Hi Eric, On 7/2/2025 10:54, Eric Auer via Freedos-devel wrote: >> Is there a way to get FreeDOS entire distribution installed over another >> OS, let's say Windows XP? Short of fetching manually each package zip >> file and extracting them over C:\FREEDOS? Or installing it fully on a >> VM or real hardware and transferring files over? > > I think you can somehow tell the installer to not partition or format > your drive, but just install to a directory. If you want to use that > from within a DOS window in Windows XP, you may want to write some BAT > file which loads things and sets up some environment variables and so > on, because you would have no config.sys and no autoexec.bat to load > drivers while your real OS is XP. DOS drivers will not work in WinXP.
This would be really nice! Specially if supported somehow by the installer. (I mean, having an install mode designed for Windows MS-DOS prompt.) If doable, would FreeDOS project be interested in patches to the installer? > People with modern PC might have so much hardware that they have no > problems with installing into a VM. I personally prefer DOSEMU2 and > yet others like DOSBOX, both of which are tuned towards DOS instead > of just simulating generic PC hardware as a VM would do :-) When having to virtualize, I also prefer DOS-centric VMs, even Windows DOS prompts, FWIW. I usually use my "retro" computers for retro projects, so full virtualization is often not very convenient. On most systems I own, old Intel Atom-based or inferior, 80386's VM86 is the only hardware accelerated feature I have access to. > You can also install DOS as a dual boot OS and share C: with some type > of FAT-based Windows with some effort and a suitable boot menu. Then > you can select at boot whether you want to start Windows or plain DOS. > > You cannot do that if your Windows is NTFS-based or ExFAT-based or is > booting from a GPT- instead of MBR-partitioned disk. However, there > are people working on the ability to boot DOS from FAT partitions > (FAT16 or FAT32) on GPT-partitioned disks. My case, I presume. > You can also install to USB sticks or other types of USB disks or > maybe memory cards such as SD cards, as long as your BIOS supports > "legacy" operating systems by providing USB BIOS drivers for your > USB mouse, USB keyboard and USB disks. That way, you do not need to > install DOS over something else. It can have the USB stick for itself. > > Note that BIOS USB drivers can be slow and limited, for example with > no support for swapping USB devices after booting. Most of my computers are surprisingly legacy friendly. (Because they are quite legacy themselves, :P) As it's a one time only task, It wouldn't hurt much to do it that way. That said, I'm doing development early 2000's style: I would like not to leave Windows (unless strictly required) for development tasks and take on the challenge of finding ways around it. Need web, email and multitasking, or at least task-swapping capabilities to be really productive. Process isolation for stability is also very much appreciated. And that brings to mind DESQview and DOSSHELL. It'd be really cool if there were at least one free software implementation of something like that available in FreeDOS. I wonder why no one took the challenge yet. Or have they? > On the other hand, just unzipping all packages into some C: FreeDOS > directory gets quite close to "installing the DOS distro as bunch > of apps to use from WinXP DOS windows" and is easy to do as well. > And you do not have to boot from a DOS install medium for doing it. That's the plan! But I'd like to automate the process. Manually, it gets very tedious after a while. Thanks for the comprehensive reply! _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
