possibility of adding support for freedos shell into reactos

[krishnaswami.kaushik]

I'm eager to know whether there is a plan for adding support for freedos shell too into reactos apart from the existing msdos shell which I think will persist.
I thought freedos is developing and compatible with dosemu just the same way as reactos is compatible with wine.
Moreover currently the dosemu and wine has got nothing in common with each other.
Whether there is a plan to bridge the compatibility gap between the pairs reactos-freedos and wine-dosemu for using the win32 control objects from the freedos/dosemu itself?

[EmuandCo]

FreeDOS is a whole Operating System and even worse, one that wants to fully access the Hardware which never will work under NT. We need a emulation layer for DOS apps just like Windows and no whole parallel installed DOS and for this we still suggest DosBOX which works nicely.

[krishnaswami.kaushik]

i'm looking for someone who knows more about the capabilities and limitations of the dosbox with respect to both dosemu and wine.
actually, i have installed freedos, reactos (containing cygwin, cygnome, greengnome, sharpenviro shell and ultraexplorer filemanager) and dragondoslinux in the same fat32 partition, which i use each from separate booting parameters from the grub.
now, freedos will run only freedos applications under C:\freedos such as C:\freedos\freepascal, C:\freedos\emacs, etc but never those under the C:\reactos or any others which depend on the win32 control objects located under the C:\reactos\system32.
reactos on the other hand will run those under C:\reactos and all the other reactos applications which depend on the win32 control objects located under the C:\reactos\system32, but never those under the C:\freedos or even the loadlin.
dragondoslinux on the third hand is a dos based slackware linux which uses the dos' equivalent of grub known as loadlin to boot the linux bash command prompt $>.
dragondoslinux however is not able to initiate the graphical interface from commands such as startx, gdm, startkde, etc because the gtk and qt cannot directly used the dos' x11.
But they can however use initiate their gui via the win32 control objects in the form of gtk-wimp, qt-win32, etc.
So the use of the dosemu, wine and dosbox was attempted.

I then installed dosemu.rpm from the slackware's rpm repository and used the pkgtool command to install these as follows:
$> pkgtool install dosemu.rpm

I'm also looking to install the wine.rpm and dosbox.rpm in a similar way as follows:
$> pkgtool install wine.rpm
$> pkgtool install dosbox.rpm

I then tried running both the freedos applications as well as reactos applications from the dragondoslinux's bash command prompt and got the result as follows:
$> dosemu /mnt/<rosdrive>/freedos/<freedos application> was successfull in initiating and running the compilers in text mode such as freepascal, gcc, g++, etc
$> dosemu /mnt/<rosdrive>/<reactos application> failed to run as expected

After the observation with dosemu I'm now looking for the similarly analogous wine and dosbox commands as follows:
$> wine /mnt/<rosdrive>/freedos/<freedos application> is expected to fail
$> wine /mnt/<rosdrive>/<reactos application>
$> dosbox /mnt/<rosdrive>/freedos/<freedos application> is expected to succeed
$> dosbox /mnt/<rosdrive>/<reactos application>

Thus, by temporarily putting aside the limitations of gtk and qt in a dos based x11 (hypothetically assuming that they will eventually be made compatible by freedos in due course of time), I'm looking to know the following:
1) can the dosbox be capable of running all applications whichever the wine runs, or there are some limitations to a limited set of capabilities
2) assuming that there are no problems of gtk and qt in dos, will the dosbox be able to run the following:
a) msforms-win32 based applications such as SharpEnviro Shell (delphi, i.e. msforms-pascal), UltraExplorer FileManager (delphi), emergedesktop (codeblocks+mingw's use of c++ as msforms-win32 objects instead of gtkmm)
b) gtk-wimp and qt-win32 based applications such as GreenGnome (lazarus freepascal, gtkfp), Atol Browser FileManager (gtkmm), monodevelop, playerX music player (gtk# implementation for windows)
c) cygwin based applications such as CyGnome (cygwin gtk), Kde

i.e. in other words to be more precise -- i'm looking to know regarding the dosbox's ability to run a) native win32 applications b) gtk applications and c) cygwin specific applications.

[krishnaswami.kaushik]

my main aim is to alternatively switch recompiling the greengnome code between the lazarus ide (installed as a reactos application) on one hand and the freepascal of freedos (C:\freedos\freepascal) [both of which also contains the gtkfp objects], and since greengnome depends on win32, so invoke both via dosbox and see if ii works without the need of rebooting between different os everytime.

[Z98]

That is highly unlikely to work. I seriously doubt freedos has all the libraries that would be needed. Just because they're there on the filesystem doesn't mean an OS knows what to do with them or has all of the underlying components a library may depend on.

[Haos]

1) can the dosbox be capable of running all applications whichever the wine runs, or there are some limitations to a limited set of capabilities

No, not all. It is possible to install Windows 3.x on dosbox, perhaps then add Win32s extension module, but this will enable you to run dos, win16 and very limited number of win32 apps. Perhaps you will be able to install Win9x on dosbox, but i have no idea if this will be of any way usable. Dosbox nor windows 3.x will not be able to run wine by itself.[/quote]

2) assuming that there are no problems of gtk and qt in dos, will the dosbox be able to run the following:
a) msforms-win32 based applications such as SharpEnviro Shell (delphi, i.e. msforms-pascal), UltraExplorer FileManager (delphi), emergedesktop (codeblocks+mingw's use of c++ as msforms-win32 objects instead of gtkmm)

Dosbox doesnt support win32, so the answer is no.

b) gtk-wimp and qt-win32 based applications such as GreenGnome (lazarus freepascal, gtkfp), Atol Browser FileManager (gtkmm), monodevelop, playerX music player (gtk# implementation for windows)
c) cygwin based applications such as CyGnome (cygwin gtk), Kdeuote]

No one ever tried that, i suspect that its not possible

[MadWolf]

hi

2) assuming that there are no problems of gtk and qt in dos, will the dosbox be able to run the following:
a) msforms-win32 based applications such as SharpEnviro Shell (delphi, i.e. msforms-pascal), UltraExplorer FileManager (delphi), emergedesktop (codeblocks+mingw's use of c++ as msforms-win32 objects instead of gtkmm)



Dosbox doesnt support win32, so the answer is no.

you can get win32s runing in dos box

[EmuandCo]

which is no win32. Its a joke. But you can install Win9x on DOSBox. I already did so.