[Trlog] TR (DOS contest programs) wil outlive Windoze

ke5c ke5c at hot.rr.com
Sat Jun 10 12:21:26 EDT 2006


This is not news to Linux-aholics, but I've rediscovered how easy it is to 
breathe new life into old computers with Linux.  KD4D accidently got me 
started with his DOS/Windoze dual boot posts for TR.  He uses Linux 
utilities to do achieve that, and I only thought that was interesting at the 
time, but it laid the foundation for this.  A friend recently gave me his 
old Dell Desktop with a dead disk.  An old hard drive I had in my drawer 
brought the machine back to life, but (fortunately) I didn't have an 
available copy of Windoze to install - thank you Microsoft for making your 
installs only work with one computer!  K5TR and NA5TT each gave me three 
different shades of Linux to consider, and Ubuntu was common to both lists, 
so that's what I chose.  There was some learning to do, and admittedly it 
helped that I had done some UNIX work in a former life.  I also learned just 
enough about FreeDOS (thanks to all those guys and gals too!) to create a 
dual boot Ubuntu-FreeDOS environment on this old Dell.  TR runs fine under 
FreeDOS.  Since this machine does not have a floppy, I gave up a small 
amount of memory to install CDROM drivers, but even with that I have 615K 
for TR.  I still do my email on my Windoze XP box, but Ubuntu (actually the 
Samba package) networks easily, so I can boot the contest computer to 
Ubuntu, transfer contest files, then reboot back to FreeDOS and TR.  Plus I 
had the fun of learning about Ubuntu/Linux and FreeDOS.

73, John

Largest executable program size       615K (629,920 bytes)
Largest free upper memory block         0K (      0 bytes)
FreeDOS is resident in the high memory area.

config.sys::
SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM C:\ /E:512 /P
DEVICE=C:\QHMBOOT.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\QDBOOT.SYS /N
DEVICE=C:\UMBPCI.SYS NOEMS
DEVICEHIGH=C:\QHIMEM.SYS
DEVICEHIGH=C:\QDMA.SYS /O /D /F /L
DEVICEHIGH=C:\QCDROM.SYS /D:CDR1 /UF /L
FILES=40
BUFFERS=20
STACKS=9,256
lastdrive=H

autoexec.bat::
echo off
prompt=$p$g
path=C:\;c:\tr
loadhigh c:\shcdx33a.com /D:CDR1




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