Re: EDE Elk´s

Forrest England
2006-05-01T20:36:55Z

Vikas Kumar wrote:
Date: Mon, 01 May 2006 15:41:29 -0500
To: linux-8086@vger.kernel.org

| And "pfengland" (sorry dude, don't know your name) "Real programmers
| use cat to edit files" :)

Thanks for responding. My name is Forrest.
Yeah, you're right, I can get by with cat and grep.
Ed didn't seem to be working, but maybe I didn't try hard enough.

| I have some questions for you, did you install as86 and ld86
| separately or did it come with your ELKS root image install ?
| If you ever get your development environment running, or even if it is
| partially running could you and everyone else who has been successful
| in doing that please post some instructions :) It would save us a lot
| of time if we want to do it and we can collaborate more in creating
| applications for ELKS or any other 8086 clone.

I have the whole dev86 working under a normal linux distribution (not on
the toshiba.) no, I compiled elks from the sources I could get my hands
on, it didn't come with as86 or ld86. I got as86 and ld86 compiled and
running at least under elks on the toshiba, but they act very funky. I
was just trying to reproduce some errors I was getting earlier, but now
it's doing something different. as86 was working fine in elks, except
sometimes it would print its usage information and not do its thing,
seemingly randomly, even with the exact same command, something like:

$ as86 -0 -o test.o test.s
$ ld86 -0 -o test test.o

but it did work some of the time. ld86 wasn't working before, it gave
an error (which I don't seem to be able to reproduce now) about not
being able to create a native a.out file, try -N. I tried it with -N
and a bunch of different options. Right now it seems to work fine, and
as86 isn't working, it's just printing out its usage info again. They
are trying to work anyway. With intermittent errors like these, it's
hard to tell if its them or some other unreliable piece of elks. Maybe
more of elks needs to work better before it can develop itself. I tried
this running elks on a pentium III, and ELKS was having all kinds of
funky problems, stack errors, printing all kinds of garbage, scrolling
"0 EXIT 0" eternally. So I guess I spoke too soon, I haven't really got
these guys to work in ELKS.

Very sorry to hear about RHW.
I think putting some kind of tribute on the website is a good idea.

I wouldn't mind helping out with the website if need be.

I'm sure ELKS isn't anyone's first priority, but I think it does have
viable applications in embedded systems
and learning purposes as the website says, and for fun. These toshibas
are pretty good computers, for their
time. Where else are you going to find a laptop who's battery lasts for
up to eight hours? I've been having
some fun with mine writing 8086 code that it boots directly into off a
disk. There was a good series of articles
on this in Linux Gazette. It seems like ELKS will take some work to
really get useable. Too bad, I can't stand DOS, though if I am going to
for anything, it would be nice to get it going with all the toshiba
drivers and stuff.

| To burn the Toshiba DOS files on the floppy, I would suggest using
| rawrite programs for windows. U can also use dd on linux but i havent
| tried that.

I wrote MS-DOS 3.3 disks from images on bootdisk.com with dd no
problem. The ones on Patrick's website are zip
files though, not disk images.

Thanks for the info,
Forrest