Welcome back to the adventure!
This is Adam and today we are giving MS-DOS a huge upgrade.
We will jump into those details right after this
Today we will be installing 4dos.
4dos is a command interpreter or shell.
That means it displays a prompt, waits for you to type something, and they reacts to
your command.
4dos replaces COMMAND.COM the default command interpreter supplied with MS-DOS designed
so that you don't have to change your computing habits or unlearn anything to use it.If you
know how to display a directory, copy a file, or start an application from the command prompt
you already know how to use 4dos.
4dos understands all the command you already know and adds to them its purpose is to make
the command line friendlier, easier to use, and much more powerful without requiring you
to use or learn a new program, a new set of commands, or a new style of work
Alright, I have the installation files already in a directory so we will start by typing
in 4dos
this is the welcome screen for the 4dos installer.
I am going to say yes to proceed with the installation.
We don't have enough available system resources for it to run so I will go ahead and press
a key to see if it can load into its alternate environment.
No i am not using an older version of 4dos.
according to our best practices we should have made a copy of our CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT
files, but I have already gone through this process and I see the lines that it adds to
each file.
In this case I am going to jump right in and say yes go ahead and update my CONFIG.SYS
file.
I do highly recommend you chose the second option to take a copy of the current file
in the 4dos directory that way you can see all the changes that it's going to make before
they are committed to your main CONFIG.SYS file.
alright, our CONFIG.SYS file has been updated.
same question for AUTOEXEC.BAT I am going to go ahead and say yes, make the changes
for me. and AUTOEXEC.BAT has been updated.
Alright, our 4dos installation is complete.
next time we reboot we will see our new command interpreter.
I am going to say yes let's go through the options real quick.
4dos does have some functions in it that replace other DOS programs that we were using like
DOSKEY which is something we will take a look at, but for right now I just want to play
with the colors for our command prompt because its something thats fun to do
alright, so here we are in the directories section.
We can type in the colors we want to display for various items.
So just as a quick demonstration we can type in dirs for directories followed by a colon
and then the color we would like to have it displayed, which I will pick bright blue.
they are the three letter abbreviations for the available colors which I will show you
a list in just a moment.so we have bright blue followed by a semicolon and then i'm
going to say that I want com, executables, batch files, BTM's those are batch files for
4dos, and sys files to all display as, lets go with bright green.
Alright, so here is a list of all the colors we have available.
black, blue, green, cyan, red, magenta, yellow, white, and the bright versions of all of those
colors.
alright, so we will go ahead and exit and save 4dos.
Alright, we will restart and be right back when the computer comes back up.
okay, so back to the changes that it made to AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS let's take
care of those here real quick.
We will go into EDIT and we will open our AUTOEXEC.BAT file and all the way down at
the bottom it put in the one line that it adds here.starting KSTACK.COM then we will
cut that and I want that moved right under prompt.
Save then we will open our CONFIG.SYS file.
I suppose we could just type in sys and only one item will come up.
again, all the way down to the bottom is the one item that changes.
we are adding a new shell which in this case is 4dos.com go ahead and cut that and we will
incorporate in common right here below UMB.
New we can save and exit then we will restart our computer one more time and be right back.
We are back after the restart!
now we have some color in our DOS environment.
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I have more 4dos tutorials coming look forward to new videos on Thursdays.
Thanks for stopping by, see you next video