OT: enhanced DOS

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

This is sort of an update, especially for Patricia. In order to be
able to run DFSEE from an emergency floppy boot, since it requires
650K of memory, I recently had to go looking for Caldera / DR-DOS.
(DFSEE is sort of a shareware, command line alternative to Partition
Magic. It can do a few things that PM won't, but, so far, it lacks
that nice, accessible GUI of PM, thereby requiring much more of a
grasp of what you're doing when you use it, and limiting the audience
for it.) Anyway, this just added to the list of why I wanted to find
that "Plus" version of DOS. It seems that -- unlike the case of, say,
TTG -- someone (SCO ? Or, presumably, whoever bought the assets of
Caldera ?) has caused what was for quite some time a free download to
be *withdrawn* from websites all over the place, and reasserted a
commercial status for it. I went to about 8 or 9 sites, including a
couple of FTP archives that wouldn't let you in without the secret
handshake, before I found one that still offered two versions of DRD
7.03, a "lite" version, and a full one that apparently has netware
type features, hopefully including the superior memory use ones. Also
a 7.02 version, and at least some references to 7.04 and 7.05 betas.
I don't know if this is what you once had but could not find,
Patricia. If anyone wants the URL for this, best to let me know
sooner rather than later, judging by what happened to its general
availability elsewhere.

On another front, I saw mention of some utility or driver, available
from Adaptec by request, that sounds like it may allow DOS to see out
way past the 8G. marker. Another issue of current interest to me, as
I set up a new 80G. drive with several OSes on it, so I'll be looking
into that too. Hope this driver is not SCSI only, because I
reluctantly had to abandon attempts to outfit the small form factor
box with a fast SCSI hard drive. Way too much heat given off, and
inadequate cooling inside for this small, constricted space, which
gave rise to a constant thermal recal of the drive.  Not good.

As usual, Xy4DOS has to be able to run acceptably in every OS on the
drive, one of my few non-negotiable requirements.

Jordan