> On Sep 18, 2015, at 9:43 AM, Mercury Thirteen <mercury0x0...@gmail.com> wrote: > > So we boot the live CD with a message to the effect of, "Welcome to the live > environment! Type "install" to install FreeDOS on your system." and then the > user can type install (or install /a or advanced mode) to go from there. > > Merc
Assuming Jim says ok to Live version. This is what I am thinking as the most User-Friendly way. Disc boots: Offers to install or quit. (note: if DOS is already installed, setup does no “launch”. The installer does this specifically for the disc to be used for recovery and whatnot. What makes a better recovery disc than a live OS?) if quit it sets up a live environment, should only take a couple of seconds. Then, if they wanted advanced mode. They can just relaunch the setup.bat /a. The live environment should not interfere with the installer. > > On 9/18/2015 4:08 AM, Eric Auer wrote: >> Hi Mateusz and Michael, >> >> the installer should NOT try to be more clever or automatic >> than we can SAFELY make that. I disagree with Mateusz about >> the "simply give me a button to destroy my harddisk contents >> and put DOS on it" because that is too destructive. Default >> should be to ADD DOS to an existing FAT partition, if any. >> >> Without checking or modifying whether that is the partition >> which is flagged as boot partition, or alternatively adding >> it to some existing boot manager which has config files on >> some other partition anyway. >> >> If no FAT partition is present, then you have two situations: >> >> 1. There is NOTHING at all, apart from maybe some MBR with an >> empty partition table, on the main harddisk or SSD yet. Note >> that we also have to check for GPT partitioning schemes here. >> >> 2. There is SOMETHING else on the disk already, but no FAT. >> >> In case 1, it is okay for me - IF we can safely decide if the >> target disk matches the case - to have a button saying "there >> seems to be nothing on your disk yet, overwrite it with DOS?" >> >> In case 2, the, hopefully experienced, user should be dropped >> to a prompt. There, they can decide to reboot and use better >> tools to make a FAT partition first. I certainly would pick a >> tool like GPARTED in Linux or the built-in partition editor of >> a modern Windows version at this point. OR the user can decide >> to try their luck with DOS FDISK and FORMAT. By running those >> manually and deliberately. But those two are FAR too destructive >> to hit you over the head after you made a wrong choice in some >> dialog from the installer about "what you want to do next"... >> >> >> >> As we see from the recent question by Josefh, people often just >> want to do something with DOS quickly. So a live CD mode, as far >> as I am concerned installing BASE + optionally more to some big >> RAMDISK, would be VERY nice to have for our installer CD. >> >> They certainly do NOT expect to burn a FreeDOS CD, try to get >> it to work by blindly pressing "OK" a few times and suddenly >> realize that this has completely deleted their Windows & data. >> >> >> >> I also agree that it would be very nice to have downloads with >> pre-installed FreeDOS in some popular virtual machine container >> format, as VM will be a popular way of installing a DOS today. >> Mike gives a nice description of the reasoning behind this :-) >> >> >> >> Regarding the package choice, I suggest a hierarchical menu: >> >> 1. One screen with one checkbox per category, with "BASE" as >> the only checked checkbox per default. The user can optionally >> check more boxes before hitting the "next" button. There can be >> >> 2. Buttons next to each category checkbox which say "select a >> custom subset of packages" which bring you to additional menu >> screens which do exactly that (although I doubt that lots of >> users would actually take the effort). >> >> Finally, the installer should make it very clear that for many >> use cases, BASE already is all that you need and that FDNPKG is >> a very convenient way to install and update those and other DOS >> packages at any later moment. >> >> Cheers, Eric >> >> >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> _______________________________________________ >> Freedos-devel mailing list >> >> Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
