bit code and throws a hissy fit. You can't have it both ways.
All this really means is that people will need to keep old boot diskettes around, or perhaps look at creating a boot floppy using FreeDOS. If it doesn't work now with FreeDOS, I suspect that it could certainly be made to given the proper impetus. In any case, it hardly means the End Of UMSDOS And BeOSfs Over Vfat, as the title of the article suggests.
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"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
IIRC, you could still go to start->shutdown and reboot to MS-DOS mode. The disadvantage is of course that now you have to boot windows and then shut it down before you can run a DOS program. My bets are also on some undocumented switch in MSDOS.SYS to turn back on the command prompt options
If nothing like that exists, I would imaging it'd still be possible to hexedit IO.SYS into doing what you want to do, or maybe even something as simple as replacing COMMAND.COM with 4DOS would let you do it.
-Dave
i think this anti-linux conspiracy paranoia is going a bit far this time. microsoft has promised to do away with dos, and they've finally delivered. i'm sure linux installers aren't the only programs affected. however, the end result is a far more stable operating system. most of what i've heard about win-me has been quite postitive.
-ajd
Also, hiding DOS gives them the ability to spin the media nicely: "The first Windows without DOS." I bet that works very well.
That would have been Windows NT, chum.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Please moderate this up. A post of sanity among the crap that is /.
--------------------------
Under the Aug-95 version of windows 95, it was possible to boot to your old version of DOS. You could also boot up under dos 7 (win95 dos) and then start up windows 3.1 It worked beautifully. In fact I had my system set up to do just that.
But then M$ came out with OSR2. In addition to all the positive new features, such as fat32 support, were two "features" that made me want to kill some redmondites. They disabled the ability to boot from another version of dos, and they went out of their way to break win31 compatibility.
You could still set up a menu to try and boot to a previous version, but it would break the first time you used it, forcing you to use a dos71 boot disk and sys your C drive with it.
As for the win31 compatibility, M$ messed up dos71 so that it would HALT YOUR SYSTEM whenever it detected you trying to use win31. It would come up with a message saying that this version of windows was not compatible with your system yada yada yada. Ctrl-alt-delete wouldn't reboot you either, you had to hit that reset button or cycle the power.
Turns out there was nothing "incompatible" about dos71 and win31. I quickly determined that they had modified io.sys. When I pointed this out in a newsgroup I got a few trite remarks back and one good one. Some bright person had modified io.sys so that it wouldn't halt your system. He pointed out his webpage which held the patch needed. When I used it on my io.sys, win31 worked just fine.
So don't be too suprised about anything M$ does that isn't in the best interest of their customers, or a segment of their customers. Monopolies view their customers as a resource to exploit. Companies in competitive markets see their customers as their most precious resource. One that must be preserved and positively encouraged to stick with the company because they can always take their business somewhere else.
I had just about forgotten how bad the personalities behind M$ really were, then I saw this. The only reason they have for doing this is so they can shove win32 down the throats of more people and lock out access by competing products.
You'd think with the lawsuit that they would have learned something. Guess again. Actually that is a good thing becuase it means they intend to continue doing the kinds of things that got them in trouble in the first place. One way or another they will destroy themselves in the process.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Microsoft is trying to push pure windows because it is something that they purely control. The next step will be to do away with 9x altogether and go straight to NT. This puts M$ in a strong position of influence over developers both inside and outside the company. Why? Because M$ soley controls and defines the win32 api. That means that if you develop for windows, M$ is who you have to deal with. Borland has to play nice with M$ to get the information they need to create their compilers. Imagine the runaround they must get from the redmondites. M$ could easily install hidden calls that only they could make use of. Calls that are faster or offer more functionality than publicly documented ones. Many people believe they have done this already. I for one would bet money they have.
Basically the point I'm making is that by eliminating a customer's ability to run something M$ doesn't have direct or indirect control over, they are securing their chokehold on the desktop.
I'd hardly call this a good thing.
Thank God for people like Stallman and Torvalds. Without them we'd all be stuck using OS/2. (Now don't get me wrong, I loved OS/2, but its no Linux.)
As it stands right now, no one uses real mode drivers except when necessary. If someone is using oakcdrom.sys with mscdex, it means their system is running in MS-DOS compatibility mode and they don't know how else to get the cdrom running.
Win9x doesn't even parse config.sys or autoexec.bat unless they're something in them to begin with. Want to make sure you're only using super high performance 32bit drivers? Make these files 0 length. Chances are you won't see any difference because the only drivers that would be in config.sys or autoexec.bat are ones you specifically put there yourself, or were put there by a dos based program.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I don't remember suggesting that M$ applications were better. Before you can call something better, you've got to have something to compare it with.
What I did do was accuse M$ of creating hidden features in windows to give their own applications an artificial advantage.
This accusation is not new, its been around for some time now.
So you claim to work for M$ in the OS division. Maybe you do. I also may have been wrong in my assumption that M$ was guilty of creating a double standard through manipulation of the API.
But tell me this, are your application divisions partitioned off from your other divisions? Do they enjoy access to priviliged information (or the people who created that information) that other outside developers do not?
I know if I were running a multifaceted enterprise such as microsoft, I'd want my divisions to be able to benefit from each other's knowledge as much as possible. Duplication of effort is money down the drain, as well as time wasted. When two groups don't work together they can go in mutually exclusive directions, creating even bigger problems.
I'd have a hard time believing that M$ would completely separate its divisions and not allow them to share information in a manner authorized by management. To do so would put them on a level playing field with other application developers. Gates wouldn't want that because it would be giving an advatage to the enemy.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
and if you believe the rumours...
12 is linux.
(HPUX that is)
No it most certainly does have a command prompt.
So there making you pay for someting you can get for free from cygnus? I have all that stuff under NT. Cygwin is great!.
No, no, no. NT/Win2000 supports longer filenames than does DOS, so it should read: "away from the crap that is DOS to the fecal_putrescence that is NT/Win2000".
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
NT on RISC used SoftPC and SoftWindows 16-bit (by Connectix? It's changed hands a few times.) Later on DEC wrote a 32-bit emulator. ;)
That might be what I'm thinking of. I just remember reading that Microsoft bought the DOS emulator in NT, and that it emulates DOS 5. Since NT4 still seems to emulate DOS 5, I assume that it hasn't been updated. But then, no one uses DOS for anything anymore, right?
NT on Intel's "DOS VM" came out of OS/2 v1, I think. It emulates some of DOS 5.0's system functions, but doesn't do any CPU emulation, of course.
I also seem to remember that OS/2 v3 was renamed Windows NT at some point during development (and changed to a Windows product, of course...) so you could be correct.
Emmm Windows NT runs what is little more than a DOS emulator. It is DOS in a protected environment
Yes, NT's DOS is emulated. And Microsoft didn't write the emulator, either. They bought it from some company (forget the name) for NT3.1, and as far as I can tell it hasn't been updated since then.
I don't see why loadlin, beos, etc need DOS mode anyway. An executable is an executable...it can still kick out windows and start clean.
But a processor mode is not a processor mode. Loadlin, at least, requires the processor to be in real mode to start Linux. If Windows has already switched the processor into protected mode, it can't run. I'm not sure exactly why this is, but that's the way it works currently.
It's not that the linux kernel runs in real mode, but loadlin needs the processor to be in real mode in order to load the linux kernel into memory. Then, the kerrnel does switch to procected mode. I don't know exactly why this is or if it really necessary (though I assume it is) - this is just the way things stand currently.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
On the other hand, loadlin doesn't actually use DOS anyway -- it just unloads Windows and loads up a Linux kernel... I can only imagine that this would still work under WinME, since it is not a protected OS like WinNT.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
exactly. sun systems dont have a BIOS. in fact, nothing has a BIOS except PCs. the only reason for the BIOS was DOS - which cant do anything without a BIOS since its just a glorified file loader. most modern systems all have boot PROMS..most of em with their own language (forth in the case of sun) which you can actually code in to change the boot process. BIOSes suck - the faster we get rid of em the better. linux/bsd/most nixes/NT dont use em anyway (SGIs NT workstations all use boot PROMs).
I don't know if umsdos based linux distros really won't work on Windows ME, but I can only hope so! Linux deserves its own partition. Introducing people to a crippled version of Linux is what makes them prefer Windows.
Anyway, implying that this whole thing somehow is a plot by Microsoft to fight Linux is just silly.
Anyway, we'll know soon enough if that works. Retail WinME will be released in September.
Hands in my pocket
I have BETA 3 from my MSDN subscription. It's win.com and a DOS kernel, just like Win 95 and 98.
Hands in my pocket
MS would add any feature the people wanted
Heh, well I don't know about that, there is more than one person that wants windows to be stable and not crash as much and they sure haven't implemented that "Feature"
Then again.. if they did that.. why would people pay for "Service Packs" and so forth?
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Win 98SE, Win95OSR2.. Win98 and WinME for that matter :)
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For a long time MS has been trying to convince us that the windows9X platform is an OS, which of course it is not. It is a shell. It sits on top of dos and there is a number of old dos real mode drivers etc.. that will run fine in windows.. An old driver to read ntfs partitions under dos is one that I can think of.. dos cd-rom drivers and that sort of thing would work fine too.. To this day Windows98 contains some old 16-bit code.. and will drop into real mode to run old drivers or old software.. One fact lost to antiquity is that from pentium pros onwards windows98 is slower than NT/2000 because the intel processors from that point were optimized for pure 32-bit instructions.. Anyway.. win2k is much better platform IMO.. I'm really happy with it.
Taking out dos windows in winME isn't fooling anyone.
Dumber question: why would you get WinME if you want to run DOS apps? I haven't heard anything compelling about ME what would make me want to install it...in fact, I feel the same way about 98. Win95 is STILL the best 'consumer' OS from MS if you ask me...and don't mind rebooting. All the cool features of 98 + ME are just bs on top of the same old bs.
PC DOS 2000
Kind of ironic that we're blaming MS for removing the "feature" that causes a huge number of bugs and compatibility issues from their OS. Backwards compatibility doesn't last forever; ask anyone who's ever owned a Mac. It's time to move on, folks. This may be a pain for some folks, but if it bothers you that much just MAKE A BOOTDISK.
So what? Who in their right mind would be using Millenium when dos and 9x are being phased out in the first place in favor of Windows 2000? I say good riddence.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
MSK
have fun
dongoodman
And if you needed/wanted to change the API, you should be able to run two APIs (call them "old" and "new") on the same platform, and warn everyone that "old" is no longer supported after such-and-such a date.
They've actually been doing this for a while. A lot of the Win32 API's have the original version and an "Ex" version (i.e., Foo() and FooEx()), with the Ex version being the newer, officially-sanctioned one. They advise newer code to always use the "Ex" API whenever one exists.
The disappearance of the DOS prompt makes it more difficult to install alternative OSes, but there are ways around that. True, you can't run LOADLIN out of a DOS box anymore, but do you really need to? You always have the option to boot from floppies if you don't want to devote a complete partition to your new OS.
(Another problem: WinNT - and I suppose 2000 as well - doesn't allow raw access to the floppy device, so RAWRITE won't work. Solution: use a bootable CD. Your PC can't boot from CD? Then it's probably not worth to run Win2K or ME.)
I believe there's a greater threat: rescue CDs. Nowadays, you rarely get a full Windows CD when you buy a new PC. All you get is media that allows you to restore the PC to its original configuration.
For example: my company-issued laptop has such a rescue disk. I also have an official Win98 CD, but I suspect it won't install without the rescue disk. This disk only allows to choices: either wipe out the whole disk, or only "fix" the C: partition.
My desktop PC (running NT) has a restore medium as well, and that one effectively repartitions the complete hard disk before reinstalling. (For this one, I do need to install from the rescue disk: I tried installing the "official" WinNT CD.)
I have installed Linux on the laptop, but now I'm hesitant to use the rescue disk (in case Windows really gets messed up).
Installing Linux/BeOS/*BSD on the other machine? I don't think so. If I ever need to reinstall NT, I'll lose everything on the disk.
Ironically, these two machines were sold by vendors who claim to support Linux...
WWTTD?
Nobody ever said you could get a funtioning Windows boot off a floppy. Let's read this again...
That's right. DOS.
--
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"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
I mean, nobody ever really uses DOS these days. Almost, if not all, applications have their DOS equivalent under Windows. And if the program you develloped for a company needs DOS to run, then you probably don't need Windows ME anyway. This is a good thing they decided to remove DOS. Besides, Windows NT4 workstation works soooo well. I had only one BSOD in 8 months! And I do some heavy stuff like realtime video effects for a TV Network. I'm pretty sure backward compatibility with DOS is the reason for a certain amount of BSOD. So this should turn out to be a good think. Viva Windows ME. :-\
Of course you can still use a boot disk. ME is just stopping people from being able to use autoexec.bat/config.sys during startup.
Stop worring, 90% of the info being posted here is FUD. I've used the beta. It's basically Windows 98 3rd edition. With the hack out there to uninstall media player 7 and replace it with 6.4, I might actually use it.
Well, I meant that if you had a boot disk it would work; I see your point about MAKING a boot disk via ME. Haven't actually tried that myself.
Dell for example, makes their BIOS boot disks bootable. Guess others will have to start too.
And anyway 'Newbie' and 'BIOS flashing' probably should be used in the same sentence.
A) DOS is gone from WinME. DOS never really was in Win95, it was present, but DOS apps ran in a VM. What Windows ME does is boot straight into protected mode because it helps in booting quickly, and the machine is very vunerable in this state. Also, it gets rid of uneeded code.
B) The legacy 16bit stuff is still there. 8 bit stuff has been gone for a long time. Most Win95 machines rarely switch into real mode unless you're running some funky hardware or software. However, all the 16bit stuff is still there.
C) It doesn't get rid of the CLI. Just like NT, WinME still has a DOS prompt.
D) You call the DOS prompt a CLI?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It's called a VM. If you knew how Windows worked, you wouldn't say stupid stuff like that. Command.com (the DOS prompt) is (and always HAS) run under a virtual machine in Windows 95. The machine operates in protected mode, and run a VM to run the DOS prompt. This is different from the straight DOS prompt which is ACTUAL real mode DOS. Windows 95 has NEVER run on top of DOS. The only DOS code (IE non protected mode) is some funky old drivers. The DOS prompt by itself was the last bits of DOS Win95 had. It was real mode DOS in which the entire machine operated in real mode without a VM. They didn't go out of their way to turn it off, they just got rid of it entirely.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Wrong. WinME doesn't use WOW. WOW is only for "pure" 32bit versions of NT. 16bit processes are handled by the same "24bit" Win95 kernel. 8 bit processes (just like the 16bit ones) are run in a virtual machine just like they always have. The only thing that has changed is that it is no longer possible to take a Windows95 machine into pure real mode DOS (without VM's or protections running.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Okay, now I can officially say that about half the posters on this topic (even the +4's and +5's) have no clue what they are talking about. To put it succinctly
/.
1) It's bfs, not BeOSfs, don't EVER forget that;)
2) MS is not removing DOS comptability. It is simply removing the ability to boot into real-mode DOS. This is a feature that most people don't even use anymore. Unless you've got really old hardware drivers that need real-mode DOS (very rare) you're machine is in protected mode most of the time. Unless you use the "Reboot into DOS" option, you're not missing anything.
3) It is not removing the command line. From inside Windows, everything will still be the same. The DOS prompt will run on top of a VM (virtual machine) just like it always has, you can run DOS applications from the VM, just like you always have.
4) MS is not removing 16bit compatibility. 16bit compatbility has nothing to do with DOS support. Win9x/ME is still the "24bit" 16/32bit kernel.
5) Stability will only improve slightly. In previous versions of Windows, Windows booted DOS first, which then booted the Win95 kernel. WinME boots straight into Win95, so any stability problems that take down you're machine at startup or shutdown will be alleviated.
6) This will have no effect on bfs/vfat or UMSDOS. Those don't actually depend on DOS. The only thing that will change is that you can't use loadlin anymore.
7) This is not some marketing gimmick, or some way to supress CLI users, or anything like that. DOS mode conflicted with some stuff, it made the machine very vunerable at boot, and very few apps actually needed "pure" DOS mode anymore (as opposed to the VM DOS mode, just so we're clear) so Microsoft decided to get rid of it. It certainly doesn't deserve a nearly 700-post barrage on
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Sorry, I mean 16bit real-mode DOS process. The person before me had reffered to this as 8bit, and I wasn't paying attention.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Never goes down? Whichever 1 task you are doing at a time in DOS is going to have the CPU's full attention. This application crashes, you're screwed.
That's stability?
What? I think you had better check that again. I don't know where you read that it was formatted 'using' MS-DOS 5. It may well be that it is identified as being an MS-DOS bootable floppy for compatibility (I don't have one on hand to check) but the boot processes are fundamentally different. The reason you aren't going to find autoexec and friends is because the NT bootstrap code loads NTLDR which then locates NTOSKRNL.EXE. NT formatted floppies cannot be used to boot DOS and have no DOS function whatsoever. They boot a GUI, that's it.
I installed ME on a laptop (runs great), and I noticed that when I went into good old edit c:\autoexec.bat a new one had be made since Win98SE (previous system OS).... Several lines of SET windir, winbootdir, prompt, temp,path, but I dont get this: It has: Set COMSPEC=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM Why is that there if dos is no longer used BEFORE windows is loaded? I need to try putting a 16bit executable into autoexec.bat and see what happens
Well, M$ may decide to drop support for hitting F8 and then selecting "Boot to DOS", but as long as autoexec.bat is still loaded when booting Win ME, there's no problem for UMSDOS distros or loadlin. You may very well place some sort of menu in autoexec.bat/config.sys, so loadlin/UMSDOS stuff will still work perfectly.
Alexander Skwar -- Homepage: http://www.digitalprojects.com | http://www.iso-top.de iso-top.de - Die
Windows ME will still have DOS compatibility. To get rid of DOS would mean to re-write Windows (ala NT). There was an article in PC Magazine or Smart Computing or something I read that said there was a way (undocumented of course) to get to DOS mode. Microsoft is most likley doing this so they can create an illusion of having DOS gone so they can get people used to the "no dos" design of there upcoming OS that will merge Win 9x and NT (2000).
Of course that is just my opinion
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
This is nothing new... I don't have a link handy, but they had mods for apache to allow FP extensions as far back as FP95 I think... I just never installed them because they didn't have them for the DEC Alpha version of Apache...
Though, now that I think about it... they didn't post the source to the patch back then... just a binary only version...
I don't think this is a conversion on M$'s part to the light side of the source... just an acknowledgement of widespread use of non-MS os's as web servers.
I still haven't found a way to switch into direcotires with spaces. the cd "space space" doens't work.
Actually it does work fine, you can even do someting like:
And this will take you to "C:\Program Files"
Still, as another poster said, if you want the CLI on Windows you're better of with a GNU port - maybe bash, or tcsh, or even zsh - you can find all this stuff at my site, mentioned in the sig.
Steve
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Subsystem vendor ID (SVID) interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms: semaphores, message queues and shared memory
You really *DO* live in an MS Only house...
SVID is "System V Interface Definition", and the IPC mechanisms you refer to are often called the "SysV IPC".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Any reason you can't use Cygwin, now owned and maintained by Redhat. From the intro page:
The tools only take up about 100 megs of space and provide you with bash, ksh, and tcsh as shells, and most of the tools you're familiar with in a GNU *NIX environment, including the compilers. They support Win 95/95/NT4.0-sp3 natively, which would lead me to believe you could get it to run on M$ Millenium without too much difficulty. But wait! We're not finished! Would you like a free Xserver for your Windoze boxen? Check this out!
A more informative site on Cygwin, it's current status, new bulletins, FAQs, etc (it's project center site) is as follows:
Enjoy your unholy marriage of M$ and *NIX. ;-) Oh, yeah. Did I mention, it's FREE ! Isn't GPL Licensed software wonderful?!
assert(expired(knowledge));
> Also keep in mind that your config.sys and
> autoexec.bat are not parsed anymore either
Well, autoexec.bat *is* parsed - though only for the environment variables.
Glen Murphy
Cute. Course, MS will make sure that none of the drivers for the latest and greatest hardware works with win 9x two years from now. Sure companies will make strives to maintain support, but it'll eventually fall off. Especially if the drivers are easier to develop under win >= 1000. Just think of all the win-modems that have minimal R&D put into them. (Not that I'd ever buy one of those)
Then, of course, as a developer for a windows market, you'd be crazy to not develop _for_ the new platform. Meaning, you're going to have to have at least some win-me machines. Then, as we typically do, once we start using the newer interface, it'll be hard to go back to the older one ( Just like win95 -> win3.1, or even win98 -> win95 ).
As a disclaimer, I'm biased towards all my OSes. (because they each give me something the others do not).
-Michael
-Michael
"cmd" from the Start/Run dialog will get you into MS-DOS under WinME. Same as NT/W2K.
16-bit drivers and dos mode were cool.
.install.main
Need to load software off the network? Pop in the netware client disk
lsl
pnpodi
ipxodi
vlm
f:
login
I will not upgrade and any computer I get (whether I buy it or build it) will be a Linux only machine from now on. MS stuff just costs too much $$!!!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
This has gotta be one of the stupidest things I have ever heard. Do I have to tell you how many times DOS has saved my ass? "Oops! Some how my registry and half my sys files have been corrupted, better get into DOS mode and transfer that term paper that's due tomorro to a floppy." This has happened more than once. I don't care what anyone says, floppys and DOS are indespensible if you run 95/98/98SE.
Eric
Make it idiot-proof and someone will build a better idiot.
They did promise to put plug and Play into NT back with NT4, they just ran out of time with it. Kind of like whistler. They planned for 2000 to be the universal OS, but they ran out of time, thus it was born.
Microsoft originally planned to dump 16bit code all together with windows 98, but they then decided to try to incorporate it into win32 (to keep the people quiet when they figured out that old apps will no longer work) This is all that ME does, it finally incorporated most of dos into win32, where it can be controlled. Its not always there in the way, can be called and shutdown whenever required, and eventually will not bring down the OS when it crashes. (which whistler is supposed to bring)unfortunally, they had to kill off real mode for 16bit apps.
Actually if you are still using real mode for some of your applications, your probably running hardware that couldn't run Me anyways. This wont run on a 486 anymore guys.
> If Jobs listened only to what people needed,
> maybe he would have incorporated actual
> multitasking - you know, making a system that a
> menu/dialog box cant crash.
That's what he did in 1988 or so with NeXT, what he was brought back to Apple in 1996 to do again, and what he's done with Mac OS X, which goes Public Beta in a month or so. I would argue that Steve Jobs has spent the last 15 years doing just what you say he would be doing if he thought about what people need.
Oh, and one more thing.. I don't have a Win98Me here right now, but could someone check what happens if you put a
- BOOTGUI = 0
in the MSDOS.SYS-file?That is, if MS didn't remove all DOS instances with a "cd
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
They just hid it better, of course. They already have an OS without DOS. WinNT/Win2000 is the direction Microsoft has been dragging their users for a long time. They reall just want people (especially developers) to quit using DOS mode, so they can quit supporting two OS that are very similar on the surface, but considerable different in the kernel. They would love to dump Win9X and significantly cut down on their development costs, as well as deliver a more stable product to their customers. However, their installed customer base isn't willing to give up their backward compatability. So Microsoft hides DOS a little better every version, and tries to only break a few "important" legacy apps each time. Eventually, they will drag their customers away from the crap that is DOS to NT/Win2000. If Microsoft really had total control in the market they would have forced their customers to NT years ago. Just like any other vendor with a large installed customer base, they are a slave to backward compatability.
The real reason for hiding the real mode DOS is marketing. Microsoft can now say even more convincingly: "Look mom, no DOS!".
Actually, I think the purpose of marketing Win9X as not haveing DOS is to get users and developers to quit using it so Microsoft can migrate users to Win2k. It's really in Microsoft's best interest to continue developing both the NT and Win9X kernels, however they need to get the users to buy into it, which has taken a few more revisions of Win9X than were planned.
For the most part I think the market has decided that 32-bit Windows drivers are much better than 16bit DOS ones. However you will always run into the case where some hardware vendor already has a bunch of old 16-bit DOS code which will work for their new hardware. The engineers probably intend to write a 32-bit driver for it eventually, but the current code will work long enough to test the hardware, and as soon as something kinda works, marketing starts shipping it to customers. Try convincing marketing you need to completely rewrite your driver to make it better before you can ship a product. For a lot of Engineers the hardware is the interesting part, they don't really want to work on the driver either. They want to play with the next generation of the hardware.
The result of this is that consumers buy new hardware, which has drivers that work under DOS, and if it doesn't work, they blame Microsoft. After all, if they call tech support they will say it worked under Windows98, just like they said it would. It was that evil Microsoft that went and changed things.
Then again, maybe the hardware vendors have found the drivers are more stable in the 16bit DOS world as opposed to the all encompassing Windows API's where applications and browsers are part of the OS?
I can see how it could be easier for developers to hack together drivers under DOS, however stability is definately not one of the benefits. With DOS drivers you are much more likely to have device conflicts and cause the system to be less stable. Of course a developer can still write a crappy NT driver which will conflict with other hardware as well as crash the system. It's just a lot more obvious that you're doing things in the driver that you shouldn't be doing. You also have a lot more flexability writing drivers with multiple threads and asynchronous I/O which DOS can't provide.
By the way, and I know this may sound shocking, Microsoft really would rather have users running on a real kernel than on DOS. It just makes their software look & run better.
Microsoft's removal of true DOS mode from WinMe is just a response to customer demand. A large majority of technical support calls were from people who didn't understand MS-DOS, TSR drivers, CONFIG.SYS commands, etc. By removing the ability to add anything other than PATH statements to AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS and by removing true DOS mode, Microsoft has immediately eliminated all customer complaints and issues related to poor understanding of DOS mode and proper DOS configuration.
Microsoft isn't trying to bar competing OSes from being able to install. Microsoft is just making its own life easier by removing a large opportunity for unsavvy customers to mess something up. Microsoft is also trying to prepare users for a "no DOS mode" mindset, since the next release of Windows for the home consumer market will be based on the Win2000 kernal.
I think there is a little too much paranoia and whining at work within the Slashdot community over this. Remember, Microsoft doesn't have any obligation to remain backward compatible with anything. If you want to keep running true DOS programs (emus, games, demos, etc), then just stick with Win98 or earlier, or set up a dual-boot system that has a real copy of DOS 6.22 on a separate partition from WinMe.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
Dammit man!! Read the other posts. There's still an "MS-DOS" icon,a nd you can still type "command" to pop up a DOS window. The ONLY thing that is different is that you can't BOOT into a PURE dos...you can't have WinME DOS running with no actual WinME.
/s switch to format..you can't "copy system files."
You still have FULL access to the command line from within windows. I'm on WinME right now - the only difference is the lack of "Reboot to MSDOS" and an "Command Line Only" on the F8 menu. Oh yeah, and there's no more
For all of you nay-sayers who assert that Windows2k doesn't have a DOS prompt, rest assured that there is one there, and you can even boot to it. To boot to it, just hit F8 like you would with Windows98 and you get a menu to choose what mode you want to start in.
To get to a CLI from Windows, just go to START, RUN, then type "cmd.exe" or "command".
-Sean
- Sometimes you're the pidgeon, sometimes you're the statue.
Microsoft's strategy is not to make a faulty Windows installation work by fixing it, you just reinstall everything and get your data back from the backup. It's the same way with Windows ME - and since most DOS games run within a DOS session under Windows, nobody needs this DOS mode except nerds at home...
By the way: Has anyone examined the Windows ME CD? Maybe Microsoft included a bootdisk as supplement, just as Microsoft Fax was a supplement to Windows 98...
Try formatting a diskette with WinNT 4.0 and then check the bootrecord of that floppy. You'll notice that it was formated using MS-DOS 5.0. Their DOS may not be complete, as in lacking autoexec.bat and stuff (the files, not the options they offer), but it sure is as real as it gets.
In the early days I'd open up a DOS box and did 'diskcopy a: b:' or 'scan c:\uploads' and stuff like that because this was the fastest thing to do. When other people finally opened 'my computer' to copy a disk mine was allready reading the sourcedisk. But I guess we now have to adapt to the speed Windows can handle. In this case; slowing down big time.
It's still there: Win-R, command.com and it's c:\ time. As to whether your legacy app will run: if it's reasonably polite and doesn't (for example) do raw hardware access then it probably will. If it's no more than a quivering mound of unstable hacks then you're probably SOL (if it runs under NT then it'll probably also run under Me)
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
Sure we do. We do it all the time, be it in the form of reviews, purchasing the product, etc. You're right in that MS has the right to produce whatever they want, but one would think that they would want to release a product that keeps the consumer happy in order to keep making money.
I'm not going to pretend I'm somehow more important than Bill Gates.
Um, you are more important than Bill Gates. We all are. We don't need him, but he does need us in order to keep making his money. If MS was to go out of business tomorrow, then companies and individuals out there would survive without him. They'd simply find alternatives for MS products. The two credos to keep in mind are, "The customer is always right", and "The customer is in charge".
Just my $.02...
Actually, I forget where the article is offhand (you can probably find it by doing a search on LinuxToday), but according an article reviewing the beta of Win ME, they stated that the only boot disk you can make is one of their rescue disks. The /s switch in format no longer works, and I don't believe there's a "Copy system files" option in the GUI format command.
This is not good, seeing as I can't see newbies trying to flash a BIOS knowing which files to delete off the boot disk to make room for the BIOS image. On the other hand, some recent motherboards (my Epox mobo being one them) do allow you to flash the BIOS via a command option in the CMOS setup...
Just my $.02...
The original intent of Win32s and Windows 95 might have been to be a stepping stone to NT, but Microsoft has been strangely really lax about the execution. They've almost purpously kept NT out of the mainstream market by keeping things like Plug'n'Play, USB support, and DirectX on the shelf for 3 to 4 years after the 9x folks got it.
To me this suggests that Microsoft are maintaining their revenue stream with the win9x line, up until the point at which they believe that they can successfully generate revenue stream from online (.NET) services, rather than continual revisions of software.
In my opinion they have done a rather good job of stretching their revenue generating mechanism, flying in the face of common sense. (win95->win98->win98se is not worth the cost by Microsoft's own standards - look at the cost of win3x to win9x, compared to the cost of win95-win98se, then look at the features. If anything Microsoft are charging more for less, so no wonder Billy G is the richest)
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Just look at the naming scheme:
win 95--end user OS
nt 4.0--server/IT OS (supposedly)
win98--end user OS
win2k--NT 5.0??? how does that fit with their normal naming scheme?
I think they are trying to bring 2000 into mainstream use.
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
I was a ME beta tester (and am running it at the moment), so I can explain the entire thing to you.
The command shell is still available. What you do is that you create a "Boot Disk" from Add/Remove Programs, and then you boot from this disk. There is an option called "Minimal Boot." Select this option, and you will find a small file called FDISK.EXE on this floppy. FORMAT and so on are in the zipped RAMDISK you can get by selecting any of the other menu options.
Not having DOS on isn't a problem at all - BEloader uses a floppy *anyway*, as do most UMSDOS type distros (and there *aren't* any UMSDOS distros - the last one I saw was Slackware a *long* long time ago, and Corel uses a disk image file.) I installed BeOS 5 under *Windows 2000*. The only distro I can see screwed is Corel's image system, but no-one uses that anyway.
In fact, WinME just removes one of the last Windows burdens left. Now all that's left is the Win9x kernel... and that's going with Whistler, thankfully.
It's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\\CompletionChar (No Windows under Microsoft) on my machine.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Thats just silly. Talking about the age of an OS...UNIX is over 30, and so what? How about picking on version numbers? HPUX is on 11!
The bits dont rot if your storage medium has the right stuff.
I won't even get into this murmuring of 8 bit nonsense, and the rest to go with it.
The issue with loadlin, IIRC, is that it's expecting to be running in 16bit realmode. If you have lots of other things loaded, you chance that an interrupt it triggers will be caught by something other than the intended software (the BIOS). Change the processor operating mode, and it's even less likely to operate correctly.
I know I am going to get flamed for this, but for the millions of Windoze users out there this is a good thing. DOS sucks. It is a GOOD thing for Windoze users that Microsoft finaly got rid of it as part of thier OS. Going to an NTish kernel will be much more stable. I too am not to happy about not having the old CLI, but at least I am going to be able to play Unreal with out it crashing on me every hour or so. Microsoft is all about marketshare, and they know that there is still a lot of DOS software out there. I would almost guarentee that a DOS emulator will come packaged with ME. I would hope that M$ would come out with a U*nix CLI one of these days though.
More stability, no nasty DOS CLI. . . fine with "ME"
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Even better, install linux, debian gnu/linux that is!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
How do you enforce a law making it illegal to commit suicide?
Simply! By making such a terrible and henious crime into a capital offense. What about the children!? We simply cannot allow such a bad example to continue!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Why not just make a screen-scraper type proggie that detects and automatically generates a mouse click on every "ok" button that pops up in a dialog box? Nifty, and cool.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Frankly, DOS just don't cut it anymore.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Officially, they claim it isn't, but they probably forgot to remove it from their ftp servers, it's still here.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Boot times are very important when using an OS that requires rebooting every couple hours. Imagine the productivity gains from this upgrade!
Windows ME runs old DOS code, I ran the RC1 and was able to run DOS programs like PKZIP. I just couldn't use the SYS command or the FORMAT /S options. MS disabled them. I'd be willing to bet that third party programs might be able to get around this?
If Apple gets rid of something, it is innovation, but if Microsoft gets rid of something it is BS? WTF? Has the MacJihad gone bonkers?
For more info see JihadSpeak
I for one am glad that MS is making DOS more inaccessible. Thanks to Linux, MS is now under a lot of pressure to develop a great operating system and I've been happy with Windows 2000; it's the first real operating system MS has released. I'm not going to buy winME though because I don't need to since I have Win98SE which can run all the games I have. From now on, I'll only invest in Windows 2000 and Linux compatible games so that one day, I will not have to triple boot Linux/WinNT/DOS and instead only dual-boot. One thing that bothers me a bit though is how we are supposed to use DOS while windows isn't loaded. Sometimes this is neccessary to solve some tech problems like DLL hell. As a help desk person, this matters to me. I'm sure there is a way, otherwise winME may be more painful to use than win98.
Cant you windows guys boot off a CD yet? Sheesh, no wonder everyone freaked out when iMac didnt have a floppy, CD-RW is the future, not floppy. Although it is impressive that you can get functioning windows to boot off 1.4 MB, Just goes to show you dont need all that bloat.
I assume that most of the hubbub here is about the Mac-like interface, that is, no CLI access to anything. Well, it just ain't so.
True, you can't boot to dos mode. I made myself a bootable utilities cd. Asus, the maker of my K7V, has a Windows flash utility now. I've tried it (nervously, I might add) and it worked fine.It has a Win98 command prompt, generic ATAPI cdrom support, and support for lots of SCSI cards. I also have a neat Seagate utility I found on it that can zero out any hard drive, provided you know the number of heads, sectors, and cylinders.
The point is, do you really need a DOS mode? Make one of these cd's. If you need an iso image, I'm sure I could make one available if there were enough demand. I don't know about the legality of distributing such an image, though...
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
I do believe you're losing touch with the DOS world (not a bad thing, mind you). Aren't DOS environment variables enclosed in percent signs rather than preceeded with a dollar sign?
What? Now you all complain because the one thing people have complained most about has been resolved?
For years people have hassled Microsoft because DOS was sitting under Windows 9x. Now Microsoft have created an OS that boots straight into Protected Mode, getting rid of DOS and people complain about it. UNBELIEVABLE! GET A GRIP!
I have been using Windows ME since the early beta's. I have to admit that Windows ME is to Win9x what Windows 2000 was to Windows NT. A huge improvement over the previous versions. Its more stable, faster, and a lot more user friendly. It still runs inside my VMWare without a problem. The driver model is still backwards compatible as well as having the new WDM system improved over Win98.
I can survive using a command shell on WinME the same as I have to for WinNT or Win2K. Even without the recovery console, its still a benefit. As for needing a Win98 boot disk or CD, get your facts straight. Windows ME can still create a boot floppy in exactly the same way you have always been able to in Win9x releases.
DOS is an archaic dinosaur of the past. It does nothing more than slow a computer down. Memory management is close to non-existant, multi-tasking is impossible without Desqview, Windows or some other multi-threaded/tasking application. Hardware support doesn't exist beyond the very bare basics. DOS is not like the great BASH, ZSH, CSH or any of the other popular Unix shells. It is a remnant of an old age when computers weren't much better than a type-writer with a built in calculator.
I for one am glad to be rid of DOS. To the newbie or un-experienced, it is probably the most dangerous place for someone to play. You would not believe the number of people that try DELTREE just to see what it does. For years now we've lived with this dinosaur slowing us down, locking us to a burdened system while we complain about stability and downtime.
I have no problems with WinME and linload. You can still do a multi-config boot system in your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files without any issue. I personally created a config that will load my usual real mode drivers before Windows ME or it will load nothing except linload. This all occurs before Windows ME gets into protected mode and starts loading Protected Mode drivers. Thus, in my view, there is no issue at all there.
Why is it that people are always bitching about improvements and saying "This is Microsofts way of trying to kill off Linux!". Microsoft has been telling us they were intending to remove real mode DOS from Windows for years now. Now that its finally happened, why do we complain? Its never been a secret that it was going to happen.
Stop trying to bash MS for whatever issues you think exist. Get your facts straight before people start flaming MS. Hell, if it wasn't for MS in the first place, the majority of us wouldn't even have PC's the way we do now. MS opened the market up to everyone by providing easy to use OS's and software. Since then the market has opened up to a whole heap of new possibilities. Stop flaming MS unless they do something that is truly wrong or anti-competitive. What they do with their OS's is up to them in the end, but don't flame them for trying to advance them. Getting rid of DOS is a GOOD thing, not an anti-competitive thing.
An AC wonders:
"Why is it the way to go? All it does is remove..."
I say:
I would say a primary reason is filesystem support -- implementing NTFS (a far, far better filesystem than FAT or its friends) in a DOS kernel is probably a lot of work.
"8 bit processes (just like the 16bit ones)"
In all my intel asm travels I've never heard of an 8 bit process. What is this?
The CLI is still available as cmd.exe or command.com.
16 bit windows apps are still available via WOW.
8-bit processes?
The poster is worried that he can't boot to "pure" dos (no memory management, etc). This sucked for me, too, but really it's the way to go.
This isn't just about Microsoft making it harder for their users to run alternative operating systems; it's about Microsoft closing off direct access to a user's own system to the point of forcing the OS to crash before giving the user a command prompt.
Uhhh, who said anything about forcing the OS to crash? Where the hell did that come from? And by the way, someone else pointed out that you can still get to a command prompt by (surprise!) opening a command prompt window.
It sounds like you've never had Windows crash on you before. Here's a pop quiz for you then:
You turn on your computer to find an error message by Windows saying, "An error has been found in your kernel. Click OK to boot from an existing backup kernel or Cancel to attempt to load the kernel." Do you:
A) Click on Cancel and cross your fingers?
B) Click OK and hope your backup kernel boots?
C) Restart the computer, push F8, go into DOS mode, and restore the kernel from a backup copy?
or D) Stick in your Emergency Win9x Boot Disk?
Well, according to you, you might as well trash C, since you don't like the command prompt. And D? Well, you want a "faster, cheaper, more efficient" motherboard that doesn't have a floppy drive hookup, so scratch that. I guess you'll just want to cross your fingers, huh?
Windows ME is being promoted with a new bundle of system tools called "PC Health." What it does is keeps records of your system's settings by creating backups of the kernel each day, so technically, if you want to go back to the way your computer looked, say, 10 days ago, you could restore the copy of the kernel that existed 10 days ago, and *POOF*, everything's fine and dandy, right? But from my five years of experience with the Windows 9x kernel, if thing's aren't working the way they should, you can NEVER rely on being able to boot to the GUI. Something always gets in the way...Blue Screen of Death, system freeze, "Cannot find 'fortheloveofgoddonotforgettoloadthis.dll'. System Halted.", etc. But you know what? Whenever I've been in a mess, I've ALWAYS been able to get to the command prompt.
If Linux/BSD doesn't boot of the kernel, you can always go into debug mode and boot from either the backup or the Generic, and at least that will get you back into your system. For any and every system technician, there needs to be a back door into the system in case there ever is a problem. That back door shouldn't be having to reinstall Windows or reformatting your hard drive.
i have read quite a few posts about people complaining about how their old DOS games won't work anymore. not true. i have used millenium and it is similar to windows 2000 in the sense that you cannot go into DOS directly and you can't boot into it. you may, however use the DOS box(i think it's just an emulated DOS in some protected part of memory) to use old DOS programs. for all intents and purposes it will run programs exactly the same as "normal DOS". the real gripe is how it'll be harder to fix problems in ME that occur at startup, and not be able to go directly into DOS to try and fix it. boohoo. yay microsoft. BTW it does boot faster(my friend uses it for his main OS), and direct X 8 kicks ass
..Examples of knee-jerk zealotry I've seen. So Microsoft /finally/ followed through, and moved MSDOS on top of the Win32 kernel, instead of the other way around.. I don't know about the UMSDOS distros, but this certainly doesn't kill BeOS R5 Personal in a FAT32 image. They aren't doing away with FAT32, just moving the kernels around to better approximate the NT and 2k arrangements.
Hell, if I wanted to get nasty, I would say that half the slashdot kiddies should be happy with WinME.. After all, it does theming, now. *eye roll*
Weapons of Mass Analysis
No. He's obviously confused. As of MS-DOS 6.1, it was still that nasty int 21h routine.. Of course, they /could/ have changed it for 95.. It's deucedly hard to find interrupt references after MSDOS 6.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
You guys bitch and bitch about Windows being inferior because it still runs on top of DOS. So Microsoft takes DOS out, and what do you do? Bitch because it doesn't run on top of DOS.
I know there is difficulty in letting DOS go. There has to be. We've spend so many years as using it as our last resort and have invested so much in mastering its usage. There is a significant possibility this is a positive step in OS development. Just as we had to learn DOS and have become so dependent on it we will have to re-learn Win2k's basics. Of course, at the expense of many painstaking hours or reading and fussing and training.
Guys, you're being absurd. They announced two years ago that they would be removing DOS mode. In fact, they had planned on doing so for Win98, but needed to maintain it for one more edition.
The entire Win32s for Windows 3.1 and Windows 4.x series (95, 98, 98SE, ME) has existed for one purpose: get all applications replaced by Win32 versions and migrate everyone to NT.
This is not a hidden agenda. Gates talked about this in the EARLY 90s ('92 or '93). Back then WinCE was referred to as modular windows, Chicago was Windows 4.0, etc.
None of this is secret. None of this is aimed at killing Linux. This is aimmed at killing DOS applications that won't run in a NT VDM. Those applications are the enemy, not Linux. They prevent MS from killing the DOS legacy and moving everyone to NT.
Right now, MS is saddled by that compatibility and limits their products ability to work. There is a world of difference between NT 3.51/4.0/5.0(W2K) and Win3.1/95/98 (can't say for me) in terms of stability, etc.
They keep migrating to new driver models that were more similar to the NT ones to improve stability and make the migration easier (more driver support for NT).
This isn't aimed at Linux, it is aimed at helping MS make a better OS.
Alex
Slashdotter's haiku
Is missing a syllable
Ridiculed by trolls
Make affiliate bucks
I think you are confusing CLI with a pure text console.
Just go Start > Run > "command"
Show me what you want, and I'll show you how to get along without it...
Need DOS? Got Windows ME? You can always create a FreeDOS partition or bootdisk, and use that.
Microsoft removing DOS from Windows has been on the cards for years, face it. I'm actually surprised it didn't happen earlier...
Syllable : It's an Operating System
There's always VMWare...
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Although I don't blame Microsoft for Doing what they did, I do blame them for providing the death knell for the command line interface.
That was one of the Weaknesses in NT. When NT's Graphical user interface crashed you couldn't access files in any way because there was no command prompt. the only option was to reinstall NT, which is a painful task in it's own right. This is why win2000 has a command line now. Microsoft realized that even thought it was outdated, it serves it's purpose when a major system error occurs.
A command prompt is also useful for remote administration. One of Linux's main strenghts is the ability to administer a Linux system just about anywhere with any computer that has internet or dial up access. NT was a pain to administer remotely because it had no telnet abilities and even when it did it was powerless without the GUI. They also realized this in win2k but they still have a long way to go if they want to catch up to the powerful command line Linux Has.
Sometimes a GUI Makes sense, but sometimes a Command Line makes more sense
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Can it run Ultima 2 or Ultima 7? Those seem to have problems running under anything but REAL dos. Maybe there's some patch for Ultima 2, but Ultima 7 accesses memory above 1 mb while remaining in real mode (don't ask), making it be a problem to multi-task.
Then upgrade to Win98, at least it still has DOS.
A smart floppy boot sector will require just the copying of an unfragmented file with a certain name to the boot sector. Of course, Microsoft never made a smart floppy boot sector loader. OS/2 does something similiar to this, there is enough space in that 1 sector.
Maybe MS have realised the DoJ is right and that an OS is not really an integral part of the Win ME browser... ? -- Leave me alone
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
Exactly which server market are you refering to?
/me tosses a handful of Purina Troll Chow in your general direction.
"Officially, Microsoft says you can boot to the real-mode command prompt only from the Emergency Boot Disk, which may leave too little memory free for running BIOS-flashing and similar programs that run only from the command prompt. Unofficially, Microsoft insiders told us to create a minimal bootable floppy disk by copying Io.sys and Command.com from the WindowsCommandEBD folder to a blank formatted disk."
=======================
Enlightenment is a Trap
IIRC, the only way to flash-update BIOS on many motherboards and PCI cards is to boot into DOS mode to run the utility. If M$ provides no way to do this and doesn't even include a boot disk that allows for it, people who purchase new systems could have a hard time applying these manufacturer-supplied fixes. Talk about shooting themselves and many hardware mfrs in the feet. I guess FreeDOS can fill this gap, though.
petard
--
Il vaut mieux avoir l'air sans l'effet que l'effet sans l'air.
.sig: file not found
This can't be correct. I simply don't believe it. The code for Win ME is supposed to be from the same code as SE, 98 and 95. I don't see how they could say it's from the same family and still remove the command prompt.
Furthermore, what about visual studio? (and many other programs) Lots of people still use the command prompt for lots of stuff! I mean come on! How am I supposed to rename 100 files in my x:\dir\dir\dir directory named this01ismyfile.txt to this01isntmyfile.txt ? Jesus, that'd take all day!
And my next point. Did anyone try clicking start->run and then running "command" this has always brought up a command prompt and I expect that it still will.
vw_bob
And remember that it is still a significant feat of backwards compatibility that many 16-bit DOS applications that were written in 1981 can still run under Windows 95/98/98SE/ME/NT/2k as a VDM application at all, without needing to boot to pure-mode DOS. That's arguably a considerable effort by itself and a tremendous amount of application compatibility development effort is involved in maintaining it to the level that it is at all.
Don't waste those cycles! Put them to use! http://www.distributed.net/
You can still run DOS applications inside Windows ME (ie: as a window or full screen), but you just can't reboot the machine to a "pure" DOS prompt. If you have a boot floppy made with a previous version of DOS/Window9x, then you can get to a real DOS prompt that way. Also keep in mind that your config.sys and autoexec.bat are not parsed anymore either. Windows ME still has the dependence on the DOS underlyings and DOS really have not been completely removed, but the ability to easily access real-mode DOS has simply been made difficult. The primary purpose of doing this is to further enforce the movement of device drivers away from old style config.sys "DEVICE=" lines and various TSRs for supporting hardware and towards natively written 32-bit drivers. Such 32-bit drivers will generally be easier to port forward to future versions of Windows based on NT (Win2k and future) if those manufacturers don't already support NT. A side benefit is that native 32-bit drivers in Windows ME will generally be easier for users to configure and adapt to hardware changes (such as power state or docking changes). For example, being able to use native 32-bit network drivers instead of 16-bit DOS IPXODI/VLM drivers generally will have a tremendous boost in performance and usability. Switching from a 16-bit DOS CDROM SYS driver with MSCDEX to a fully native will generally not only be faster, but will allow access to long filenames. Although it is true that systems with older, no-longer supported hardware may still depend on DOS-mode TSRs or SYS drivers and may not be able to get updated drivers, Windows ME is not intended to be a general purpose upgrade for all older systems. Going forward, the next consumer OS after Windows ME will be based on NT and will have even more dramatic legacy hardware support issues, since many older manufacturers have neglected to support NT at all.
Don't waste those cycles! Put them to use! http://www.distributed.net/
Synesthesia
Try hitting "Cancel" when the scandisk window pops up. Then fix the problem once you get into windows.
Lars -
Ummm... just one question... How do I ping sites to check connectivity/lag? Is there some sort of built in util that can do this?
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
Intel 8086 in the old XT is a 16-bit CPU. When I want to run 8-bit processes (read: NES games), I pull out LoopyNES on my Pentium laptop.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I tried this. But no matter how fast I try to type, my computer always loses power before I can finish typing it.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
What if your hd is formatted FAT32? AFAIK, DR DOS won't be able to read it.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Every time I try to type mode co80 at the logos.sys (It is now safe to switch off your computer) screen, my computer always loses power before I can finish typing.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
> - Drag and Drop
:P). No problems installing it on RedHat 6.0 or Mandrake 7.1.
Several window managers do this. Gnome and KDE do, at least.
> but installing Gnome is annoyingly hard
The latest release of Gnome (1.2) has a very nice installer (Microsoftish!
-- Fester
-- Fester
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
Would it be possible to use this command shell to:
Create and Format a new partition
Copy io.sys and command.com to it.
and execute?
Oracle and unix guy
But DOS is not gone - it is still the heart of WinME, it's just hidden - so some functionality is crippled and they sure need an excuse for that.
Real life is overrated.
What's more, they mentioned this (no CLI for WinME) in their news page one month ago. They also said it would be possible to port FreeDOS to WinME, so people would still have access do DOS.
Maybe this is not necessary at the moment (because we still have cmd.exe/command.com) at later stages we may need this.
I can remember when people whined about Windows being tied to DOS. People would bitch, and moan, and cry about the bad, bad people who hadn't killed DOS when they should have.
So now, when the "great evil" does what some people have been asking for, for a long while, we whine still. You knew that MS-DOS would not be staying around. It was wrong of Microsoft to claim that the OS would be compatible with it's ancestors, but that is it.
With this action, the market is going to fracture. Advanced users probaby won't use ME, and some of those may not switch to 2000. Maybe this stupidity will lead to more BeOS and Linux users.
Pax Digitalia
The subject line says it all, really.
I may be wrong, but I remember hearing that Microsoft had to pay licensing fees to IBM (I Believe) in order to use DOS in its operating system. This is probably a way for Microsoft to get away from that type of money-drainer. -Chris
what?? did you read the topic??
Steve O.
I am really, really exhausted.
It took PCs almost forever to have the ability to boot from a cd. I have a 10 year old sun 3/260 that can boot from tape/cdrom/disk/network. It still has a more advanced boot prom than PC bios.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
It has some other interesting and unpleasant problems. Unlike the "real" dos, for instance, it won't do command line argument interpolation. If you feed a program you've written a filename including a whildcard, it doesn't recognize it as such and just feeds the name, wildcard and all, to the program. In "real" DOS, OTOH, it expands the wildcard so that your program actually receives a list. Very annoying.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
It must be a change that was made as part of 95, then. I never tried programming much under older versions of DOS. I encountered this problem when developing some programs on my home computer, which rans Win95, and tried to run them at work on machines that run NT. I had to add a file name expander, which I found most annoying.
If it's the case that versions of DOS up to 6 didn't do this, and that NT actually uses a third party DOS emulator, I can understand why this problem cropped up. Still, though, I think that not expanding filename arguments with wildcards is lousy.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
No they can't. Their OS is trash. Why accept a low-grade product? I certainly won't. Go read the artical in this month's Linux Journal. It's great. Basically explains how MS listened to wait users(read nontech suits) wanted and added every and any feature(talking paperclips)..spoiling them rotten, and in turn producing the blotted bugridden product they call Windows. The article also points out how Apple did the opposite. Jobs never cared what people wanted, he "knew" what they "needed"...which has led MacOS to be the way it is. They even mention how the developers of excel say that the majority of features are only there cause one or two people requested them. MS and Apple are at the two extremes of customer interfacing...
Look at it this way: If they were car companies Apple wouldn't add cupholders even if 99% of the people wanted it...if the developers didn't. MS would add any feature the people wanted...even if it made the car inefficient, unreliable and dangerous.
And actually OT...the point is...DOS isn't gone. Its still the GUI over dos. They are just trying to HIDE it, and make it look like they are making progress..As someone already stated...barring a MASSIVE rewrite..dos won't disappear.
More importantly, tab completion can be enabled, although you do have to go registry diving. Simply change the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Comma ndProcessor\\CompletionChar to 9. I have no idea why this is not an option in the cmd preferences or somewhere more easily accessible, but it is there. It isn't as good as bash's because it won't search the path or anything like that (it does check the current directory though).
-nh
DOS compatibility is at odds with stability and security. If you plug security holes, and tighten the lid on broken/questionable drivers, then you give up some DOS compatibility. Can't have it both ways -- choose your poison.
Microsoft doesn't want it.
Stuck in GUI hell.
(GUI pronounced gooey)
nf
hahahahahah
someone mod this up.
nf
Basically this is a move by Microsoft to make people become less reliant on the CLI side of windows by removing the functionality (which could just as easily stay and make no difference) in order to condition people for future releases of windows which won't contain the MS-Dos support.
Twice so far (in two months) have I _needed_ to boot into dos only to be thwarted by this "feature". Luckily I had a boot disk handy.
nf
n/t
--
"No se rinde el gallo rojo, sólo cuando ya está muerto."
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Doom runs fine at a DOS shell in Windows. That's what DOS4GW's job is, partially, to interface with the OS (or EMM386, if you're in raw DOS) using DPMI (DOS Protected Mode Interface).
No, there isn't...
The IO.SYS that Me installs on a hard drive is
different than the one installed on the EBD.
The hard drive version ignores entries in
msdos.sys, config.sys and autoexec.bat; it
is basically there to call the Win32 kernel
and help switch into protected mode.
This is the first I've heard of such a utility for Windows Me.
And I cannot find any info on google, or on the WinMe beta to
tell how to install such a beast.
Can you provide more information on this, or are you confusing
new features of NT/W2K with WinMe?
yes, but this is the first DOS-based windows without DOS... duh!!! havent you read the freakin press-release... ;)
Windows ME has a command shell, just doesn't have any "Pure DOS"
Sure we do. We call it a review usually.
Didn't the DMCA take away our right to do such reviews without the reviewee's consent?
Edward Burr
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Argh! I meant UCITA. Even though I know what all the letters in both acronyms stand for, I still can't use the correct one when I'm using just the acronym.
Edward Burr
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Also, hiding DOS gives them the ability to spin the media nicely: "The first Windows without DOS." I bet that works very well.
By doing all this, however, MS becomes more and more inferior to open-source alternatives. By locking their users in, they will eventually lock them out. I know many who would like to leave Windows if they could, but who would come back to it?
The transition to open alternatives is the difficult part, you literally have to walk through walls. That's why projects like KDE and KOffice are so important: To break the barriers. Linux people should concentrate their efforts on defining open standards, especially in mainstream applications, and making Linux easy-to-use (without dumbing down the user).
--
>Microsoft has the right to produce whatever kind of program it wants to
This is correct.
>and we have no right to judge its endeavors
This is incorrect.
well, there are a million different source ports for both quake and doom to win32. Both doom and quake had ports to win32 written by id themselves.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
There is already a WIN-BASH. Its called Slashdot.
dude, who cares about Be? It's like NeXT or the Mac - a neat fringy toy. Next you'll be claiming that Amiga's will take over the world.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
At the moment, I'm working on a help desk for an ISP. One of the checks we tend to use for connection problems is ping (both in the absence of an nslookup to check DNS status, and also to test data throughput - although that can obviously be done from our end, too). I certainly hope that you can still run ping from the Start/Run box, otherwise it's going to cramp my style.
More seriously, it's going to be a problem for network and system administrators. Certainly being able to drop to DOS mode has saved my arse a few times, and I'm sure that's true of others, too.
You have to wonder about the logic (OK, it's Microsoft, so there may not be any logic involved, but hey) behind this: in my experience newbies take one look at a DOS prompt and run screaming for the hills, so leaving it in doesn't cause them any grief, and really, its omission just hurts the users who grew up with DOS and who still find it more natural for some tasks.
Finally, people do still play games which only run in DOS mode, which means that you'll need a boot disk (quite possibly from 98, too... can you do a command-line boot disk in ME? Doesn't sound like it). Obviously these are older games, but I for one still enjoy some of those games quite a bit more than current games. (That's not to say current games are bad.)
Anyway, I guess the point of this rambling passage is basically just to reaffirm that I think removing the DOS prompt is a bad thing.
It's natural for Linux people to hate Microsoft, but come on... Microsoft just can't win with some of you people.
Microsoft is trying to kill DOS, not the CLI. So what if it's only "hidden"? The goal is to get people AWAY from it.
You people slag MS for still relying on DOS, and then you slag them for killing it. Well, which do you want? You can't have it both ways. Honestly, if you're going to argue for Linux's superiority over Windows, try to have some sort of consistant logic in your arguments, or you're just going to make the cause look bad. There's plenty of reasons to hate Microsoft, so why strain your credibility by inventing new ones?
Besides, even if you hate it, NT4/Win2K are an order of magnitude better than Win9x in terms of stability. Killing DOS is a step away from DOS and towards the far superior NT kernel. If you still feel that the NT kernel is shit, then that's fine... but it's still a step in the right direction.
Even if you feel Microsoft sucks, don't slag them for moving in the right direction... what kind of sense does that make? If you were trying to get someone to quit smoking and they moved from 2 packs/day to 1 pack/day, would you slag them for that, too?
It's fun (and easy... and justified...) to pick on MS, but picking on them for the wrong reasons will make people think you're bashing MS for some sort of personal vendetta, and not because you have a valid, superior alternative (Linux, BeOS, CP/M, whatever floats your boat). And then who will listen to you??!
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Yes but this is Millenium Edition seee :)
:)
To be honest right now batch, bash, bourne, korn, csh, perl, c++, pascal and basic and all convolving into one big master programming language inside my brain
Emmm Windows NT runs what is little more than a DOS emulator. It is DOS in a protected environment - i'm 99.9% sure that you cant run doom or quake in that environment. In fact I believe virtual PC on the Mac runs a more realistic version of dos.
Also on Win2k I find the command prompt less responsive than when i'm working on a remote linux machine. That is definitely not true dos.
Realistically using the format tag isn't a valid way to verify an operating system.... it's like trying to identify the model of car by it's exhaust fumes.
I was actually thinking of it from the Mac user perspective (been spending too much time in my parents house again :))
Mac users routinely slag windows off since it's just a graphical add-on for dos.
I'm sure dos is in there somewhere though
The hidden version of Autoexec.bat now reads:
if $windowsfound win
echo Error : No graphical OS found
echo Error : Halting startup process. Beat your OEM to pulp for a windows CD.
:loop
goto loop
To be fair you are being just a little hard on Microsoft here.
I can see it now, if they had left dos in then the story would read "Microsofts 20th attempt at a graphical OS still relies on the command line".
Surely this is a step in the right direction and surely the linux/BeOS people can find a way round it.
After all winNT hasn't included a true dos for a heck of a long time and ultimately that is the model that the simultaneous windows versions are striving towards (slowly striving that is).
Aren't there articles in the Microsoft Knowledge base that have solutions that require a bootable system disk? It seems to me that I had a problem with NT one time and the Microsoft documented solution required that I make a boot disk with 95. I thought that was bad at the time because they kind of assumed that I had a copy of both OSs available. Now, if they remove bootable floppies are they going to go back and update the solutions to the problems that require them?
Well this post ought to just show you guys just how much you "Linux" people seem to know about the world of Windows.
Microsoft has been planning to remove pure dos from Windows Me since day 1. How this came as a shock to anybody is beyond my comprehension.
Why did they do it? Because maybe it was making Windows 9x a bit unstable (though I will be the first to say it didnt help Me - only idiots will run out and buy ME).
Also - if you are going to install linux - INSTALL IT! Dont play the UMSDOS game - how sad.
By the way - I havent tried this as Im a win2k user - but you may try editing the msdos.sys file and setting BootGui=0 (something along those lines - might still work in ME)
What a sad post... cant you guys find any real news?
Gam
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
Do what VMware does. Do a "black hole" to the other side of the host using low-level drivers. Then it's possible to search for the holy grail all you want...
And the inability to get down to pure DOS is nto all, you cannot enter protected mode either. There's nothing wrong with the FS. You just can't get another OS to stomp on top of WinME. BeOS, or linux(loadlin)...
Were that I say, pancakes?
If anyone has it, does it still allow you to grab/modify/backup the registry with command-line regedit? We use it here as part of the boot process in AUTOEXEC.BAT along with backups to the network during login.
Anyone else out there using regedit like this with WME? Any odd changes in the registry or the tools to manage it?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
should do the trick nicely
As far back as I can remember reading about Win ME, one of the new "features" it had listed was the final complete and total utter eradication of DOS from underneath windows. Whether this is a good thing or not, it's there and it's not going to change. Of course, it wouldn't be difficult to move Win ME's command interpreter back a notch or two to the win 98SE version (or earlier) much in the same way it was possible to remove IE4 from Win98 and use the original explorer.exe. And hey jingo, there's you command prompt back, for those who wish to use it. --
Said it couldn't last, said it wouldn't last... This is the last stand against tomorrow's world.
I've been running WinME since some of the latter BETAs...and while you can't really boot into DOS, or switch to true DOS mode, most programs that run in a DOS window or in DOS mode still work. I think the only exception was Partition Magic 5.0, and I believe a fix was released for that. However, certain things that you're only supposed to be able to do in true DOS mode (like flashing the firmware of a CD-R or DVD-ROM drive) can be done from the regular DOS Prompt, which is just hiding in the accessories menu, instead of the root programs menu. True, it may not be the windows most people are used to, but after using it for months, I don't think many people are going to miss DOS mode. So far, everything I've needed to do in DOS has worked fine from that prompt....
"Life ain't interesting till you blow something up" --Anonymous
umm actually.. working with msdos (from a programmers perspective) is not the greatest task in the world. Especially when you wish to do anything with graphics. (Yes I know, VESA eventually came along and there where a few librarys for video access.. but still.)
Besides that, Microsoft bought DOS from someone else so they would have something they could licence to IBM.
Luke
However, most moves away from Dos are kinda good in terms of stability. Wierdly though, dos has it's place... There is nothing like dos for *real time* processing, even linux folks! Single task , poll a couple of interupts and program.... The ports are dead easy to get at, and for a radical quick RS-232 hack for equipment control... QBASIC is the engineers friend :) Old school and effective.
The light at the end of the tunnel though is Free Dos's. There are a good many GPL'd dos's out there , some better than another. If microsoft won't let you do raw stuff, give em the bird. Open source saves the day. Same applies for 2000 and NT. Watch those Fat32's and NTFS's.... You could always use LILO though.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I guess fdisk does run under a command-line within Windows in current versions, but what if your installation is hosed? Windows (9x) is one of the only OS's that doesn't allow you to repartition on install (again, probably for the ignorant-user factor). Maybe this functionality will be added to the installer then?
I agree with removing the dos foundation from Windows (are they really removing it, or just "hiding" it even more? --though it seems they are removing many of the dependencies on it), but there still needs to be some of that functionality available. Other arguments about convenience and preference for us-types aside, some of the utilities and ability to fix the OS yourself are still needed to be available from a still-pure unadulterated dos mode.
"I say consider this day seized!" -Hobbes
"Tomorrow we'll seize the day and throttle it!" -Calvin
First you complain that Windows sucks because it crashes too often, and then when Microsoft tries to do something that will fix that partially you complain more.
Besides this is old news... I have been using Windows ME for months already.
And in case you just thought Tim Patterson just wrote QDDOS, that became first SCPDOS and then MSDOS version 1.0, here's a computer he built.
A good insight into the why of dumping DOS comes from Microsoft's Alan Sohn who apparently gave a webcast called Windows Millennium Edition Feature Overview and discussed this point(from the transcrip t)
My own emphasis added
You could dig this out from http://support.microsoft.com by choosing "-All Microsoft Products", typing the word Millennium, and choosing the first search result.
I just think it's amusing that with WinMe, we return to the days of DOS 1.0/1.1 and can't boot DOS off the hard drive.
It really has been an incredible run for a tiny little "Operating System".
What makes you think it's the same people? Did you take note of their names/handles?
This is a common error, created by viewing a group composed of many seperate individuals as a homogenous entity holding a single opinion.
Just because one belongs to a group such as, say, Linux users, doesn't mean that one agrees with everything other users say. In all likelihood the people complaining about the lack of DOS are different from the ones complaining about the fact that DOS was still there.
The hypocracy exists only in your mind, because you fail to view people as individuals with individual opinions.
you should check out this Windows ME FAQ. according to this document you can get to a DOS prompt by using a bootdisk...and your native DOS apps should still be supported.
still, ME doesn't sound all that great. i don't think i could survuve without command line. :)
"When all clock radios are outlawed, only outlaws will have clock radios."
--Zippy the Pinhead
The boot-to-DOS/16-bit/real mode part of Windows was eliminated in ME for the sake of Fast Boot (one of the big improvements MS is touting for ME). In previous versions, it loaded everything up in real mode (16-bit), including processing the autoexec.bat and config.sys files, then "thunked" over into 32-bit mode and launched the GUI (in 3.1 there had to be a line for win.com in autoexec.bat to accomplish this, in 9x it was automatic). This contributed a lot to 9x's long boot times.
I am using a release version of ME (build 3000), and it does boot significantly faster. As it has been mentioned here numerous times, you can make a bootdisk the same way as previous versions, and use that if you need to boot to real mode. And the DOS virtual machine/command prompt window functions just like previous releases.
Now, as long as we are ranting about ME, [rant] let me complain about how it treats my USB CF reader. Wants to make me 'stop' it in software before I remove the CF card. This didn't happen in 98SE, and I spent about an hour last night trying to get rid of it. Installed the old Sandisk drivers (ME has its own it wants to install), but it still has the dumb little icon to 'stop' the card, and pops a warning dialog when I remove it without stopping it...[/rant]
Jenova_Six
During the 2.1 kernel development cycle, UMSDOS wouldnt even compile for over a year, due to the introduction of dentries. The original author dropped out, and eventually someone else took over the code. The code he had to work on was a mess, and error messages reported undocumented abbreviations in French, which didn't help. It to ok a while before anything usable came about, even longer for support for a root filesystem.
For a while I was running 2.0 and 2.2 side by side on the same filesystem. I had problems with files being present under 2.0 but missing under 2.2, the most important one being /etc/passwd. It was odd trying to log into 2.2, getting message indicating that /etc/password wasn't there, then rebooting 2.0 and finding nothing wrong.
Things may be stabler in more recent 2.2 releases. UMSDOS now fails to compile the last time I tried it (2.4.0-test6-pre-somthing).
Microsoft heard that Apple's Mac OS X will remove the CLI and the BSD apps from use by the populus and won't offer them on the install CD's. No word as to whether they will indeed be available as a Developer CD release, but signs point to yes along with OS X Server add-ons. The trouble is that for Windows, the CLI while useful is becoming less glamorous all the time... for OS X (a BSD 4.4 on Mach system), the CLI is totally useful.
the simplest way to get around this is that my system uses a tray system when you want to use a different OS you simply shut down remove one Drive from the tray (eg. WinME) and replace it with the other Drive running the second, or third, etc. OS (eg. linux, Win2k, BeOS) and then for swapping files you put a another drive fully internal with your file swap space using whatever file system would be appropriate for the situation..... problem solved. So i ask, Who Needs Dos?
-Borgdude
How do you enforce a law making it illegal to commit suicide?
So what if we don't have command.com anymore? NT has cmd.exe. Will that run on WinME?
From what I understand ME doesn't parse autoexec.bat anymore. Sun's JDK, and many apps ported from unix want to set the path in autoexec.bat.
Does this mean we'll have to launch them from batch files now?
As was stated, Micro$oft have been planning to get rid of DOS since the dawn of time. But this is something else. Win 2000 even has a little MS-DOS lookalike application. This could be not only a ploy to get other OS's off Window's boxes, but also a shot at trying to get people more into the 'life without DOS' lifestyle.
-There is no
Windows ME is developed as a mom and pop os for people who DON'T want to have to deal with DOS and driver compatability issues. People have been complaining about the complexity of PC's for years now and this has lead to the development of Terminal devices (IOpener, ect...) My beef with everyone who is complaining about it is this:
If your all such hot shot hackers, why are you wasting your time on WindowsME at all?
OR
Quit your bitching about something that should have happened a long time ago, and figure out how to crack it.
MS has finaly started to deliver on the promise of removing legacy support and I for one am happy.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Flashing a BIOS:
Step 1.
take DOS bootable floppy, load BIOS flash onto floppy.
Step 2.
Insert floppy and boot machine.
IT WILL NOT MATTER WHAT OS YOU ARE RUNNING ON THE HARDDRIVE
If you are trying to flash a BIOS by booting to a command prompt from the harddrive you are as stupid as you are uninformed.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
At least I still have my linux partition to go in and fix the crap that happens in Windows Land. Although I like the command line style (hence the linux) I really think it was something they had to do. Still having to support dos/dos apps make developing a stable system difficult. Constantly checking environments and if/elsing your way through an application sucks!! I am not a MS advocate in fact I hate billy boy with such zeal it can only be matched by Stallman :) But I gotta hand it to MS this is a step in the right direction for them.
There's something wrong with that, now all game deisgners are going to be forced to
A: write patches so the games work in windows ME
B: design games to the MS WinME specifications, (and of course, have to pay M$ more money to get those specifications)
C: force the price of games up even more, due to A and B.
I'm not a huge gamer, but I have noticed many games don't run on Win2k because of the 'dos' prompt issues.
UMSDOS and BeOS over FAT aren't about the COMMAND.COM. I've installed BeOS PE in a blank MSDOS partition more than once. It's about the file system. WinME still uses FAT32 as its file system, and BeOS can install on NTFS. It doesn't matter whether or not they removed COMMAND.COM in WinME, it matters that the file system structure is still valid. Get it?
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
While DOS based programs won't work, I'm pretty sure that an equivalent program could be written for WinME ...
After all, allowing those kind of tricks is the whole point of WinME, so dumping windows from memory should be possible (their are some OS functions under Windows that give unrestricted memory access).
The equivalent programs for WinCE had to deal with similar difficulties, after all there's no DOS mode there eighter.
Windows ME -- kept being promised, "Any day now."
Windows ME -- took a lot longer to actually arrive
Windows ME -- crawls on a P100
Windows ME -- will be used to judge Bill Gates
Windows ME -- turns perfectly good computers into furniture
Windows ME -- remembered for weak memory protection
Windows ME -- was created from Windows 95
Windows ME -- has no shame
Coincidence?
J
Skip winME and go to Win2K. In the 2K install you can choose to format to VFAT (2K can run on VFAT and NTFS5.) Simple.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
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Microsoft is trying to get into Open Source, check this.
M$ claims they removed RealMode DOS for stability reasons. IT seems to be true, as I haven't had it crash on me yet. Very odd for a Micro$oft product... ...perhaps it is a conspiracy.
DOS was seemingly designed without security concerns, as a single user enviroment. Just MHO
The loss of a 'pure' dos mode in Windows is something that has been needed for a long time, simply in the name of progress. As for UMSDOS and BeOS being troubled by this, it shouldn't be for long. The virtual file systems used in Linux's UMSDOS, BeOS and other similar loop back ideas still work... just booting into them has changed. I hope the Linux community would see this as an opportunity to develop a newer Win32 based loader for booting into these opperating systems. It's a chance for new innovation. By simply complaining that your current functionality has been lost, all you do is portray the Linux community as non-innovative backward thinkers. Instead, embrace this change... Support your open source programmers and help them build a better and more user friendly tool. Just a thought. *TheDarb
This sig intentionally left blank.
"Linux is merely the fourth re-implementation of a 30-year-old operating system that no one has yet figured out how to make easy to use for people who need to actually DO things, rather than just fiddle with configuration files or recompile their kernels all day."
--Bill Joy
But what's ten years among friends.
Ummmm.... no. BeOS R5 Personal Edition puts that nifty little BeOS icon on your desktop. Making a boot disk IS an option- but you don't have to. My BeOS icon is a shortcut to LOADBEOS.EXE, which, as someone else stated, is a DOS program that drops the processor to real mode and loads the Be kernel from the \BEOS directory on the VFAT partition. You can set it up to make and use a boot disk instead, but if your system boots to Be stable without one, there's no point in making one unless you don't feel like using Windows at all.
from what i've heard, WinME runs the win98 kernel, but it bootstraps itself, ie: it doesn't need command.com to get running. command.com is still there for access to the comamnd prompt, but the GUI loads itself. if any stability is gained, it's there. just one less level of thunking to do. win98 still loads command.com into ram (do start/run/"mem"), but winME doesn't, unless you tell it to open a command prompt
--Justin
so, everybody needs a working dos boot disk to do fast recovery with GHOST. which will probably needed to be done every two months or so.
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
try using a startup disk. When prompted choose the option "boot without cd support". Just a word to the wary: my system locked up after i executed the "win" command from the c:\ prompt had to cycle the power but anyway it was dos.
PrimalChrome
Well, they have *a* shell under Windows 2000, with an add on product that they actually purchased from another company. The company was Interix, so now the product is Microsoft Interix 2.2.
Here are the product features directly from the Microsoft website. While I'll admit it feels kind of dirty to use this product, for those of us in a "closed Microsoft community" type of shop who have no choice but to run a Microsoft Workstation product on our desktop, it means we can still do *some* of the things we're used to doing at home.
Product Features
KornShell, C Shell and Bourne Shell with full job control
Over 300 utilities, including scripting tools such as awk, sed, perl, Tcl/Tk
Berkeley Software Design (BSD) sockets mapped to Winsock
Memory-mapped files
Subsystem vendor ID (SVID) interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms: semaphores, message queues and shared memory
Pseudo-terminal support
Color curses support
Ability to execute Win32 applications from Interix
Full tty semantics mapped to console windows
Pseudo-terminal support
File-link support and true case-sensitive file names
Full integration with Windows NT security model, administration, file systems, networking and printers
Support for POSIX.1 (system services) and POSIX.2 (shell and utilities)
X11R5 runtime, including X clients such as xterm, twm, xrdb, and xlsclients
Support for running X Windows applications on remote displays
Support for daemons running as Windows NT services
telnetd & rlogind services (multiuser login support)
Berkeley r-utilities (servers and clients)
cron, syslogd & other daemon/service support
Internet clients: ftp, telnet, ping, rsh
Integrated tape device support
Interix Software Development Kit
Development tools, including make, RCS, lex, yacc, cc, c89, nm, ar, strip
ANSI C, POSIX.1 and POSIX.2 interfaces
Color curses library
BSD-style sockets library support
X11R5 libraries and header files
gcc (GNU C) compiler
g++ (GNU C++) compiler
g77 (GNU FORTRAN77) compiler
Support for Microsoft Visual C/C++ versions 4.0 and 5.0
System Requirements
Intel x86, Pentium, Pentium Pro and compatible systems
Microsoft Windows NT Workstation or Server version 3.51 or higher, Windows 2000 Professional, Server or Advanced Server
15-100 megabytes (MB) of available hard-disk space
Windows-supported CD-ROM drive and mouse
Check out www.microsoft.com/unix/interop/default.asp for information on UNIX interoperability on Windows 2000 platforms.
Ed Booher
Network Engineer
One Call Internet
www.onecall.net
[Disclaimer - Any and all views, opinions, out looks, philosophies, words of wisdom, words of brash stupidity, and principles out lined in this post are the belief of the Reverend Eddie W. Booher, Jr. and are not necessarily synonymous with the views of his employer or religion.]
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
Jenova_Six: In reference to your comment about Windows ME wanting you to "stop" the service before removing the card.
I don't know why they did it, but Windows 2000 Advanced Server also does the same thing. Not just with CF cards, but with docking stations, PCMCIA cards... Now, I consider myself to be well above the "beginner" level, so I'd like for Windows to just shut up and do what I tell it (undock, eject the PCMCIA card). Ah, but unlike most software, Windows 2000 AS doesn't have a "Expert" mode to it (that I've found anyway). I still undock, eject my PCMCIA cards, and even swap out my DVD drive/LS120 combo drive to make way for my second battery -- all without shutting down. I figure clicking "OK" is much faster than having to shut down to get stuff done, and far less annoying -- though it *is* annoying that it can't be silenced without clicking "OK."
Seth Anderson BTW, I'm not 23 anymore -- I am TexasCowboy26 now. =)
That people complain about how bad DOS is, and how bad all M$ software with DOS based roots is(i.e. Win3.1/9x/ME), but when access to DOS is removed, they still complain. Go figure.
Martee
~~~~~~~~~~
Martee
What of all the (old) games like Duke Nukem 3D, DOOM, and such? those are also out, it would seem. If DOS is gone, so is DOS/4GW.
US is now divided as the "Red" and "blue" states. Red States = communist countries. Coincidence? I think not
But isn't it still a shell over 20 year-old DOS code, just now without access to the underpinnings of the shell?
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
People, please read the story carefully. The problem is that Windows ME is just that GUI that is just Windows 1.0 with bloat added, and it still goes on top of DOS. Now, this means they still have DOS under it, there's just no way for it to kill itself and give everyone pure DOS.
W2K was built from the ground up, not as a thing on top of DOS. It has command line support, because well, some people found it useful. But it can't reboot to DOS, for well, because, if W2K kills itself, your computer would probably hang, while WinME, in so far as I can see it being an "extension" of Windows 1.0, would be able to terminate all of its processes and that would give the users DOS. If that's still possible, why not allow it? In my opinion, why block access to DOS?
If it was given, I think most lusers would avoid the option to go to DOS anyway, but it would be nicely there when the power users need to use it.
The following is no longer on topic. Stop reading here.
I can't believe how dumbed down Windows has become over the years, it is trying to approach the ease of use of Apples/Macs but has so far only achieved it very slowly. It continues to suck. I'm still using it and other MS products because well, it's got what X-Windows doesn't (I don't keep up with X-Windows so this is probably wrong):
- Consistent GUI
- Drag and Drop
- Other things I've taken for granted.
But here's one, I've got AfterStep, and to change the colors of emacs I have to go hunting for some obscure line in a file somewhere. In Windows it's in Display Properties. Of course Gnome probably fixes my problem, but installing Gnome is annoyingly hard (dependancies that mean I have to reinstall the whole OS anyway.. in Windows the only dependencies you get is "please update your MFC/Visual Basic dlls).
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Microsoft abandon the prompt when it is integrated in MacOSX.
I guess this won't please the developpers : in most of my former companies, they were using some special compilation stuff to be launched from within Visual Studio.
Also, what about gamers who still love to play eiher Quake1 or Doom and who won't be able to launch their favorite mod anymore?
This definitively make me think Microsoft is inviting people to use Windows2000 rather than WindowsME.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
It's just the way I was forced to upgrade from from my beloved Wordperfect 5.1 (DOS) to Winblows Word with paperclip :-(
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I think most of you don't understand that the only thing they've done is remove the DOS option from the boot menu, as well from the shutdown menu.... You STILL have access to the DOS prompt, you can STILL boot to DOS by using a diskette.
And I know a little trick that will boot you too DOS very easily... All you have to do is make a batch file that renames c:\windows\system\vmm32.vxd to c:\windows\system\winlod.vxf and then rename c:\windows\command.com to c:\windows\system\vmm32.vxd.
You then restart your computer and voila BOOM you're in DOS. Just make another batch file which does the contrary and restart, and voila BANG you're in Windows.
Then, when they finally start to do something about it (an attempt to further ween DOS out of existence) people create some grand conspiracy about how it has something to do with screwing Linux and/or BeOS...
Geezus. What's wrong with you people?
It's pretty simple to get into dos from windows ME, just put in your ME boot disc and there is an option for a "minimal boot" I believe it is called. just select that and what do you get?: c:\ and you can boot to BeOS too, you just have to reboot with the BeOS boot disc in, you can't use the desktop shortcut anymore, kinda crappy, but you can still get into it at least. another layer is off windows, good, I'm just waiting for the next windows build, since all since now are rumoured to be built off the NT code. (yeah, it's still windows, but until Linux has better gaming and multimedia support I'll stick with it)
== www.FreeBSD.org == The Power To Serve. ==
Then again my ASM is not too good
The commands are (surprisingly)
If anyone can veirify this or get it running I'd love to hear about it.
I can't speak for the Slashbots, when Windows Millennium Edition ships, I'll be standing in line for my copy. Sure, I'll still probably use Linux more, but that shouldn't stop me from buying it. WinME has been development for a long time, with a lot of coders behind it, and I'm not going to pretend I'm somehow more important than Bill Gates.
Microsoft can drive its operating systems into the ground however it wants. You don't own the Windows concept; they do.
Finally, I found a sane person on Slashdot !!!
X-Window is a graphical shell on top of a 20+ year old unix code base
Go read the artical in this month's Linux Journal. It's great. Basically explains how MS listened to wait users(read nontech suits) wanted and added every and any feature(talking paperclips)..spoiling them rotten, and in turn producing the blotted bugridden product they call Windows.
And of course we all know that the Linux media sites on the net are the home of rational, unbiased opinion about Microsoft don't we? Your post makes it clear what your views are, and I for one would rather come to my own conclusions rather than spew party line FUD.
Still, if it makes you happy...
super user-friendly ... yes ... no
superuser friendly
No brain, no pain!
I think it's not the idea of getting rid of the 16-bit code that is a problem - it is the loss of the command line interface that rubs many /. ers the wrong way. It bothers me a great deal, actually. As limited as DOS is when you are used to UNIX, it is still nice sometimes, especially for quick under-grad type computer science assignments. It looks like I'll be sticking with win98 and linux.
A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.-Mark Twain
Do microsoft consider DOS to be part of their windows plan anymore? Isnt it all super-user-friendly GUIs now? As long as it can still run your DOS binaries, i dont think MS think it matters there isnt a traditional CLI.
-----
"Almost isn't good enough - but it's almost good enough."
-Me
No!!! Not my most beloved of dos!!! *sniff sniff* Looks like once I learn more of linux it'll be over to that! Permanently.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Ignorence is blis.
Would it be possible to simply copy the directory with the dos files and commands in it from a copy of Win98, then run it like a normal program?
I have tried it too and the fact that you can't start up in DOS, bugs me a lot. Specially when it went crashed on me once and wanted to do a scandisk in GUI. The only problem was that there was a program (somewhere) that kept on making disk access so scandisk started over and over and.... So I cound not start up in DOS and avoid it, sigh. ;-)
But I am afraid to say that i runs faster and is a lot more stable than Win98 and the crash it made was because of a overclocked GeForce
Still, I fear when I have to start making customer support on this.
Well, now I am going to find a way to boot on that WinSE partition without GUI.
---
One more thing, Dos isn't gone just certain features are diabled. WinME is Win9x, it runs on top of DOS and most DOS programs will run in WinME. Oh and becareful with Partition Magic. It can really FUBAR you're computer if you run it in Windows. My suggestion is to install it, boot to dos using a boot disk and run the dos version.
Yeah I beta tested for WinME and this was a hot topic in the newsgroups. The way I see it, this was done really to prepare people for the next Windows release (Whistler) which will be base on the NT kernel and will have only an emulated dos support (Like W2K). This is a great step in the right direction since one of the main reasons for Win9x's instability is due to its backwards compatibility. Get rid of it, get rid of a lot of problems. Personally I'm all for it, if I want to play Nascar Racing 1.0 I'll use a bootdisk.
Or you can always get a third party shell such as BASH
Normally a administrator (regarding Windows) often uses a boot disk to get to the command prompt.
You can always make an option in your Autoexec.bat to check if you're holding down a key to bring you to the command prompt, or to use the Choice command to prompt you to continue running Windows or launch a shell. (That is, if the command still exists in WinME)
I understand this isn't easy for the average user to do, but using the command prompt is considered an advanced feature to the targeted Windows ME market.
I hope this helps anyone
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
"I recently got a copy of Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (which is suppossed to be the next generation of the Windows 9x series, supposed to mantain 'backwards' compatibility with older versions. In them all the ports and memory access are unprotected). I was really surprised that "pure" DOS access was simply removed. You can't enter into pure DOS in any way
This is a pretty solid argument against getting it. Pray tell, what arguments (other than lining Bill's pockets) are there in favor of "upgrading"?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
True Story: My high school Win NT Admin has had his job for over four years. He took a class on DOS 2 years ago. He then told me, "tu huh, Knowing DOS sometimes helps you out when you're working with programs." It is for this reason that Microsft wants to move away from DOS. It is not a necessity for users and apparently admins to know. As for me, give me Linux and a console.
I don't see why loadlin, beos, etc need DOS mode anyway. An executable is an executable...it can still kick out windows and start clean. Mac people never had a DOS to work with and we still have BootX which works just fine to load Linux. It's not a big deal.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Since DOS drivers, VxD drivers can still run on WinME, DOS is still here. Windows Me is just a new flavor of Windows 9x. There is no rewrite of the system. But Microsoft wants to get ride of DOS. A simple way is to hide it. Officialy, there is no mean to fo in DOS mode, so DOS mode doesn't exist.
About the compatibility issue. At each new version of Windows, MS makes a step against other OSes. Not something too big. Not something too visible. For example, with NT 4, the HPFS support has disappeared. HPFS is used by OS/2 and is an "old" version of NTFS. There is no drawback to leave HPFS. Except the fact that a user can still share data with another OS. Windows 2000 introduced some disfunction in the IBM Boot Manager. Why ? I don't know.
If we go backward in the time, we can find that a DR DOS user had problem to install Windows 3.1 but no problem with Windows 3.0 (which is older than DR DOS 6). Why ? We don't know.
We can't pull a definitive conclusion, but we can say that MS is not trying to maintain compatibility with other systems.
When Microsoft bought out Win95 and it still had DOS people complained that it was just a shell running on DOS, not a real OS.
Now when they bring out WinME and DOS is gone, people suggest that they have to have an "excuse" to do it...
Go figure.
Hi, you can actually boot DOS in WinME. Make a rescue disk and boom, you're in DOS if you boot of the disk. I'm sure with some hacking one can make this true for the HD boot too. Imagine, my machine could boot Win2K, WinME, Suse6.4, and DOS all from one boot menu :)
l8r
someguy...
I wasn't aware Windows ME isn't publicly available yet. I've got a copy from a friend. I installed it (mainly to play games since all my real work at home is done with BeOS). I can tell you DOS is still there. The command prompt is available. However, I seems much slower than with Windows 98.
;-)
I suppose this is what those guys at Redmond call an upgrade
Cedric.
This is my first post, and probably a redundant one at that. I noticed the same problem when I first installed ME.. I have several applications that must be run under a pure dos envioronment. The boot disk created Millennium does let you boot to a dos environment, with / without loading anything. (at which point you could run your autoexec.bat or whatever you wish)
Just for all you geeks to add to your knowledge. One you load windows ME. Drop to a dos shell ( in windows) attrib -r -h -s c:\io.sys; adel c:\io.sys; copy c:\windows\command\ebd\io.sys c:\ this solves all the dos limitations and gives you full F8 and shutdown rights that you want. The never crippled windows, just io.sys
I also have a copy of the new WindowsME...not only did they get rid of the *pure* DOS shell...They actually sort-of hid the icon to the prompt...95/98 you could easily access it by going to START, then PROGRAMS...Now you have go from the programs menu, into the Accessories menu...I personally am a huge fan of DOS and will be sad to see it go...hell, I'd be a hardcore DOS user if Xfree86 was ported to it.. =) ~VudooCrush~
I haven't tested WinME, but I've read that it's certainly and issue when you have to deal with your motherboard, either changing your processor or anything else that needs to be done from DOS prompt.
Any information about it?
Carlos Toro --- "..." that's it.