I gave this a shot yesterday. A fresh install of the OS gave me 619 KiB of free conventional memory, which isn't bad at all. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the DR-DOS task switcher working properly – while it did start, the Command Interpreter would not load in any of the tasks I created.

GemCookie wrote on 2025-01-10, 10:27:

I gave this a shot yesterday. A fresh install of the OS gave me 619 KiB of free conventional memory, which isn't bad at all. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the DR-DOS task switcher working properly – while it did start, the Command Interpreter would not load in any of the tasks I created.

did you try using (E)DR-DOS' COMMAND.COM instead of SvarCOM?

I replaced command.com with the version from DR-DOS 7.03. Still no luck.

GemCookie wrote on 2025-01-10, 14:36:

I replaced command.com with the version from DR-DOS 7.03. Still no luck.

then you're likely hitting a bug, please file it in https://github.com/SvarDOS/edrdos/issues

EDIT: filed as https://github.com/SvarDOS/edrdos/issues/130

There is stable and edge if you havent used both already

How is it pronounced?

In my mind, I want to pronounce it like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz

douglar wrote on 2025-04-02, 02:57:

How is it pronounced?

In my mind, I want to pronounce it like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz

Svar meaning : Lord Vishnu, The Sun, Heaven, World of gods, The Sky, The region of the planets and constellations, A mystical word pronounced after Om and before the Gayatri by every brahman in commencing his daily prayers, Sound, Voice, Tone, Tune, Lord vishnu.

Many years ago i was looking for a substitute of command.com for my "ultimate floppy boot disk" and i did find svarcom back then. But it was still in development and for example lacked the "CALL" support in batch files.
Today seems like all the basic stuff has been implemented. (didn't test, but webpage claims all those commands to exist)

Where could i find some usage manual for all the tools?
For example what are the supported keyboard layouts by the "KEYB" utility? And it seems that "SVED" supports multiple open files, but how do you switch between them? Can you do SELECT+COPY/CUT+PASTE, or this is not supported?

SvarCOM is still feature incomplete last time I checked, about two months ago. For example, the CTTY command was not implemented and if I am not mistaken, for example, DIR /S did not work either.

The KEYB utility, depends on its keyboard layout database which is built into its different KEYBOARD.SYS variants. I recommend you better use instead mKEYB which has a built-in database and it is impressively small in size and can be easily be queried for a list of layouts from the commandline.

SVED is supposed to be a minimalistic text editor, not a full blown one. Its file size is a testament to that, at about 6 KB in size while EDIT in MS-DOS 7.x is about 70 KB and E in IBM PC-DOS 7.x is near 107 KB. The MS-DOS 6.22 version of EDIT is essentially its QBasic editor which is huge at about 190 KB even without its help file.

As far as I understand, the limitation in SVED's size was imposed by the distribution media (floppy images). It would make sense for the developer of SVED to implement an optional loadable module, as a separate file, which could contain all more advanced and complex features that would be available if it is present on the same directory as SVED. In that way he could deliver a small basic version on floppy and when HDD installation comes, the complementary advanced options could also be thrown in without any fuss.

igully wrote on 2025-04-02, 16:18:

SVED is supposed to be a minimalistic text editor, not a full blown one. Its file size is a testament to that, at about 6 KB in size while EDIT in MS-DOS 7.x is about 70 KB and E in IBM PC-DOS 7.x is near 107 KB. The MS-DOS 6.22 version of EDIT is essentially its QBasic editor which is huge at about 190 KB even without its help file.

As far as I understand, the limitation in SVED's size was imposed by the distribution media (floppy images). It would make sense for the developer of SVED to implement an optional loadable module, as a separate file, which could contain all more advanced and complex features that would be available if it is present on the same directory as SVED. In that way he could deliver a small basic version on floppy and when HDD installation comes, the complementary advanced options could also be thrown in without any fuss.

There is an editor called "SLED" (Sam's Little Editor) from 1987, which can work with multiple files at the same time, jump into command prompt and back and all of this in 16kB. Probably with UPX you can get it quite a bit smaller.
SLED's problem is that it is so old that all the keyboard shortcuts are very... unconventional.
My ideal editor would be SLED updated with modern keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately i lack the skills to build or reverse engineer the SLED to change the keyboard shortcuts.

This is why i'm quite interested in small editors. And SVED shows promise, but where's the manual?
SLED is pretty much the perfect one.

NB! Today i am using mKEYB. Love it. 😀

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-04-03, 07:52:

SLED's problem is that it is so old that all the keyboard shortcuts are very... unconventional.
My ideal editor would be SLED updated with modern keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately i lack the skills to build or reverse engineer the SLED to change the keyboard shortcuts.

So, you want Vi or Emacs shortcuts? 😁
If not, what else?

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-04-03, 07:52:

This is why i'm quite interested in small editors. And SVED shows promise, but where's the manual?

Isn't it self-explanatory?

bttr wrote on 2025-04-03, 18:54:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-04-03, 07:52:

SLED's problem is that it is so old that all the keyboard shortcuts are very... unconventional.
My ideal editor would be SLED updated with modern keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately i lack the skills to build or reverse engineer the SLED to change the keyboard shortcuts.

So, you want Vi or Emacs shortcuts? 😁
If not, what else?

Moden day editor shortcuts. CTRL+[letter] for various stuff. SHIFT+ARROWS to select a block, F1-F12 for various functions, etc.

bttr wrote on 2025-04-03, 18:54:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-04-03, 07:52:

This is why i'm quite interested in small editors. And SVED shows promise, but where's the manual?

Isn't self-explanatory?

Obviously not. If it is for you, then tell me how to change between multiple open files. I asked for that specifically and what you do? Don't be a smart*ss.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-04-04, 08:19:

Moden day editor shortcuts. CTRL+[letter] for various stuff. SHIFT+ARROWS to select a block, F1-F12 for various functions, etc.

Sam is still around: http://www.wilmott.ca/sled.html -- You could ask him to release SLED source code under a libre license and maybe some developers jump on.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-04-04, 08:19:

Obviously not. If it is for you, then tell me how to change between multiple open files. I asked for that specifically and what you do? Don't be a smart*ss.

Please, don't be rude, just because I overlooked that question. One can use F1 to F10 to select a buffer to load a file into.

Sved's 'manual' can be found online at https://github.com/SvarDOS/core/blob/master/s … /trunk/sved.txt or offline in C:\SVARDOS\DOC\SVED\SVED.TXT.

So, I'd like to know two things about this DOS:

1. Does it support Windows 3.1x in 386 mode?
2. Is it compatible with FAT32?

Take with a grain of salt...
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/com … _their_vintage/

Appears to show win31 running on vintage mono vga laptop, on top of svardos.

The progenitor of svardos was KNOWN to work with win31, and microsoft didnt like that, and added a dumb check (aard), that got later removed. There does not appear to be a reason svardos would not work.

El Reg says they used a single fat32 partition for their test.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/23/svardos_drdos_reborn/

We gave the VM a 2GB virtual drive, and it automatically partitioned and formatted it as one big FAT32 volume. Even with the additional tools we installed, it only took about 6MB of disk. The repo has over 400 packages, including tools to access OS/2 HPFS and Windows NTFS drives, plus USB drivers, development tools, editors, games, and more. If that's not enough, there's also the FreeDOS-repo, an online collection of totally legal DOS freeware – no dodgy abandonware here. The SvarDOS repo has a copy of the Dillo web browser and the wget file-download tool, to help you get them onto your DOS box.

Which suggests 'yes'.

Windows31 might not like fat32 though.