You may have looked at this already, but can't you run win 9x of some sort eg 98. This can be quite cheap 10e or thereabouts...My guess is this'll run on a 486/pentium with 1? G disk, 16? M memory -then use dos (or even win32) fpc...This'll give you 'multitasking' of a sort and be easier to support... Regards John

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Lee, John said:

You may have looked at this already, but can't you run win 9x of some sort eg 98. This can be quite cheap 10e or thereabouts...My guess is this'll run on a 486/pentium with 1? G disk, 16? M memory -then use dos (or even win32) fpc...

I'd add to this - what's your (the original poster) definition of “weak hardware”, and what is the program intended to do (at least roughly - what kind of tasks)? This might help to find the best alternative solution if necessary.

Regards

Tomas

What I mean by "weak hardware" is an imposed PC embeded with :
- no mouse
- DX 486 from 66Mhz to 133Mhz
- 32 Mo RAM
- 32 Mo HARD DISK (target configuration, development is 2Go)

The application is already written, with TP 5.5. Yet it becomes far too huge for DOS 640Ko, so there are overlays everywhere (it is terrible) and I intend to switch it to FreePascal (option -So of course) that I know will so easily solve all memory shortage problem (via GO32V2).
The applications uses a screen manager, a file manager and a cooperative multitasker (all three not mainttained anymore, with only TP 5.5 TPU available). *
Also lots of port access (RS232) but that will be coped with later. I therefore have to port the three of these. I intend probably to quickly write the two first in C language (or adapt some ncurses or sqlite), yet the easiest way for me to cope with the cooperative multitasker would be a little Free Pascal program with a small part in assembler backuping and restoring context. Several of such units are available for TP, yet they - for what I understood - rely on TP mechanism and can not be adapted (for the assembler part) to FreePascal.

I know I could install the C compiler DJGPP, compile the FreeRTDOS C sources and invoke them from FreePascal, but I am quite convinced that will not work - unless someone says it has been done before. I will probaly give it a try, anyway.

There are 8 tasks, communicating with so called "buffers", some kind of message queue system provided by the curent multitasker (and also direct access to data, which is rather perillous, but that is another story). Mult tasking is cooperative with throughout use of a PAUSE instruction meaning "please anyone else go ahead to work".

Regards.

En réponse à Tomas Hajny :

__________________
Jérémie Lefrançois
06 73 27 35 97
Consultant
Altran Technologies

En réponse à Jérémie LEFRANCOIS :

In fact it is only 16Mo RAM.
__________________
Jérémie Lefrançois
06 73 27 35 97
Consultant
Altran Technologies

Jérémie LEFRANCOIS said:

OK, this could still host stripped down (text-mode only) versions of both OS/2 and Linux quite well. I was running OS/2 Warp 3.0 even with full GUI on such a configuration...

Tomas

Where would I download a free OS/2 (possible ?) and a free LINUX both "stripped down" as you say ? Or they have to be installed and the GUI never started I suppose...
I found "TINYLINUX" somewhere , yet what do you suggest ? Of course the latest Red Hat is out of scope...

Getting the whole thing to work on LINUX might imply more work than getting it to work under DOS, so that option is not my first choice, but seems advisable in the end of the process, to have a "safer" multitasker.

Regards.

__________________
Jérémie Lefrançois
06 73 27 35 97
Consultant
Altran Technologies

Hello Jérémie_LEFRANCOIS,

Wednesday, June 30, 2004, 2:05:51 PM, you wrote:

J> Where would I download a free OS/2 (possible ?) and a free LINUX both "stripped J> down" as you say ? Or they have to be installed and the GUI never started I J> suppose...
J> I found "TINYLINUX" somewhere , yet what do you suggest ? Of course the latest J> Red Hat is out of scope...

Concerning "Tinylinux"...

There was a Linux distribution named MiniLinux, which fitted on only four 1.44MB floppy disks, and it didn't include GUI, but worked... somehow. There were neither man pages nor compiler, but I think one had been able to extra-download needed.

Later version was about 32MB, without GUI, but worked relatively stable. Warning: if you downloaded this version, you couldn't unzip it with PKUNZIP 2.04g under plain DOS because of memory usage with this program. You should use WinZip or something instead.

Both versions had been starting under plain DOS using linux.bat, had been stopping by rebooting with ctrl+alt+del.

The former was considered having problems with large disks / partitions (I cannot recall the problem exactly).

So, you might try the latter one? Only if everything else fails, of course...

J> Getting the whole thing to work on LINUX might imply more work than getting it J> to work under DOS, so that option is not my first choice, but seems advisable J> in the end of the process, to have a "safer" multitasker.

Moreover, it seems pretty much machine (OS) dependent. I'd like I was wrong...

P. S. There was a Linux distribution YUCCA (stood for "Yugoslav Computer Communications Association"), which one had been able to obtain on a three disks, and still had had GUI. I have never tried.

Best regards,
Ivan

Hi,

You might want to take a look at PicoBSD (stripped down FreeBSD for network router and the like, fits one one floppy disk):

http://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/

I don't know if it is maintained in any way, but a year ago I had it running on a i386/40 with 16 MB RAM.

Another source to mention: Somewhere deep down in my archives there should be an old multi-threading code for Delphi 1 (in words: one) for 16 bit Win3.1. Maybe this can be adopted to use in fpc-console mode. It is written around a task switching core in assembler code wrapped into a Delphi 1 TThread implementation. It's origin has been the "white ants" website, the creator of early "modelmaker" that has been absorbed by Borland-Inprise-Borland Inc. a while ago. The sorting example code from Delphi 2 - do you remember the three windows with red vertical lines? - was backported by white ants and worked fine.

Searching would take some time, though. But I'll do if there is a chance to see the porting results to dos or whatever with my own eyes. :)

Bye,
Marc

Hi!

You should give White-Dwarf-Linux a try. It is really for small systems, i386 based.

http://www.blast.com/wd_about.html

I only wonder - it was free, now it appears to have become commercial? Anyway, I still have free versions (from when it was free) as CD-Images...

mfg

Ing. Rainer Hantsch

Jérémie LEFRANCOIS said:

Where would I download a free OS/2 (possible ?) and a free LINUX both "stripped down" as you say ? Or they have to be installed and the GUI never started I suppose...

OS/2 isn't free (as opposed to Linux), although I think that especially older versions can be purchased for cheap. However, this wouldn't probably help too much if you want to use it in many instances for your customers, of course. The only possible advantage compared to Linux (or FreeBSD mentioned by somebody else etc.) might be that the concept of the OS is much closer to the DOS world (which you targeted before), so it might be both easier to develop for this environment and support it. In addition, OS/2 fully supports multi-tasking for DOS applications and gives them possibility to communicate to each other (e.g. using named pipes, which are transparently handled as files in the DOS applications using them). For the reduced installation - there are tools which make it possible to build an image containing exactly what you need/want, so this should be quite simple.

I found "TINYLINUX" somewhere , yet what do you suggest ? Of course the latest Red Hat is out of scope...

.
.

I can't give you advices for different Linux distributions, there are definitely much more knowledgeable people in this area, probably even on this list.

Greetings

Tomas