4DOS

[Beth Hatch]

Hello John and all,

I'm just wondering.......  I have a version of the Spin Rite hard drive
maintenance utility which boots as a CD using Free Dos.  It should be
theoretically possible to make a bootable spin rite cd using JAWS and Free
Dos then.  I unfortunately don't have a Double talk, but I do have a Dectalk
Express.  I tried to install JAWS on a bootable cd, but I got into trouble
somehow and though I found the floppy images that I downloaded from Freedom
Scientific, I wasn't able to get them installed on to a CD.  I have a badly
broken desktop pc that needs Spin Rite very badly to fix the hard drive, it
would be really cool if I could use JAWS and Free Dos to make this work.
Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Beth 

-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca]
On Behalf Of John G. Heim
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 9:40 AM
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: Re: 4DOS


----- Original Message -----
From: "Gaijin" <gaijin at clearwire.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
>
> Think it would be nice to collect all this old stuff and put it on a 
> CD or DVD iso image.  I wonder what some of these defunct companies 
> would say if we asked them to release the old, no longer supported 
> source code to the GPL.  I miss the old WordStar Professional word 
> processor.
>

By and large they'd say no.  I've seen it tried many times and mostly you
get no answer or a refusal. I think these people still have lawyers telling
them it's a bad idea. Maybe they have something to hide within their code --
like that it wasn't entirely their own in the first place.

Anyway, I don't know anything about 4dos but the FreeDOS project is alive
and well. Their mailing list is very active (google it). Anyone interested
in DOS applications should definately check out FreeDOS. For instance, I
know that Jaws for DOS; which is a free download on the Freedom Scientific
web site; runs under FreeDOS.

I have a diskette image on my web site that allows you to boot freeDOS with
jaws for DOS. It's configured to start talking with an external doubletalk
hardware synth. In other words, if you have a doubletalk, you can boot from
this diskette and get speech. See:

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~jheim/blindi/FreeDOS-ltlk.img

The diskette image also includes CD-ROM support. So, theoretically, you can
boot from a diskette made with this image and then access a CD-ROM. I was
hoping to install Windows this way. But the Windows installer craps out when
run under FreeDOS. However, you should be able to make a bootable CD-ROM
with this image.


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