From: davidli@simvax.labmed.umn.edu
Subject: Re: Mint versus Powerdos
Reply-To: davidli@simvax.labmed.umn.edu
Organization: Health Computer Sciences, U of MN, Mpls
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 17:36:59 GMT

In article <1992Oct15.114205.1@uwovax.uwo.ca>, 7103_2622@uwovax.uwo.ca (Eric Smith) writes:
>PowerDOS claims to be able to multitask the same as MiNT, i.e. any
>number of TOS/TTP, plus 1 GEM. However, from the slew of "I can't
>get programs to multitask under PowerDOS" messages appearing on GEnie,
>I gather this is extremely difficult to achieve in practice and
>involves grovelling through the configuration file.

From what little exposure I've had with PowerDOS, there isn't much grovelling
necessary.  Problems running programs are similar to problems running certain
programs under MiNT.  There are always non-compatible programs in a
multitasking environment, especially one where memory is not and cannot be
protected from the programmer!  There are usually workarounds for these type of
problems -- MiNT, being more mature, has solved a large number of the problems
encountered early on.  PowerDOS will probably do so as well.  Given the fact
that PowerDOS isn't being experimented with on as massive a scale, there will
probably be a longer time frame involved.

If there are interested parties, I can see about posting the latest full set of
PowerDOS programs and applications to the atari.archive server.

>MiNT 0.95 is easy to set up; you copy mint.prg to the AUTO folder,
>and then (if you want to make multitasking really easy for yourself)
>you copy TOSWIN.ACC and TOSWIN.RSC to the root directory of your drive.
>Then you reboot. To run a TOS/TTP program in the background, you
>select "TOS Programs" from the desk accessory menu; a file selector
>will come up, you select the program you want to run, and TOSWIN will
>open up a new window with the program running in it.

Of course, if you want to use some of the MiNT utility programs, you have to
modify the MiNT configuration file -- documentation for this is a lot better
than early PowerDOS documentation...

Then again, if you get bold and start trying to use some of the more advanced
'features' of TOSWIN (such as pull-down menus for applications), you're going
to get bogged down in the cycle of experiment-bomb out-reboot-experiment until
you get things tuned just right.  The more complicated you get, the more
careful you have to be to have your hard drive backed up on a regular basis!
(I assume everyone here backs up their hard drives before installing major
changes to the GEM/TOS environment?!?)

>If you're comfortable with CLIs, you could instead download MiNT aware
>CLI's like tcsh and bash and use the Unix notation for multitasking
>(e.g. "foo &" runs the program "foo" in the background).

But you should expect to run up against a wall while trying to ensure that
these programs actually run correctly -- configuration files, environmental
profiles and the now-infamous (and unecessary, under MiNT) UNIXMODE can
be quite confusing to someone whose only experience with CLIs has been
running GULAM.  I gave up on the BASH CLI because I could never get it to
correctly access the system profile file, and also because there are no
built-in shell commands for doing simple things like getting a listing of
a directory.  Including the GNU File Utilities helped a lot, but at the
expense of a massively large amount of disk space taken over by programs which
did little or nothing which the much smaller 'all-encompassing' shells can do.

A side note to those of you who are using UNIXMODE in coding your programs --
don't.  It just makes it that much more difficult figure out whether the
installation instructions you've given are bombing out because of the UNIXMODE
being set up incorrectly, or because of program incompatibilities, or because
of faulty installation instructions.  EMACS 18.58 comes to mind as a perfect
example of a UNIXMODE program which proved worthless because of a combination
of the above.  [Note:  read that as 'worthless to me' ... I understand that
others have gotten the program to work quite nicely for them after a bit of
struggle].

Any CLI which has to call a 200K+ program to process a TOS directory listing
is simply not worth the time or trouble.  And, when you add in 200k+ programs
to create or remove a directory (or file), you get a feel for the ponderous
quality of these MiNT-aware CLIs...

There ARE CLIs which work nicely under the TOSWIN accessory which don't require
megabytes of disk space for standard shell utilities.  I've seen a very nice
setup using a CLI and a MicroEmacs editor in two TOSWIN windows which provided
most everything one would need for background processing.  Telecommunications
in the foreground even worked tolerably well under these circumstances.

Folks should really experiment a bit with the multitasking options available to
them now.  MiNT works nicely; PowerDOS works but is a bit sketchy on the
documentation side of things at the moment.  One can only hope that MultiTOS
comes out shortly, and works across the line of 68000-based Atari ST computers.

-- David Paschall-Zimbel