Here's a goofy question...

I was just wondering if there would be any way to port the X Window system to DOS. I know, why do that when its designed for Unix and Linux. However, I have a laptop that for some reason, won't take Linux, but it will take DOS. I don't like the GUI's that I can find on the internet for DOS, but I do like the Linux/Unix ones. Has anyone ever thought of making a version of X for DOS?

Cheers

Companies like Hummingbird sell X for Windows. But it is not cheap. If you can't even run windows, I'm thinking that you must have a 286 cpu. You are not going to run x in a 16 bit address space.

KDE can run over cygwin, which runs on MS Windows.

KDE: Download/Installation
Other X Apps: Cygwin Packages

But like Perderabo said, if the OP is looking to run things in DOS, it doesn't look s/he can even run windows on that laptop... :slight_smile:

GUI is presumably a graphical user interface. Well ... a GUI on a text-based command-line like DOS just doesn't make any sense. I've seen some people call anything from MS-DOS to Windows a 'DOS' (for reasons unknown to me). Anyway, it's just my guess at the poster's intention. If this is not the correct guess, then just treat this as a piece of extra info. :wink:

have a look at this link:

http://www.colinux.org/

nice freakshow for such problems....

greetings Pre�y

Thanks guys, I'll look into all of that. The computer is a 386 laptop of a brand I've never heard of. It was given to my dad by someone up in Michigan. It won't take Linux for some reason, but it had Windows 3.1 on it when I got it. I have since done a complete format of the drive, and put the newest version of MSDOS on it. I was just wondering if X was able to be ported to an MSDOS system. I think I will try KDE, like someone up above stated. Dunno if it'll work though.

Here's another question. I have a newer computer that's having problems recognizing the Linux kernel. I've tried putting Debian and Red Hat on it, but it keeps coming up and saying that it either can't load the kernel, or it don't recognize the kernel. It just gets stuck in the initial boot, and won't load the operating system. The motherboard was salvaged from a Compaq computer.

Hmm ... cygwin requires 32-bit Windows. That is, at least Windows 95, and doesn't work on pre-4.0 versions.