Hi Jim,
>> https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=17794 Of course, fresh replies keep coming in there, too :-) > 1. Ugly FDISK > 2. LiveCD is unusable The Live CD is not useful as "Boot and get tools" CD, but I am not sure whether that is the goal. However, just "Boot as if you had put a DOS boot disk into your floppy drive" would really miss most of the opportunities of having more space on CD, even if you want to be humble. Do not be TOO humble. > 3. After installation, the installer doesn't set up a GUI > or even a file manager by default It seems the installation is BASE only. Again, only putting alternatives for those things on a whole target harddisk partition which you would have gotten from 3 floppies full of MS DOS does not match the vast space even of a 20 year old computer. We do not need th > 4. Complaints about the programs and utilities, and how > they are organized By the way, there could be more "luring me into the LSM HTML overview" for example at the root directory of the IBIBLIO category directories of our classic package collection which you link directly from http://freedos.org/download/ ==> https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/ because there are no readme files or anything similar. Only the inconspicuous "What's included" link, but not the big colored "FreeDOS files archive" link gives you orientation: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/index.html Good to know that FreeDOS 1.3rc4 will bring improvements :-) About FDISK, what are YOUR thoughts about xfdisk, spfdisk, ranish? > - Compatibility is key. > - FreeDOS 1.3 will remain 16-bit. Nothing stops you from including 32-bit apps like DOSFSCK in particular on a CD ISO which is almost impossible to boot on 16-bit hardware anyway. You can limit stripping down things to 16-bit only to the floppy edition of 1.3, which should ALSO make KSSF loading for FreeCOM available as normal XMS swap FreeCOM is a big memory hog on systems which do not provide XMS. Of course, please also include both FDXMS286, 8086-compatible (but FAT32-enabled?) kernel and the 386+ EMS/XMS drivers there. After all, even 386 computers are still hard to boot from CD/DVD drives. > - FreeDOS 1.3 will retain focus on a single-user command-line environment. Agreed, no need to default-install a GUI and most GUIs are somewhat large so the could be reserved to larger versions of the ISO. Still nice to have a big ISO with plenty BUT not all apps to have a good pile of apps without requiring additional separate downloads :-) > - FreeDOS 1.3 will continue to run on old PCs > (XT, '286, '386, etc) In particular the floppy edition. There is not much point to say the CD edition is not allowed to require e.g. 16 MB of RAM for cache and RAMDISK in a world where only such PC which cannot boot a CD at all have less than that amount. > but will support new hardware with expanded driver support, > where possible. Sure! > - The "Base" package group will contain everything that > replicates the functionality from MS-DOS. YES, as a means of organizing stuff, but NO, the CD ISO edition should make it very clear that BASE is only for minimalists and it should already include MORE than BASE ready for install without requiring additional downloads. Also, the Live CD mode should already have a bit more than BASE, but it could work with "unzipping selected packages to a RAMDISK of maybe 12 or 128 MB" if we want to avoid to include packages twice (packaged and live). > I don't see turning FreeDOS into a "mini-Windows" or a "mini-Linux." Indeed. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
