Hi, On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 5:58 PM, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > > I posted this topic to the FreeDOS Facebook group, as well. Sharing > some comments from our Facebook friends, to add to the discussion: > (edited for clarity/brevity) > > - a floppy maintainance kit > [I think this means a set of disk repair utilities?]
Chkdsk? Dosfsck? Raread? Diskcomp? > - Internet tools (ftp, web browser, email, etc) mTCP is quite good. So is Links2. > - A version of FreeDOS 2.0 that targets older machines, distributed as > a few 360k floppy images. How?? I'm not even aware of any emulators that support such size. (Maybe they do, I haven't checked much.) Even 720 kb might be barely useful, but I don't know how to make/modify it (without physical hardware). MetaDOS is (almost) 720 kb. That could easily be tweaked, if anyone needed it. (That was the whole point of making it.) > - "Barebone" setup profile for the minimal installation possible, > something slightly more functional than "format c: /s" > [not sure how this differs from installing "Base only"?] MetaDOS is a single floppy. If there was literally any other (that I knew of), especially still maintained, .... Well, beggars can't be choosers. It does have minimal installation tools (fdisk, format, sys, bootmgr). > - Meta-packages or "package groups", so we can install full sets of > programs in one shot (such as "Development" to install all of the dev > tools) In MetaDOS, everything is downloaded via FTP or WGET. There are simple .BATs (plain text) to do this. Granted, I don't point to literally everything, but there's a lot of links to various programming tools. But, concerning official repos, it only supported FDBASE and FDUTIL (back before 1.2 changed/added a lot). Everything else was just whatever I could find and test. > - Tools to make it easier to roll out / deploy FreeDOS to many > machines, or at least a scripted / automated setup I'm not sure what kind of miracle people are expecting here. There's so many complications (MBR or GPT? UEFI w/ CSM?). I think FDISK can be automated, but I haven't tried. The absolute bare minimum DOS installation can be done in less than five minutes (assuming quick format on reasonably-sized drive). But VMs are easier and safer to use, so I think most reasonable people (without retro/old/dedicated hardware) should use that instead. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
