Blairdude

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Blair's Blog

Welcome to my weblog, my way of letting everyone know what I'm up to.

What's new (YYYY-MM-DD):

2006-08-16 Upcoming FreeDOS 1.0

OK... 1.0 is right around the corner with a snazzy installer and user-friendly installer menus. Included also is a long filename driver and (with the full distributions) many other useful software packages, all of which can be managed using FDPKG. All software packages have been updated and there is a free disk space checker in the installer now. Enjoy :-)

2006-02-03 FDPKG, OpenWatcom, PASCAL, ASM, MD5SUM, and Awale

The FDPKG 1.0 release has been delayed due to difficulties with Pacific C, but I hope to have it back on the road soon. As a result, the next release of my distro has been delayed, but when it is released, it shall have FDPKG 1.0 integrated into the installation and it will be much enhanced over the last version.

I was thinking one day how it would be especially nice if OpenWatcom's clib supported LFN the way DJGPP's does, so I brought it up on OpenWatcom's discussion groups with a response that basically said that they'll support it, but only if they don't have to do it. I volunteered that I might be able to partially do that. They also suggested that if I have the time, I try to get the DOS installer for OpenWatcom working again... which would be great... I didn't even know that there was a DOS installer earlier.

To add FDPKG integration into the graphical FreeDOS installer, I also had to learn some PASCAL, which I've been a bit busy with also... and I also need to improve my ASM knowledge in order to add LFN to OpenWatcom's clib, so that's another thing I'm learning more about.

I finally got around to setting up another DJGPP distribution and some new binaries of mine are linked to from my website along with previous ones, and I have also finally been able to compile MD5SUM with this DJGPP installation, increasing the capability of that program (the DJGPP makefile also automatically compiles SHA256? support into the exe, unlike the 16-bit counterpart). During this, I also found out to my surprise that the Pacific C-compiled binary of MD5SUM is generating false digests, so I would recommend to anyone to wait for the next release or compile it themselves with Turbo C or OpenWatcom to avoid this nasty problem. Note that it WILL work if you don't intend to use it with another digester (e.g. download a file off the internet and then check its MD5 with the digest from the website).

As soon as I do some quick bugfixes, I'll release a simple game called Awale that is a computerized version of the African game with the same name, and many other names as well. Although it could use a reworking of the UI, it works and the 'AI' (although not much of an AI) can be very difficult and is configurable. It is mainly based off the version for Windows found at http://pascal.libaud.free.fr/awale.html and the author has been notified of my modifications. It has a half-complete French translation and an in-progress German translation. Hopefully a future version will have a much prettier interface (the current one works well, but is only very text based and would do better to use CONIO or CURSES).

Apart from that, I've been very busy with school by writing two mock provincial exams last week and on that note I'll also be writing the real exams on Monday and Tuesday. These exams are notorious for causing very low marks with students and they are worth 40% of most courses they are taken for... Yikes!!

2005-12-21 FDPKG and the Distro

FDPKG 0.2 is about ready to release (I just have to finish kittenization), and then I've gotta merge its new package format into my distro before finalizing a new release of my distro by next year

2005-11-14 MD5SUM and various FreeDOS packages; the success of TCC2WAT

I've fixed most of the problems of MD5SUM and I think I am ready for a full release. The GetLFNname? function was rid of and replaced with an LFN truename function written by myself as a wrapper for a DOS interrupt. I have also just ported it to Turbo C and have begun preliminary work on WAT2TCC?. Porting MD5SUM was very simple, and it would likely be very simple to port to DJGPP.

I have also been busy porting many of the FreeDOS apps to OpenWatcom such as Unformat, Mirror, Diskcopy, and chkdsk, as well as making more standard makefiles that allow for easy switching of compilers. In order to port defrag, I will also need a function for gettext and puttext. Eventually, it would be nice if I could have a batch file that automatically builds source packages in my Distro, and possibly even optimizes them for the current system. TCC2WAT has had a lot of updates, so if anyone wants to use it, it is recommended to ask for the latest version.

2005-10-14 TCC2WAT, FIND, GEM, MD5SUM, and Distro

I'm about ready to release TCC2WAT now as a preliminary beta and so that people can verify that it works well, as 2/3 of the missing Turbo C functions are completed.

I managed to get Find compiled with Micro-C to obtain a smaller binary, but unfortunately this port does not want to work properly. If anyone is experienced with Micro-C, I would appreciate some help.

I started to port the Pacific C GEM bindings to OpenWatcom, but ran into some trouble about halfway through when I discovered some ASM code. Fortuneately, the maintainer of the DOS version of FreeBASIC? is helping me to port this to WASM (Watcom Assembler).

A new MD5SUM release should be out shortly that adds support for @file lists, SHA-256 hashing (though not compiled in by default), and hopefully RMD-160 hashing, and CRC-32 checksumming.

As for the distro, it has been suggested that I release it as a 1.0-pre release. Objections?

2005-10-10 TCC2WAT and Kitten

I've just finished porting Kitten to Pacific C and Micro-C, and it compiles on both without uttering a warning. As for TCC2WAT, I've added many more functions today.

2005-10-7 TCC2WAT and MD5SUM

I am pleased to announce that I should soon be releasing a new library called TCC2WAT, which, when complete, will allow for much Turbo C source code to compile without modification with OpenWatcom by simply including a file called "tcc2wat.h" and and changing any instances of <dir.h> to #ifdef __WATCOMC__ / #include <direct.h> / #else / #include <dir.h> / #endif.

This new library currently has the following functions implemented: getverify(), _chmod(), getftime(), setftime(), searchpath(), biosdisk(), absread(), abswrite(), gotoxy(), textmode(), window(), textattr(), clrscr(), wherex(), wherey(), dostounix(), and unixtodos(), with several other #defines for functions where only names differ or the order of arguments differ (like findfirst). Missing functions include getfat() and getfatd(), and likely many more that I simply haven't noticed. If anyone has an implementation of these, I would like to have it.

dostounix() and unixtodos() were copied from WATT32? source code, and if there's anything wrong with this, I would appreciate someone telling me. The conio functions like wherex() were taken from a C source file I found with no license, so they will simply be treated as open-source unless anyone can point me to sources that have a definite open-source license.

As for MD5SUM, I now have working CRC-32 checksumming code, but still no CRC-16 checksumming code. Once again, if anybody knows of CRC-16 checksumming C source code that checks out with a checksumming tool, please let men know.

2005-10-4 Working on MD5SUM and distro

I have added @file list support to MD5SUM since the last pre-release, and am working on CRC-16 and CRC-32 checksum support. I have these checksums implemented, but for some reason I cannot get the checksums to match up to other tools. If anybody knows of CRC-16/32 source code in C, I would be interested.

As for the distro, I need to get the ghostscript source code downloaded and I need to look at Bernd's batch files to see what can be used. If anybody would like any particular packages added, email me at Blairdude AT gmail DOT com.

Later I might put my todo list up on the wiki somewhere...