Hi Jerome, indeed if you have a 386+ and un-bootable CD/DVD, then you should be able to run the installer after opening the CD/DVD with CD/DVD drivers of your previous DOS :-)
What I mean is that if your computer is OLDER than 386 then it does not make much sense to expect CD/DVD at all, so for such computers, a floppy distro is better. I know that technically you COULD have CD/DVD on 8086, it is just very unlikely, so it has very low priority. A floppy distro can be created as follows: You install all BASE packages to harddisk, then format a few floppy disks, SYS the first such disk and XCOPY your FreeDOS directory to those few floppies. You will see that all of BIN and some other useful stuff will fit completely on the first floppy, including NLS and localization... You could use the second floppy for HTMLHELP and LSM files and the third for other documentation and mixed other files. This is just a rough sketch, you can try a few variations until you get the impression that it is possible to do most work with the first floppy and that it is possible to install to harddisk by copying all floppy contents there after manually doing, when needed, the usual FDISK FORMAT SYS steps. This means that the installer magic does NOT need to be working for really old computers, so it can require 32 bit :-) People with old computers can XCOPY those floppies to their computer and be happy. IF they are still NOT yet happy at that point, they can find a way to open the CD/DVD (either as actual disk or as ISO) and open the files in there, either with a 16-bit FDNPKG or simply by using the 16-bit Info-ZIP UNZIP as approximation. As no 16 bit FDNPKG is available yet, you do not need to worry about the CD/DVD supporting 16 bit at once. Cheers, Eric PS: Almost all of BASE is 16 bit, but not everything. Still I suggest that the floppy distro includes e.g. some EMM386 variant of your choice, because there can be owners of 386+ computers without CD/DVD drives :-) So you can simply put ALL of BASE in there and UNZIP. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
