Hi, On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 7:11 PM, Jerome Shidel <jer...@shidel.net> wrote: > > Just replacing the COMMAND and SYS files won’t really give you 1.2. It would > just be 1.1 an upgraded kernel. Take a look at the software comparison chart > on the official FreeDOS software repository. > > http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/1.2/pkg-html/comparison.html
Or you could just look closer at specific categories that are relevant to your usage: http://www.freedos.org/software/ BASE, Archivers, Boot tools, Development, Editors, Emulators, Games, Networking, Sound, Utilities (I know it's the same thing, but it's easier to me to only have to look in Sound for relevant sound/music tools than scroll through a list of hundreds of programs, even if sorted / ordered.) So, obviously, kernel and shell are supremely important, but the changes were minor (2040 -> 2042) or even non-existent (FreeCOM). I wouldn't recommend to overload yourself with worries about updating literally everything. I dislike having a billion files that are all falsely considered "important". I would suggest focusing only on your most commonly used utils and system drivers (e.g. JEMM). Honestly, a lot of stuff hasn't seen major changes. And for things like compilers (e.g. FPC), the upgrade path is usually to delete and reinstall from scratch anyways. > The FreeDOS 1.2 installer will backup your config files. Also, if the new > system directory (C:\FDOS), already exists, it will also backup and replace > it. > So, make sure you have plenty of free disk space. Yes, always have backups, if possible, but I don't think you need to backup literally everything. I guess you could always cat or dd from atop *nix the relevant partition into a .img file. Or, for Windows, use something like this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ > However, that assume everything works as designed and nothing goes wrong. > I highly recommend you create your own backup of anything important. Okay, but anything unmodified from stock builds (e.g. easily available on reliable online mirrors) isn't worth backing up. You can always re-download DJGPP or FPC again without worries. (These take up a ton of space but are also quickly updated / obsoleted, so it's not worth preserving them to backup, IMHO, without a good reason.) > The first step in that process would be to make a known good bootable > backup. Format a floppy and preform a sys transfer to that diskette. That way > you > can easily boot that floppy and restore your kernel. I would also copy your > current autoexec.bat and config.sys to a directory on the floppy along with > any > drivers you may require. Is this an ancient machine? Why can't he backup to USB jump drive instead? They certainly have higher capacity (and are dirt cheap nowadays). A good boot floppy can be useful, I'm not disagreeing. ;-) But overall it's a very limited medium for backups. > Also, please be sure you have good backups for any games you have. I > wouldn’t expect any serious problems. But, you never know. On top of that, a > hard > drive can go bad or even completely fail without warning. For proprietary games, yes, back them up. Even CD media is prone to failure these days. Otherwise, if the game is freeware, just backup config and save files (and maybe mods / add-ons), not the original data itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
