Eric Auer schreef: > Hi all, > > for extra fun, I traced through the installer batch > files in the new fdbasecd (1.0 preview 2 cdrom iso) > tonight... The new ISOLINUX 3.11 still did not like > me (hangs on boot), but I could again use the special > boot diskette... The cdrom driver liked my dvd drive > better this time, no crc errors etc :-) > I didn't expect Blair nor Jeremy to use my bootdisk, but instead to fall back to a simple "load cdrom driver, access cdrom, install FreeDOS" mechanism. > The next issue is that FreeCOM freaks out if you > do CTTY NUL in single step mode, probably because > it wants to read the Enter or Esc from NUL then. > In either case, it only beeps, and when you hit > Ctrl-C to abort the batch, you cannot type an > answer to the abort prompt either, as that would > have to be typed from NUL as well. > A "?CTTY NUL" would cause no problems, it's answering the following line of code that gets singlestepped, that's troublesome and will hang the machine as you cannot enter input anymore. The risk of singlestepping, even in MSDOS with it's own command interpreter. > This is a NUL specific case: A solution would > be to CTTY only output of FreeCOM for the NUL > case, but to do bidirectional redirection for > other devices like AUX. > > I notice that the installer diskette would > NORMALLY load an 1.5 MB diskette-only cache > and TICKLE. Why is that disabled at the moment? > diskspace on the 360KB disk? 360KB is the smallest disksize available, and also 360KB makes a nice small ramdisk image on machines with 2MB or more system memory. For example QEMU (or was it Bochs?) can do 1MB increments. VMware on the other hand takes 4MB increments. Real machines have memory assignment in even bigger steps, usually exponentional ( 4MB on 486, 32MB on Pentium, 1024MB on modern systems) > The installer diskette also has many "if file XYZ > is present then..." things - it would be better > if those tests were omitted. Either you have the > installer diskette or you do not have it. > > About drivers: both the CDROM driver and SHSUCDX > (and the CDRCACHE as well, 1.25 MB of it...) are > DEVLOADed /H to UMB. Unless the installer really > needs a lot of RAM, it would be a lot safer not > to use UMBs for such drivers. > Emm386 is hardly used on bootdisk. > There also is a check for c:/fdbootcd.iso, but > no message about it (which could inspire people > to put the ISO there, I mean)... > That's kinda the way it's ment. Imagine a Win95 machine with internet, downloading the FreeDOS ISO, then putting it there, booting from diskette, and installation goes automatically due to the ISO being found there. CD/DVD writers (or even drives) aren't *that* common on older machines. > In general, the installer looks a lot better > now than the early beta9 ones. I hope the > remaining issues can be fixed before 1.0 :-). > Some of them make the installer somewhat use- > less to less-insider users at the moment, but > most bugs are still easy to pinpoint and fix. > I'm sure Blair and/or Jeremy will either try to solve the points you mentioned, or fall back to a simpler version of batchfiles. There's no more time to improve the batchfiles. I have local versions of improvements sometimes, but when I was tired of FreeDOS, I either uploaded an ISO with all the current work I had, or simply forced people to improve the older official released FreeDOS, making my changes fruitless. However, most changes involved starting from scratch, which discouraged me from even trying to merge them into the already existing batchfiles. > Thanks :-). > > Eric > Thanks for the time spent on testing FreeDOS. If 1.0 will just be a cdrom/iso release, i might have time to also test it before release. If it's not only ISO, then there isn't enough time to do anything. Normal work and life is time consuming.
Bernd -- Efficiency is intelligent lazyness ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
