Running OpenGEM on FreeDOS 1.3
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- OpenGEM is an open source version of the GEM graphical desktop, which you also know as ViewMax on DR-DOS. But if you run OpenGEM, you may notice things are broken. But there's a quick fix for that using SWSUBST to substitute a drive letter for a path.
Thanks to Liam on the freedos-devel email list for pointing out the path mistake and the quick fix.
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Standard comment rules apply.
Just wanna say FreeDOS having an official UA-cam channel is a blessing. The ease of access for tips and documentation is pretty much unmatched compared to other projects of this scope.
Thanks - I'm glad you like the videos!
Back in '91 I had an Amstrad PC1512DD that came not only with MS-DOS but also DR-DOS and GEM Desktop. I loved GEM Desktop back in the day!
The Atari ST also used the GEM Desktop with very few differences. The Atari ST also used the MS-DOS file system so it could read and write MS-DOS disks natively.
The Atari TOS! A friend of mine in college had an Atari ST and you're right, it was running the same desktop.
@@freedosproject I was an Amiga owner back in the day and even it used a variant of the GEM Desktop called WorkBench. GEM seemed to die out after Motorolla 68K processors fell behind Intel offerings and then Windows put the nail in the coffin for GEM as a desktop GUI as well as the operating systems using GEM.
@@ferrellsl I've never heard of WorkBench being based off GEM. I'm not saying it's not true but honestly it doesn't really sound plausible. Have you got a source to this?
@@OldAussieAds It's not true.
It did have quite a nice version of GEM, especially in later versions (2.06 and then 3.06 and 4.04 for the Atari TT and Falcon, respectively). They got some nice features like custom icons and colour configuration etc, at a time when PC GEM was actually downgraded due to legal action from Apple who claimed that it infringed on their work (despite that Apple's desktop was itself heavily "inspired" by ideas from Xerox Parc, and Engelbart's research before that).
Although the ST used a DOS-style FAT, there was a slightly unfortunate incompatibility with the BIOS parameter block (BPB) stored in the bootsector. It expected a few bytes to be set in a specific way, which the ST's built-in formatter didn't do. When TOS 1.04 was released, it updated the formatter to fix this, and there were some free utilities floating around to do the same on older machines.
I was really wondering why OpenGEM seemed so broken when I last tried it! I'm glad you posted this.
Glad I could help!
Wow! I've been thinking lately about how a DE for DOS would look like. Pretty cool to see people have tried. It'd be cool one day to see something like XFCE fully working in FreeDOS.
We include a few graphical environments in FreeDOS: OpenGEM, oZone GUI, and SEAL.
If you want see a DE for DOS, you need to install Windows 3.1 or Windows for Workgroups on DOS. That was the main DE in the late days of DOS.
@@freedosproject Neat. I wonder how viable they'd be in modern times. Gonna look into those. SEAL looks exactly what I'm looking for.
@@OpenGL4ever I've used Windows 3.1 briefly for gaming but huh, I always just assumed it was NT. Didn't occur to me it was just DOS.
@@realreaper3 Well, Windows 3.1 and Windows NT
*sigh* if only Gary Kildall hadn't decided to go flying the day IBM came calling, we could all be running GEM 11 on our CP/M-x64 machines
I've heard that's a myth. I think it had more to do with Gary's wife refusing to sign IBM's non disclosure. Though I'm sure that's not even close to the full story.
I've heard so many versions of the story, I don't even know what the truth is on that anymore.
@@freedosproject True. And with Gary Kildall now gone, I doubt we'll ever know.
The point stands. If he had taken the deal we might be running proper desktops today.
That's a nice program to work on and fix/improve, rather than trying to get old Windows 1/2/3 to work on FreeDOS
You can't compare OpenGEM with Windows 3.1.
Windows 3.1 was everything in the late days of DOS. Thousands of applications moved to Windows 3.x when Windows 3.0 was released. It's a very software rich environment and it was a new universe for DOS. That is something, that was never achieved for OpenGEM and others.
Windows 1 and 2 on the other side never played a big role and there are good reasons for that. They didn't abstract the software development as much as Windows 3.x did, they were usually only DOS program starters and they also only run in Real Mode which limited RAM below the 1 MiB address range + HMA.
Windows 3.0 supported Protected Mode right from the beginning and Windows 3.1 dropped the Real Mode for Windows applications.
Windows 3.0 was the big change in the DOS world and Windows 3.1 was the release to raise that on a new professional level.
Thank you for the hint, it just came useful.
Glad it was helpful!
Never seen OpenGEM in action. Kind of reminds me of Macintosh system 6 and 7.
Same era, so lots of graphical enviroments looked like each other. Mac System 6.x was late 80s to early 90s, and System 7.x was early to late 90s.
GEM was so like the classic Macintosh, Apple successfully sued them based on look and feel and GEM version 2 and higher had to be constrained to have non-overlapping windows and run only one program at a time. It looks like OpenGEM removed those restrictions though.
So sad there's not so much software for GEM, and it can't run DOS promt in windowed mode.
I remember a friend running this years ago.
Why don't you put that SWSUBST command in the FDAUTO BAT or AUTOEXEC BAT file by default when OpenGEM is installed via FDIMPLES? Even a IF command in ther FDAUTO BAT batch file, that checks for OpenGEMs existance would do the job.
That way it would always work and the user would not need to know that.
A much better option would be to just fix the bug in OpenGEM, but i assume it's a little more complicated, thus the workwround in the FDAUTO BAT should do it for a while.
There's discussion about how to update OpenGEM to not rely on a "root directory" path. Might be just in the BAT file, or could require a code fix. I think Liam was looking into it on freedos-devel.
@@freedosproject Thank you for the information.
@@freedosproject Did the team manage to figure out the issue with OpenGEM?
Only thing missing from this presentation is a walkthrough creating a batch file to automate the process.
I’m a bit OCD about my root directory - only CONFIG.SYS, KERNEL and a few root level directories are allowed - and it always annoyed me having the open gem folder in the root. SWSUBST allows me to move into a subdir.
A batch file would have been a good addition. I'll keep that in mind for future videos.
Is it possible to set Gem to boot automatically when you start the computer?
Yes, add those commands to your FDAUTO.BAT and that will start GEM automatically whenever you boot FreeDOS.
Very Nice.
Thanks! It's a pretty neat desktop.
I'll have to try that on my AMD Athlon 2X machine
how does one actually get the files to show up as a drive in freedos within Virtual box? I have tried creating a shared folder and an img disk with no luck
Here's how I do it on Linux: opensource.com/article/21/6/copy-files-linux-freedos
can you build a operatingsystem. win 1995. and. 1998 on ontop of FreeDOS
You probably could, and you should feel free to do that. But building a "Windows"-like operating system wasn't very interesting to me, just DOS. ☺
is there any efforts to modernise freedos with a graphical desktop environment and a web browser or something like that, i would love to use a gui operating system with dos as the terminal that isnt windows
Our primary goal with FreeDOS is to use a command line, not a graphical desktop. Sorry.
There's ReactOS
@@mgord9518 reactos is completely unstable and doesn’t work on modern computers
@@betaworld5522 Yes, and modernizing FreeDOS would take a much bigger effort than making ReactOS stable.
@@mgord9518 fair
i was to create this gui interfaces from scratch and is not so complicated
If you're referring to the area tutorial at about 9:45 when R hasn't been defined yet, your program may be overflowing the variable. Because R isn't given an initial value, the spec says the compiler might give it whatever value is in that memory location at the time (i.e. not initialized). So if the bit pattern in that part of memory happens to be a very big real value, then squaring that value and multiplying by PI could overload the variable, resulting in the PRINT statement reporting "Infinity".
That's why it's important to always initialize variables. In my example, I was lucky and R happened to have a zero value at the start. The demo after that shows how to initialize the variable with a value, so you should do that.
we need something like Xorg for DOS
Desqview/X was an X client for DOS, back in the day. I haven't really looked into X alternatives now, since I am more interested in using DOS in character mode.
how do you install opengem?
You can install it from the FreeDOS 1.3 distribution using FDIMPLES. OpenGEM is on the BonusCD so you need to have that CD loaded before you run FDIMPLES.
Does DOS have an equivalent to TTY’s? Or is the only way to get back to the command prompt killing the desktop?
I assume you mean a "terminal window" app? Most people who ran graphical desktops like this were trying to get away from teh command line, so I don't think OpenGEM has a terminal app. You'd need to do everything via the GUI.
@@freedosproject I mean like in Linux where you have the x server on a TTY, but if you press Ctrl+Alt+F1 through F7 it puts you into a text only command line, sort of like the DOS prompt. It's annoying to have to kill the GUI just to jump to a terminal and run a simple command, but I am new to DOS, FreeDOS being my first DOS, so I am not sure if it is capable of something like that.
@@tylerdean980 Sorry, the ctrl+alt+Fn feature is specific to Linux virtal terminals. DOS doesn't do this. (That feature would require multitasking, and that's not present in plain DOS.)
@@freedosproject Okay, thanks for clearing that up for me.
@@tylerdean980 There were taskswitchers for DOS available in the later years, DesqView/386 comes to mind.
I have big problems to make youtube comments with the word of this OS. All of my comments with the name of this OS will be deleted/censored by youtube in a few seconds. I do not know why, but i think this is crazy. I like to help this OS on youtube.
That's weird. Others have been able to dierctly mention FreeDOS in their comments.
@@freedosproject And i can not put an internet url example from youtube in the comment since one and a half year. Some time i can put a batch file in the comment, but not every time.
@@maxmuster7003 I'm not a UA-cam expert, but my guess if you posted a series of comments that were all automatically blocked, UA-cam may add additional restrictions on future comments. I know batch files can get blocked because the algorithm considers them "spam" because it's essentially code.
As cool as GUI desktops are for DOS, the problem is they very quickly evolve into Windows wannabes.
Norton Desktop for Dos doesn't work on Freedos. X-Tree works great with Freedos.