Op 27-12-2011 17:03, Michael B. Brutman schreef:
> Forgive me, this is going to be long ...
Your feedback is always welcome, so no problem there.
> I made a few attempts at creating a new virtual machine and installing
> the preview. It was a bit rough around the edges, especially from a new
> user perspective. If it took me a few tries to get things installed
> then something is amiss.
What virtual machine did you use? I've been using QEMU mostly, and real
hardware. Occasionally VMware Workstation 8.0 also. How much system
memory did you assign for the virtual machine?
The CD can be considered complex yes. LiveCD environment disables access
to all physical drives, while Install keeps drives visible.
> Booting the ISO: The default timeout of 5 seconds before booting the
> Live Environment mode is way too short. A new user would want to read
> the screen to see the options; right now it will start booting to the
> live environment and confuse them.
OK, will change.
> This check correctly found the hard drive with no partitions. But the
> screen cleared too quickly; there should be a pause to show the results
> of the fdisk check.
Ah, so at least JEMMEX works for you, didn't build a failsafe around
that yet. If a harddisk is found is shown again in text form at the
central menu but I agree it could be more clearer.
> The next screen allows you to run FDISK to modify the hard drive
> partition table or load additional drivers for optical drives. It tells
> you installation will continue in 15 seconds. Once again that is too
> fast, and there is no count-down timer to show you that the clock is
> ticking. There is also no way to pause it if you need additional time
> to read or decide.
I thought 15secs to be sufficient for a single-choice, but can make that
longer if desired.
> Running FDISK was uneventful. But after FDISK exited it went back to
> the previous screen ("run FDISK or load optical drivers"). FDISK gives
> a warning about needing a reboot but does not enforce that. The install
> script should terminate by telling the user that the machine is going to
> be rebooted to restart the installation and actually reboot the machine
> once the user acknowledges it. (No count-down timers!)
How was FDISK uneventfull? I know v1.31 has some MBR-detection issues
(blank disk in VMware for example) so using the older 1.21 one. There's
an issue if FDISK can't find any disks, then it won't reboot either.
Using FDAPM instead (there's a couple of hidden options basicly, like
'r' or 'm' or 's'). I'll see what I can change.
> (At this point I forced a reboot to make my partitioning changes stick.)
Yeah if no C: present I'd like people to have the choice to load a
RAMDISK as C: or run FDISK (and then reboot or still continue with
RAMDISK). Guess I failed a bit there.
> Resuming where I left off ...
>
> Mysterious "a" and "1" appear after the 15 second period. Next comes a
> prompt about "Buffering installation files, press N to skip:" There is
> no explanation about what is going to be buffered, or what the
> ramifications are of saying "no". There appears to be a timeout period
> that but it is not stated, and there is no countdown.
I'm not sure how to implement a countdown, it's not an option in CHOICE
program (and neither is suppressing the selected input char apparently,
thus explaining the 'a' (auto-mode) and '1' displayed).
> Next the RAM disk program runs and creates a drive (G: in my case), but
> all of the operations to create directories and copy files to G: fail.
I've seen this on my family's laptop during Christmas and will have to
debug this, it's not happening on my machine. Quite odd. What happens is
that a RDPREP.BAT file is being called on the CD that loads SHSUCDRD.
The SHSUCDRI program (duplicate disk) didn't work for me so I went this
route.
I can try disabling this routine if that would be more failsafe.
> All of the messages are out there - it looks really ugly and would scare
> the hell out of somebody. (I'm not a newbie but even I felt the need to
> stop and debug what just happened, not realizing that the failures did
> not affect the ability to install.) Any operation to drive G: gave an
> "Out of memory error."
>
> The last prompt said:
>
> Type E:\Setup to start installation of FreeDOS 1.1.
> Batchfile 'D:\AUTOEXEC.BAT' not found.
>
> Again, not confidence inspiring. D: was completely empty - I am not
> sure what is supposed to be there.
A: is the virtual diskette created by MEMDISK, C: is harddisk partition
or left available for ramdisk by SHSURDRV.
D: is the lowest driveletter that is assigned to a 100KB ramdisk created
by TDSK (in XMS if available, otherwise conventional memory).
The 100KB ramdisk is created because even the virtual A: can't be
guaranteed to be writeable with enough free/available diskspace. What
should happen is that the command interpreter gets copied to this
temporary ramdisk as well as the main a:\autoexec.bat file.
> Starting the install with E:\Setup ...
>
> After selecting the language there was a foul stream of "Run chkdsk: Bad
> FAT I/O: 0x00000001" messages before the installer cleared the screen
> and reported that the drive need formatting. The latter part was good,
> but the foul stream of error messages really should be hidden. (And
> whatever caused them needs to only show one message at most, not the
> same message over and over.)
I've not tried yet with an unformatted drive C:, will see if it gets me
the same experience as you had.
> It tells me that it is going to create a FAT32 filesystem. I formatted
> the drive to be FAT16. I suspect this is an error in the message text,
> and that it really didn't check the partition type.
I'll have to check this, it's indeed not checking. I'd need tons of
specific utilities to catch all of this.
> The user should get a chance to review the messages from the format ...
> there is no pause.
>
good call.
> "2) Change installation mode" should tell you what the current mode is.
> It should also be above "1) Start installation of FreeDOS 1.1 Final",
> forcing the user to read through it and consider it. The screen has
> plenty of room for help text as the user moves through the menu options.
No idea how to add help texts to PBATCH, sorry.
> Selecting option 1, a mysterious "Syntax Error" appeared on a blank
> screen before continuing. Not confidence inspiring.
>
> The package selection screens should have some basic help - using the
> arrows to move, 'X' means selected, etc. "Boot" was missing a
> description - the rest were fairly spartan. "Done" probably should be
> "Continue to the next step."
The old installer is a bit messy indeed, and isn't always used. If you
start SETUP with an argument (E:\SETUP DUMMY) you'll get the new
installer (which however isn't that friendly either, lacking
recommendations and defaults).
> Second package selection screen: Everything has an 'x' at the end of it
> which makes the 'x' kind of meaningless. If the description is too long
> it corrupts the right border with extraneous letters instead of
> continuing on the next line. (Dosfsckx does continue to the next line,
> but the screen formatting is borked.)
This is INSTALL 3.7.8 interpreting LSM files I think. The screen
flickering isn't that nice either.
> After what looks like to be a complete file copying stream another
> package selection screen comes up with SYSLNXX. If this is not out of
> order then there should be some text explaining why it is there after
> all of the other files were copied. This goes on for a few packages
> including a shell, WATTCPX, misc utilities, etc. Are these all
> considered optional and hence the post-install type approach?
All is required at the moment however Jim requested the website category
should be followed, and thus I did. What might be possible is to put all
packages which don't belong to BASE category, in a single installation
textfile (\FREEDOS\PACKAGES\name.1/name.end)
> The status updates at the end "Menu step 1 through 6" update in a
> confusing way ... how about just one line of output each time a step
> completes? It keeps clearing the screen which makes it hard to see what
> it is doing.
I can't silence all output, thus no:
step 1 completed
step 2 completed
..
final step completed
but instead clearing the screen.
> Next comes the bootsector fixup. I'm not sure if this is because I
> installed SYSLINUX or if this is going to happen as part of a normal
> install. If this is SYSLINUX specific it should be made obvious that
> this is an optional step related to SYSLINUX being installed as an
> optional package. It does correctly save the boot sector; is that file
> location in an installation log somewhere? (Is there an installation
> log?) I would like to see those options in an installer type screen,
> complete with help text as you scroll through the options. (I opted to
> have SYSLINUX do nothing to the boot sector - it worked. I suspect that
> is because FreeDOS formatted the drive.)
POSTINST.BAT and LOCALIZE.TXT/EN are still in FreeDOS directory. I'm not
100% sure they can still be rerun indefinately as I encountered some
ramdisk issues later on thus commented out some stuff.
> Upon rebooting FreeDOS wanted me to select boot options from a menu (0
> to 4) but the menu options were missing. I've seen them before, so this
> is just an oversight.
Ouch, wonder how I managed that. Guess I should create a graphical
step-by-step installation guide.
> I took a quick look around and went straight for mTCP (of course). I'd
> like to provide a more detailed configuration file that includes some
> default options commented out. That would make it a lot more obvious to
> somebody who is picking it up and looking at it for the first time.
You're welcome, is this file already present in your most recent MTCP
package? I remember there were some tuning/performance options as well.
I'm real bad with getting networking going on virtual machines (and my
physical machine doesn't have a packet driver for its network card),
only included the AMD/VMware packet driver so far.
> I hope this hasn't been too much of a downer. I'm kind of crazed about
> user experience, and if the install is smooth it makes it much easier
> for newbies to test drive. We have a great window of opportunity here -
> any new machine can run VMWare and VirtualBox quite well. That makes a
> great opening for people to be able to play with FreeDOS without having
> an older dedicated machine.
My aim with the double ISO structure was to have the inner ISO placed on
CD along with QEMU. QEMU's files are nicely 8.3-formatted except for
svga-cirrus.bin (required) ruining the show.
I've used QEMU (v0.13 , win32) bundled with ReactOS 0.3.13 at:
http://www.reactos.org/en/download.html
this does the trick in a batchfile:
@echo off
qemu -L . -usb -m 99 -cdrom fd11.iso -boot d -net nic,model=ne2k_pci
-net user -serial file:con
Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Write once. Port to many.
Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create
new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the
Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join
http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev
_______________________________________________
Freedos-devel mailing list
Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
