Hi, On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 2:55 PM, Mingcong Bai <[email protected]> wrote: > > I happen to have a ThinkPad 340 kicking around: > > - Intel 486SLC2 25/50MHz > - 12MB RAM > - 3.5 inch 1.44MB Floppy Drive > > But FreeDOS seemed to have CD installation only... Is it possible to > install FreeDOS with a set of floppy disks still? If not, what are my > options?
You mean that old bunch of like 88 floppy images for full FD 1.0?? Uh, no, that hasn't been attempted this time, probably overkill. FreeDOS is just a simple DOS, so bare minimum installation from floppy is easy (fdisk, fdapm warmboot, format, sys, xcopy). Of course that won't give you all third party software or even a full FD "BASE", but it will boot up (giving you at least a kernel, shell, and partition/MBR/boot sector). You can piecemeal add whatever you want. Truly, you don't always absolutely need all the extras (networking, games, archivers, development). Do you have a working packet driver for networking for that machine? (My own MetaDOS floppy heavily relies on that, but it works fine under VBox or QEMU. So you can download there first and rawrite to physical disk later.) If so, that would make things a lot easier. IIRC, one way to halfway tell what card was "pcisleep q02" (or maybe NSSI or similar tool). http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/metados/ Most other floppy image files are very old and abandoned. If you just need "whatever", I could point you to various ones, like I did on the bug tracker: * https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/bugs/143/ * https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/bugs/129/ But FD 1.2 RC2 has a bootable floppy installer (thanks to Jerome): http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/previews/1.2-rc2/FD12FLOPPY.zip And Mateusz recently made his own Svarog86 floppy images: https://sourceforge.net/projects/svarog86/files/2015-05-29/ Or if you could copy the .iso to the hard drive (via another computer), then you could then mount it via SHSUCDHD (I think). http://adoxa.altervista.org/shsucdx/index.html http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/shsucdx/other/ > Oh also, I am a native Simplified Chinese user/speaker, there doesn't > seem to be any translation for CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, > Vietnamese) locales yet - is it not supported or just no one had gone in > and translate FreeDOS to these particular languages? Not sure exactly, you'd have to ask Henrique, the resident codepage expert (or maybe Wengier Wu on BTTR). Most of here don't grok such CJK languages, and IIRC there is no (fully working?) support for DBCS (unlike MS-DOS). IIRC, the typical DOS codepage doesn't hold many glyphs, so it's too small for most non-European (non-Roman alphabet) languages (but maybe some Cyrillic support). There are some minor workarounds (maybe), but most of us aren't qualified to test them. As far as Chinese (viewing only?), take a look here: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/file/pg/libs/ Or Foxtype (viewing only): http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/util/foxtype.zip We did have a (theoretical only, albeit with a few third-party links) discussion a few years ago about Japanese support (freedos-user, date: Nov. 8, 2013, subject: "FreeDOS/V"): https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/freedos-user/thread/[email protected]/ In other words, such CJK languages probably need their own TSRs or tools in order to use graphics mode (instead of limited text mode). There is however no active support (AFAIK) in FreeDOS for any CJK. You can still write Unicode stuff with various DOS ports, e.g. Mined or GNU Emacs or Blocek (gfx). It's not universal DOS system support by any means, but it's far better than nothing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
