*BSD News Article 65662


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From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.throck.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.announce
Subject: DOS Emulator now available for porting to FreeBSD.
Date: 10 Apr 1996 20:16:35 -0500
Organization: FreeBSD Project
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To: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: DOS Emulator now available for porting to FreeBSD.
Date: Tue, 09 Apr 1996 17:44:19 -0700
Message-ID: <11392.829097059@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>

Some of you may recall some coy comments on my part a few weeks back
about something being on the way vis-a-vis DOS emulation for FreeBSD
and that we shouldn't be too quick to jump on the Linux dosemu
bandwagon.

My reasons for refusing to elaborate with more details on this until
now were simply that I did not want to jeopardize my negotiations with
BSDI through Keith Bostic, whom I approached at USENIX '96 about a
possible "partnership" arrangement whereby we would get their DOS
emulator, something FreeBSD has needed for quite awhile, and BSDI
would get a bunch of extra people hacking on it, improving it in
various ways and, of course, feeding those changes back to BSDI as
part of the bargain.

Well, I'm very pleased indeed to announce that after some months of
negotiations, Keith has managed to convince the powers-that-be within
BSDI to do the deal, allowing me to now speak more freely about it!

Since this emulator was originally written for BSD/OS, I don't expect
its integration into FreeBSD to be entirely painless, and it will take
some dedicated work to merge it in while ensuring that we don't break
anything in the BSDI support (which would not be part of the deal!).

I would therefore like to call for all the people who've expressed an
interest in working on this (or would like to express an interest now)
to "step forward" as it were and declare their participation to the
hackers@freebsd.org mailing list so that we may coordinate our
efforts.

I have also made the following resources available to those doing
the development:

1. The original sources to the BSD/OS DOS emulator, as well as
   the first BSDI supplied patch to it, are available from:

	ftp://freefall.freebsd.org/incoming/rundos.tar.gz
	ftp://freefall.freebsd.org/incoming/rundos.tar.gz.PATCH-1


2. In order to ensure that we don't break BSDI compatibility
   along the way, I've also installed BSD/OS 2.01 on one of my
   machines and will give accounts on the box to anyone working
   on the project.  Just send me a passwd line or point to an existing
   one on freefall if you already have an account there and I'll send
   you the login information.

I'm really enthusiastic about this project, not just for what it
represents in finally getting ourselves a working DOS emulator but
also for the chance to finally do something in cooperation with BSDI.
One of us may be commercial and the other not, but we're both solidly
in the BSD camp and I think we have a lot more in common than many
other parts of the operating systems community - I'm very happy at the
precedent we have a chance to set here.

Paul Borman <prb@bsdi.com> is our contact at BSDI on this project,
though I would really rather prefer that our dealings with him go
primarily through one or two people at most.  The last thing we want
to do is swamp the poor guy with email and make him regret that this
ever happened!

That said, if you do find something in the code that you feel would be
of direct interest to him, then certainly by all means contact him
personally, but let's just try and keep it from becoming a stampede! :-)


Finally, if you've ever had any interest at all in seeing DOS
emulation come to FreeBSD then please do consider volunteering some
time to this effort - your contributions will be crucial - and
certainly don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions!

					Jordan

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