BoxOS

[Mr. T]

Greetings,

Getting the FreeDOS Kernel via Linux code to work with WINE will be almost
impossible.

FreeDOS and Linux are two entirely different operating systems, both having
extremely different code structures and different
I/O interfacing methods. I use FreeDOS often and whilst it's an excellent OS
as a MS-DOS replacement, Wine will never work on it.  FreeDOS
works well as a DOS operating system. This means that it's not going to have
multi-threading, multi-tasking and gettng WINE to use a UI
besides X will be an issue (although not as impossible as other parts of the
OS).

For starters, C++ is a good base for this type of development, but Qbasic is
long-dead and using it now will not be a very good idea. It has memory
limitations (can't easily use memory above 4Mb) and won't be suitable at all
for this type of program. If you want fast, don't even consider QBX (or any
QB variant), QB is extremely high-level code and by the time you get an
output, it's too congested and execution time will be slow, particularly for
larger programs.

Should you wish to genuinely start such a project, I suggest starting with a
completely Linux Kernel without the FreeDOS and using a stripped-down Linux
distribution to build your environment. This will work much better than a
Windows-DOS-Linux mix and will be more likely to succeed than using a
mixture of two OSes and an emulator.

Please don't get me wrong, I think it's a terrific idea, but I thought I'd
just give my two-cents.

Regards,
Jonathan Thorpe