Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> > Sindi Keesan wrote:
> > Are you booting from bare DOS?
>
> No, we have himem.sys and emm386.exe in config.sys, because this is a DOS
> computer used for DOS as well as BL3.  I thought the whole point of BL was
> for use on a DOS computer, not on its own computer, and I can't use DOS
> very well without autoexec.bat and config.sys.
>
> My partner was saying something about registers (video?) being programmed
> with some default value, that gets reset the first time a program is used
> and stays set to the new value after that.  Maybe that is going on here.
>
> I will see if booting from a bare DOS on floppy disk fixes the lack of a
> cursor in rxvt.  That problem is not fixing itself when I reboot.

I guess maybe a boot floppy is the answer, like Day kept harping about?
There are freedos bootdisks available on the 'net (called "odin") that
could have their autoexec.bat and config.sys files emptied or simply
deleted.  Stick one in the drive when you want to boot BL3, leave it out
when you don't.  I don't suppose a menu could be presented to the user on
boot by a DOS running from the HD, asking if the autoexec.bat and
config.sys files should be loaded?  This would be a better solution yet -
especially if it had a timeout feature such that it would boot to a
default within a certain time period (either to DOS with regluar
autoexec.bat and config.sys loaded, or to BL3 without any autoexec.bat or
config.sys).  Maybe really all that's needed is a choice between
autoexec.bat's and config.sys's, since it seems to be the memory mgmt
stuff that's interfering with xvesa: one set would have memory mgmt stuff,
the other not.  Any ideas on how to do that, DOS users?

James