China DOS Union

The following is quoted from windrv on 2004-3-6 23:04:43:
Thank you,  Roy!

You're welcome! :-)

The following is quoted from 不点 on 2004-3-1 17:08:18:

As for the situation you mention here where 0.2 cannot run, I feel that it should not have happened in the first place. 0.1 already ran, but 0.2 cannot run, then this is definitely a BUG. But without further details, it is hard to locate this bug. Could you provide your DOS memory image? That is, capture the 1M memory under DOS control and put it somewhere I can download it.

Then could you provide a memory capture tool?

Thanks, brothers. My health is bad and I need rest, so I will rarely come again in the future. Please, brothers, help maintain this thread together. All the BUGs mentioned before do not seem very serious. When my health improves, I will come back and solve them. Before that, brothers can try solving them yourselves. GRUB for DOS also needs new maintainer(s); I wonder who is interested? In the future I will still provide patches (as one of the developers), but I really can no longer handle daily maintenance.

I feel very surprised by the BUG mentioned by brother tmpid that GRUB.exe cannot run. I checked the dosstart.S file, especially the parts changed from 0.1.4 to 0.2.0pre4, and did not find anything that would cause the BUG. If this problem is not very widespread, it can temporarily be left unsolved. Also, since the dosstart.S file in 0.1.4 can start GRUB.exe, you can directly try taking the dosstart.S file from 0.1.4 and using it in 0.2.0.pre4, replacing the dosstart.S file in 0.2.0pre4 and recompiling, and then it should run.

As for memory capture, I do not have any software either. I suggest using DEBUG.

It is a pity that I was unable to officially release 0.2.0. Sorry!

The following is quoted from 不点 on 2004-3-7 9:24:34:
Thanks, brothers. My health is bad and I need rest, so I will rarely come again in the future. Please, brothers, help maintain this thread together. All the BUGs mentioned before do not seem very serious. When my health improves, I will come back and solve them. Before that, brothers can try solving them yourselves. GRUB for DOS also needs new maintainer(s); I wonder who is interested? In the future I will still provide patches (as one of the developers), but I really can no longer handle daily maintenance.

Brother tmpid mentioned the BUG that GRUB.exe cannot run, and I feel very surprised. I checked the dosstart.S file, especially the parts changed from 0.1.4 to 0.2.0pre4, and did not find anything that would cause the BUG. If this problem is not very widespread, it can temporarily be left unresolved. Also, since the dosstart.S file in 0.1.4 can start GRUB.exe, you can directly try taking the dosstart.S file from 0.1.4 and using it in 0.2.0.pre4, replacing the dosstart.S file in 0.2.0pre4, and recompiling, and then it should run.

As for memory capture, I don't have any software either. I suggest using DEBUG.

It is a pity that I was unable to officially release 0.2.0. Sorry!

Dear TinyBit,

Miss you!

Anything that we can do it for you?

Please come to here to chat if you have time! Just chatting is enough.

May be we could take over the project to look after it. But about the
technical improvements, we may not be so good as you to make
improvements so often. Anyway, your contribution has been very
significant and gives us quite a stable platform.

If you agree, we could also put GRUB for DOS project, besides Wengier''s
site, on:

sourceforge.net

and our site:

windrv.net

so that it can have a permanent site for its hosting as well.

Thanks again to brother windrv for the help! My illness was caused by tension. Programming is very physically draining work. My health used to be quite good, but over the past year it hasn't been, and right now it's especially bad. As soon as I start programming I enter a state of extreme tension, so my health has been severely damaged. I cannot relax; it's just my personality, and I cannot change it. The only option is to give up programming completely. This is very painful, but there is no way around it.

I agree with you carrying out this project on sf.net, windrv.net, or any other place. You can arrange the specific matters. From now on, new versions will be released by you.

Also, I just changed the bootgrub file, and now it should not have any major problems.

http://www.ipdown.com/grub4dos/bootgrub
http://www.ipdown.com/grub4dos/bootgrub.S

It seems you cannot access this site; let's see whether brother wengier can help you.

This upload space is very easy to use. Thanks, brother wengier.

If I can come in the future, I still will, but much less often. If there are patches, for now they will still be placed at

http://www.ipdown.com/grub4dos/

but I will no longer come here to announce them.

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Supplement: on February 29 the grldr file was also changed:

http://www.ipdown.com/grub4dos/grldr
http://www.ipdown.com/grub4dos/grldrstart.S

The other BUGs reported on the forum have not been fixed; the work has not been done yet.

=======================

Another supplement: it is precisely because I am too impatient by nature that I cannot continue development. So the speed of development progress is not the key issue. I hope you will take good care of your health and not make the same mistake I did.

Any questions related to GRUB for DOS, technical or non-technical, (if there are any) can be asked here without worry. We want to achieve the goal of continuing development of Grub for dos at a lower cost.

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Special thanks again to brother windrv for the act of saving my health! I can go recuperate with peace of mind now.

Dear TinyBit,

Please remember -- Life the most precious thing to yourself and your family. Everybody cares about you.

I agree that you stop programming for a while and take sufficient rest. This may be a temporary phenomenon.

Very often, after taking a good vacation, people can resume work very well and work much better than before.

This magic must also work for you.

We shall try our best to work for your project.

And hope some day you can re-join us, not necessarily doing coding.

After taking a rest, you must be able to regulate very well the distribution of your time between work and leisure.

Maturity makes one patient and tolerant.

I hope someday we can meet and chat.

If you are free and feel comfortable, please come to the NewDos forum to chat and make friends.

Good luck & Good health!

Dear Wengier,

If you don''''t mind, please help us to consolidate a collection of the most updated work
by TinyBit on his Grub For DOS on its homepage hosted at your site and provide
a URL for others to download.

With your permission also, we would open a project page, in addition to the
homepage of Grub For DOS on your site, on sourceforge.net. Updates will be
sent to you and posted on sourceforge.net

We can still use this thread to discuss issues related to Grub For DOS and WINGRUB.

After extracting, copy the two files BOOTGRUB and GRLDR to the root directory of drive C:, then modify the Boot.ini file. Add the following line at the end of Boot.ini:

C:\BOOTGRUB="boot grub"
But after entering “grub>”, typing the following commands does not work, and I can't get into linux?
1. kernel (hd0,9)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda10
2. configfile (hd0,2)/boot/grub/menu.lst and press Enter,
or type configfile (hd0,2)/boot/grub/grub.conf
help me!!!!!

Grub is so powerful, supports both English and Chinese, and there are so many Chinese-localization experts; friends who are willing to spend time localizing an ordinary DOS program under Win98, please lend a hand and localize its DOS command Hlp for everyone...! Let more friends, especially those who want to get into and learn DOS but don't have DOS+98 installed, use it and understand it...!

The following is quoted from 不点's post on 2004-3-9 11:48:34:
Thank you again, brother windrv, for your help! My illness was caused by nervous tension. Programming is very physically demanding work. My health used to be quite good, but over the past year it hasn't been, and especially now it's very bad. As soon as I start programming, I enter a state of extreme tension, so my body has suffered serious damage. I can't relax; it's just my personality, and I can't change it. I can only give up programming completely. This is very painful, but there's no other way.

I agree with you carrying out this project at sf.net, windrv.net, or anywhere else. You can arrange the specific matters. From now on, new versions will be released by you.

Also, I just changed the bootgrub file, and now it probably shouldn't have any major problems.

http://www.ipdown.com/grub4dos/bootgrub
http://www.ipdown.com/grub4dos/bootgrub.S

It seems you can't access this site, so see whether brother wengier can help you.

This upload space is very easy to use. Thank you, brother wengier.

If I can come in the future, I still will, but much less often. If there are patches, for now they will still be placed at

http://www.ipdown.com/grub4dos/

But I won't come here to report it anymore.

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Supplement: on February 29 I also changed the grldr file:

http://www.ipdown.com/grub4dos/grldr
http://www.ipdown.com/grub4dos/grldrstart.S

The other BUGs reported on the forum have not been fixed; the work has not yet been done.

=======================

Another supplement: it is precisely because I was too impatient that I can no longer continue development. So the speed of development is not the key issue. I hope you will take good care of your health and not make the same mistake I did.

Any questions related to GRUB for DOS, technical or non-technical, (if there are any) can be asked here with confidence. We want to achieve the goal of continuing development of Grub for dos at lower cost.

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Special thanks again to brother windrv for what he did to save my health! I can rest and recover without worry now.

Dear TinyBit & Wengier,

We have opened a project on sourceforge.net on:

GRUB For DOS & WINGRUB

On this project homepage, I intend to put up some description about this
project and two icon-links:

1. One icon-link is for GRUB For DOS, pointing to the original homepage at
Wengier's site
2. Another icon-link is for WINGRUB, pointing to the homepage of WINGRUB
at our windrv.net

If you agree, you can put up update files for GRUB For DOS at
the files section of the project on sourceforge.net

If we have files for WINGRUB or updated files for GRUB For DOS, we may
also put them up onto that area.

The administrator of the project is:

bean123

I shall give a private mail to Wengier about other details.

Dear Wengier,

Do you mind changing the following wording on the homepage of GRUB for DOS to:

(in Chinese and in English)

******
For development information about GRUB for DOS 0.2.x, please look at this page (also in Chinese).
******

And I suggest that to better promote your NewDOS forum here, we should
encourage people to discuss problems in both Chinese and English so that
it makes the forum international.

People can put up questions in English and do receive English answer as well.

GRUB for DOS is a good project for us to do it this way.

I have requested:

bean123

to do discussion here about the maintenance and updating of GRUB for DOS here.

He can both write Chinese and English very well.

I leave it to him now.

Oh, sorry everyone. Because of my health problems, in the rush I may have forgotten some things and did not think through some issues in detail. As everyone has already seen, the driving force behind grub for dos has to a large extent been this forum. On google, many people have already taken the webpage that brother wengier worked so hard to build as the homepage of grub for dos. I think this is a good foundation for our continued development. There are many experts gathered here, and this is also fertile ground for cultivating GRUB for dos. The reason grub for dos has grown so healthily is precisely because of such a good environment. I have also said many times before how important brother wengier himself is to grub4dos. Although wengier has not yet written code for grub4dos, his testing ability is by no means ordinary, but very comprehensive and profound. His testing shows that he is also a developer of grub4dos. In addition, there is a lot of knowledge about DOS and CPUs that I did not understand correctly; it was brother wengier who pointed out the reason behind the problem. For example, it was brother wengier who pointed out that the EMM386 environment is protected mode; before that I had always mistakenly thought it was real mode. There are many such examples, so I will not list them one by one. What I want to say is that when I later went back through old posts where I discussed things with wengier, I found that I had made many mistakes, but I did not go back to correct what I had said in those posts, because the posts were already very old and nobody was reading them anymore. Another thing that helped advance grub4dos was the good and plentiful suggestions and help. There were many people on the forum offering opinions and suggestions, and brother wengier's suggestions were often relatively important, and he also offered the most suggestions.

sf.net is a well-known open-source promotion site. If a grub4dos mirror download is set up on sf.net, it will undoubtedly increase awareness of grub4dos. I very much agree with brother windrv linking the homepage to brother wengier's original homepage. If brother windrv or brother wengier could also set up a Chinese homepage, that would probably be even better. I originally wanted to create this Chinese homepage, and brother wengier had already agreed, but because of my health, I was slow to act. Personally, I think it is still better to use the space brother wengier already prepared.

Also, there is not yet a dedicated forum for discussing grub4dos. We are only borrowing this thread. If this does not cause confusion, then that is acceptable too. If you have the energy, it would be best to have a dedicated section【however, if there are too few posts, then it would not be suitable to open one】. Actually, I think Chinese discussions should use a Chinese forum, and English discussions should use an English forum. I myself once replied to a grub4dos question on the English forum set up by brother wengier. The forum software brother wengier uses really is quite good, hehe.【Any way is fine, I'm just speaking casually.】

There is no best, only comparatively better. My opinion only represents myself; as for what is really appropriate, that is for you to decide. GPL software itself does not restrict anyone from taking it and doing further development. But to do it well really does require putting in manpower. I believe that with the strong backing of the community, grub4dos will certainly continue to develop in a healthy way.

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One more technical idea:

I had considered the issue of grub for linux before. Now I have thought of this again. If the grub boot loader could boot from under LINUX, it would undoubtedly make it more attractive. I hope that one day I will be able to complete it【right now it really isn't possible】.

Thanks to everyone for the discussion.

As for the specific plan, for the time being we can implement it according to the plan we discussed in private messages.

Also, I think discussing GRUB here is very good. There probably won't be any confusion, and I think the discussion atmosphere here may even be better than setting up a dedicated GRUB forum, and more people can browse it. Just like software on many other well-known forums, there are rarely dedicated sections for it.

Could Wengier consolidate & put up TinyBit''s development codes for GRUB for DOS
so that we could have a test of it?

And we wish to begin to do works on WINGRUB as well. With latest codes for testing
could facilitate work for the project. Once the first release of WINGRUB is ready, we
shall put up the latest version of GRUB for DOS and WINGRUB to sourceforge.net