Guest Stonehead Report post Posted October 18, 2006 You have been warned, this is a first-user-report :) I sprang up with joy when I learned that there is still life in my favourite DOS program ever. I've been running Linux for the past seven years, so I lost contact. Anyway, this was a real MS-DOS week for me: there was a topic on digg.com about the leaked MS DOS 6-source code on Google Code Search, then I tried to install the setedit/rhide programming environment in Linux (which works quite well, actually - pity that it isn't really maintained anymore, it seems) - and now NDN! First, I tried the 'stable' Linux version. It is very funny: it tries to represent 'drives' on my Linux system (which seems totally awkward), and you can even configure them for 'fast disk access using int29h' :) There are lots of small bugs, but the main usage problem is that lots of shortkeys don't work. None of the Alt-shortcuts work, some Ctrl-shortcuts interfere with KDE. When I tried to scan the directory tree - a feature that I really, really miss in Midnight Commander - ndn seemed either to hang or to recurse forever. Anyway, I couldn't see what it did or how I could stop it, so I killed it. Then I discovered that there was a beta version. Which was about a whole year newer. Say, three days old. (Wow!) So, forget about my rambling above. Installing it is weird. - Why a .rar package? It's a fine Russian packer and I already had unrar, but it's not really common. - Why do I manually have to 'chmod a+x ndn' to be able to run ndn? Running it is even weirder. - The first time I start NDN in my xterm with a 'Large' font setting, it first changes the font (eek!) and then crashes with an 'Exception 0D9h at address 0041628a in f:\NDN\source\views.pas, Line 1441'. The crash does not occur when I leave the xterm to the default font. - The next time I start NDN in the same xterm (with the changed font), it starts correctly. Well, that means: it shows for a second the warning message 'Could not open VCSA file to read screen data!' in grey before the main window starts. - Keyboard shortcuts. This is still a major problem. It's very painful NOT to have Shift-Tab. Or Alt-X. Or even F10 - regulary I have to press it twice to get in the menu (the first time just puts '[21~' on the commandline). Yes, I know even Midnight Commander and Setedit don't have Shift-Tab, but at least Setedit has Shift-Tab and correct function key handling. I realize shortcuts like Control-S will be impossible to hook... - I cannot type 'exit' to quit NDN, like I sometimes - Ctrl-Tab brings me another unhandled "Exception 0D9h at address 1b411bcf in ?, Line 0 Unhandled Exception". - 'Edit OS environment' in the Utilities menu returns gibberish. Still, I really applaud the effort. Oooohhhh, DN has a disassembler nowadays! And a spreadsheet! And a desktop system! And something called Piton which is probably going to addict me another few years! (I don't 'get' that game yet - the stable version was way too fast and this beta version doesn't move anything at all) Actually, I wish NDN was my window manager. With SetEdit and (a CSS/XML-capable hack of) Lynx/Links/W3M integrated. ;) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
AngelsHolocaust 0 Report post Posted October 21, 2006 Hey stonehead! Thanks for your nice words. If you would have read the whatsnew file and the online help you should have been ready what to see when using NDN under X :). Unfortunately the X support for console programs is the worst i've ever seen. While the linux terminal almost feels like our good old DOS i am simply not able to get at least the keyboard shortcuts working correctly. There's simply no way to configure them for a console program. At least noone was able to tell me otherwise and i have nowhere seen a howto (and believe me, i read a lot to make the linux port better) if you have ANY console program, which can hook the X messages f.ex., please let me know i will write down your crash reports, but at the moment i am not very motivated to work on the X-parts of NDN, since i know i won't get far... If you want please try the new version in a real terminal, and i guess you will like it better :) about rar: i am compiling, editing and packaging on a multi-os-system i know linux people prefer tgz, but it is simply much easier to use one archiver (not to mention, one of the best) for all my work the multi-os environment is also the reason for why ndn has the execution bit not set if someone knows a way to configure that let me know thanks for the bug reports Stefan / AH Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
