Re: tlug: X Windows client

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Jason" == Jason Molenda <crash@example.com> writes:

    Jason> There is also DJGPP at http://www.delorie.com/ (I believe),

Correct.

    Jason> but DJ is mostly concentrating on porting GCC to DOS so
    Jason> that doesn't provide all kinds of Unix utilities.  It's a

However, grep, gawk, perl, fileutils, shellutils, textutils, TeX, etc, 
etc, have all been ported and are available in a contrib directory, I
believe.  I don't know if there's a working bash.

    Jason> pretty impressive how much he's accomplished; I think he's
    Jason> got GCC so it can rebuild itself under DOS

This has been true for about seven or eight years, if you don't count
the GO32 VCPI DOS extender which had to be built with tasm (Borland's
Intel assembler).  As of version 2.0, DJGPP switched to using the DPMI
interface, which is provided by Windows and all the major DOS memory
managers.  Now DJGPP is being distributed with a free DPMI host, which
is built with a small 80386 assembler written in C and distributed
with DJGPP.  The libc was quite Posix-compliant, and may be fully so
by now, except for process control.  I believe that some work has been 
done on the egcs and pgcc ports, but I've been away from that
environment for a while.

I would go one further and say "spectacular" rather than impressive.
I used (occasionally contributed) something like 100 ports of X
Windows and TCP/IP programs, often fairly large, such as Ghostscript,
xrn, tin, and so on, for the DESQview/X multitasking X-over-DOS
environment using DJGPP.  I rarely had problems with disabled features
or DV/X-specific bugs.  (DV/X did not like Japanese fonts, however, it 
tended to crash.)

The effort and intelligence required on my part for the ports I did
was nearly nil.  Even Ghostscript (not my work, it was ported mostly
by Tom Brosnan at Stanford) required only a half a dozen wrapper
functions for file system operations.

If you have programs you use under Unix and would like to use in the
DOS/Windows environment, DJGPP often provides a nearly trivial port
for TTY-oriented programs (I believe pdcurses has been ported).  I
don't know what the current status is, but two years ago a few
non-trivial Windows-programs were being demonstrated.  (The main
problem is that "windows.h" must be licensed from Microsoft, so you
had to buy the Windows SDK---and that was usually cheapest when you
bought Borland's compiler!  In any case, it could not be legally
distributed with DJGPP.)
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