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The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

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Re: The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

#11

Post by walrus01 »

joshcryer wrote: post #8
ndiddy wrote: post #5

I’m guessing they’re doing this because modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore (edit: untrue, see reply by dmitrygr). This makes me wonder why they’re even offering FreeDOS as an option when they offer Linux for customers who don’t wish to purchase a Windows license. Maybe they have some sort of contractual obligation with a large customer?

I suspect it's more bland than that, they need to be able to have a booting/working system otherwise the customer is going to call up support and say their computer isn't booting or that it's saying "no OS found" type messages. It's just to cover themselves, that's why they include enough Linux to be able to load a PDF reader. It should be easy enough to do d:\setup.exe with a USB that has a Windows installer on it,…

Yeah, but why not have something that just uefi boots into a barebones grub2 and then cli only debian-stable and bash shell?

Forget the DOS part.

Re: The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

#12

Post by walrus01 »

wmf wrote: post #10
mcculley wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it is for customers running weird old legacy hardware (e.g., lab devices, manufacturing, that only runs on DOS).

Would those apps work inside QEMU though? Is it configured to properly pass through the parallel port?

Highly unlikely, without really messing around with it.

Re: The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

#13

Post by dmitrygr »

ndiddy wrote: post #5

I’m guessing they’re doing this because modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore (edit: untrue, see reply by dmitrygr). This makes me wonder why they’re even offering FreeDOS as an option when they offer Linux for customers who don’t wish to purchase a Windows license. Maybe they have some sort of contractual obligation with a large customer?

> modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore

This is false. They still can and happily will. Issue is more about vendor not shipping a CSM image. A modern x86 processor will happily run real DOS just fine.

Re: The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

#15

Post by ndiddy »

mcculley wrote: post #7
ndiddy wrote: post #5

I’m guessing they’re doing this because modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore (edit: untrue, see reply by dmitrygr). This makes me wonder why they’re even offering FreeDOS as an option when they offer Linux for customers who don’t wish to purchase a Windows license. Maybe they have some sort of contractual obligation with a large customer?

Maybe it is for customers running weird old legacy hardware (e.g., lab devices, manufacturing, that only runs on DOS).

Weird old legacy hardware that only runs on DOS generally requires real-time access to stuff like ISA cards or parallel/serial ports, so this wouldn't work for that use case since the computer doesn't have any of those.

Re: The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

#16

Post by mc4ndr3 »

mcculley wrote: post #7
ndiddy wrote: post #5

I’m guessing they’re doing this because modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore (edit: untrue, see reply by dmitrygr). This makes me wonder why they’re even offering FreeDOS as an option when they offer Linux for customers who don’t wish to purchase a Windows license. Maybe they have some sort of contractual obligation with a large customer?

Maybe it is for customers running weird old legacy hardware (e.g., lab devices, manufacturing, that only runs on DOS).

FreeDOS is known to not run well inside of virtualization. A proper host install would be far more capable.

Re: The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

#17

Post by yuhong »

dmitrygr wrote: post #13
ndiddy wrote: post #5

I’m guessing they’re doing this because modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore (edit: untrue, see reply by dmitrygr). This makes me wonder why they’re even offering FreeDOS as an option when they offer Linux for customers who don’t wish to purchase a Windows license. Maybe they have some sort of contractual obligation with a large customer?

> modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore This is false. They still can and happily will. Issue is more about vendor not shipping a CSM image. A modern x86 processor will happily run real DOS just fine.

Intel officially pulled support in 2020-2021.

Re: The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

#18

Post by zitterbewegung »

ndiddy wrote: post #5

I’m guessing they’re doing this because modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore (edit: untrue, see reply by dmitrygr). This makes me wonder why they’re even offering FreeDOS as an option when they offer Linux for customers who don’t wish to purchase a Windows license. Maybe they have some sort of contractual obligation with a large customer?

Hypothetically if you wanted to use something like FreeBSD, Dragonfly BSD or maybe OpenSolaris? This is a big reach.

Re: The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

#19

Post by jchw »

And then there’s another OS: UEFI.

Something I recently joked about doing was porting SDL to the UEFI environment and then building DOSBOX for it. I’m sure someone has already done this in some fashion, but the idea was amusing enough for me to genuinely consider it one of these weekends. I guess in that case, though, you can’t really run FreeDOS.

Re: The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

#20

Post by userbinator »

yuhong wrote: post #9
userbinator wrote: post #6

That was far more amusing and interesting than I thought it would be... I wonder if it can actually boot DOS on the physical hardware, and if it can't ( DOS itself is very minimal in what it requires of the hardware), is it really PC-compatible anymore?

Intel phased out the UEFI CSM from new platforms in 2020-2021.

I suppose you could use GRUB and whatever Coreboot has as its BIOS? Either way, sad times indeed when PCs aren't anymore.
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