Steve said: > I can't see what would need to be on base to make it more than about 20 > MB? And even that's pushing it hard. > > Maybe because I'm measuring by PC DOS 2000, which came on 6 floppies. >
The FreeDOS distribution has a "LiveCD" component that allows users to boot the CD. This includes a minimum FreeDOS environment that you can use to run FreeDOS commands - and the environment also has the installer, so you can install FreeDOS. I just installed T2310 with "Base" only (no sources) and it installed in about 17MB. Let's assume that as the "base minimum" FreeDOS environment on the LiveCD (I think we also include a few simple games .. but let's go with this assumption to keep the math simple). On top of that, all of the zipped packages for "Base" are about 13MB. And there's some overhead to boot the LiveCD - I think that's about 12MB. So if you *only* have the LiveCD + minimal FreeDOS environment + zipped "Base" packages, that's just over 42MB. But from our survey, and based on the questions we see on the email list and on the Facebook group, a lot of people who discover FreeDOS and want to try it out also expect to have some applications to go with it. There are a lot of people out there who want to try FreeDOS but haven't used DOS before, and they don't know how to download a DOS program and unzip it. I think the "Base" should make it easy for these users: 1. Want to try FreeDOS without installing it? Boot the LiveCD (in a VM or on real hardware) and run the minimal FreeDOS environment (same as "Base," about 17MB) with %TEMP% set to a small ramdisk (so I can pipe commands to one another). I can see this being *very* useful if I want to boot FreeDOS without installing it, like to run some program (like a BIOS update) from a floppy, USB flash drive, second hard drive (or hd image), etc. Or if I just want to see what this "FreeDOS" thing is about. No point in installing FreeDOS just to try it out. 2. Install "Base" and you get everything from the "Base" group (about 17MB + a few other things like FDIMPLES) - if you want to install other stuff later, then you need to use FDIMPLES with the "LiveCD" to install those other packages. 3. Install "Everything" and you get every package from the "Live" CD In either 2 or 3, if you want to install other cool stuff (like editors, compilers, etc) then you would need to get the BonusCD and run FDIMPLES to install packages from that. I updated my "sorting exercise" based on comments here. I agree that most general users won't care about the extra editors (vi, FED, ..) so let's move the "Edit" group to the "Bonus" CD. At the same time, I think it's important to have zip and unzip available on the first CD, so I moved the "Archivers" group to the "Live" CD. With those changes, and adding the "Live environment" stuff (Base), "boot overhead" stuff (Base) and "Floppy installer" stuff (Bonus) I think we can do this: LiveCD: - Apps - Archivers - Base - Drivers - Games - GUI - Net - Sound + Boot overhead + Live environment (total: 294,663 kB) BonusCD: - Boot - Devel - Edit - Unix - Util + Floppy-only installer (total: 374,848 kB) If anyone wants to check my numbers or do the exercise for yourself, I ran my numbers in a Google Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SyP_Q3zC877WNdWp1ptwFr5fm0S3XhCh0gW5npYQ-PA/edit?usp=sharing (That's a view-only link. I'll "un-share" the spreadsheet in a few weeks.) The "package list" tab was a comparison of the packages from 1.3 and T2310. The "sort exercise" tab was the first experiment I tried (earlier email). The "sort ex 2" tab is the one I described above. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
