> On Apr 30, 2021, at 12:36 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Jerome, Laaca, others,
>
> Given that I have verbose thoughts about Laaca's review and your
> […]
> versions. Lite ONLY exists for USB and I think it is TOO small.
Wether or not any of those ideas are good or bad, they all take some amount of
time to research and/or implement. Some a few minutes, some hours and others
longer. There is only so much time available. Time better spent improving
things most users will appreciate. Things like adjusting installation paths and
updating packages are more important to most people. And even replying to this
email takes time.
> […]
> The Live version only exists for CD, why not for USB? And why
> do Live and Full (USB) or Legacy (CD) have to be separate
> downloads? Also, why not call it "Full CD", like "Full USB”?
As I said before, the Live Environment is a Live OS. It can have things
installed into it without any need to write to or existence of a hard drive.
What packages actually are pre-extracted or made live are always up for
adjustment. Those choices are only made based on user convenience. It wastes
most users time extracting (and disc space) pre-extracting and/or making
“active” packages users will rarely use.
>
> The purpose of a Live CD is that you can ENJOY APPS without
> having to install the operating system in question. If you
> only include BASE apps, you should call it "boot disk" ;-)
Like I said, it is a Live OS. Even if it was just base, it is far more than a
boot disk. For all intents and purposes, there is only one difference between
running the Live Environment and running an Installed to Hard Disk version.
That difference is — Turn off or reboot and changes to the Live OS are reset.
Now if you decide to make changes to your hard drive from the Live OS, that is
your choice and those would persist across reboots. Otherwise, things like disk
repair utilities would be of no use in the Live Environment.
>> Perhaps more software will be pre-extracted on the CD and
>> not made “active” on a RAM disk in 1.3-FINAL. However, this
>> has some trade-offs. You really can’t remove the CD...
>
> It is still better to have (more) pre-extracted apps :-)
Completely disagree. Being able to remove the CD is a very good feature. You
can boot the LiveCD. Yank the disc out. Put in a game or program disc that can
run directly from CD and use it. Without being able to remove the disc, to run
such programs would more or less require you to install the OS to the hard
drive.
>> Some programs cannot be run on a read-only filesystem.
>
> Which? Probably only a few apps would complain about that.
As I said, it would require testing each of them to ensure they did not have
issues. More time and effort.
I have no idea what (if any) programs/packages provided with the FreeDOS
release might require a writeable hard drive.
I do know I have seen many such programs in the past during my DOS days.
>> Regardless, RC4 does a much better job than RC3 to auto partition
>> blank hard disks. On a clean system or VM, most users will no
>> longer even see FDISK.
>
> To ME that sounds like "it will auto destroy ALL your data
> when it accidentally mis-detects the disk as being empty,
> without even asking you first!" :-o Please clarify.
As I said… On a CLEAN system it will usually be able to auto partition.
If there is a drive writeable to DOS, neither partition or formatting occur and
the installer goes straight to “install now”. On rare occasions, that in itself
may not be what a user wants. The may have Windows 95 installed and want a new
partition for FreeDOS.
If there is no drive writable to DOS, the user is prompted by the installer
wether or not you want it to partition the drive.
If running in advanced mode or detection cannot be performed or any partitions
exist, auto partition does not occur and the user is thrown into FDISK.
If any user thinks their is any risk in letting DOS partition their drive, they
should use other means to do so.
>
>> The easiest way to run in advanced mode is to exit the
>> installer and run “setup adv”. But, ... CTRL+C ...
>
> Are tricks like those announced and well-visible during install?
I’ve mentioned it numerous times here and in other venues.
Design implementation for a quick, easy and uncluttered install prevents such
things during execution.
It is officially mentioned in only one place… run “setup /?” or (/h or /help or
several other variants)
> Also the thing that CTRL+C can either open menu or kick you out?
Like I said, only do it when it is waiting for user input. Most people are used
to such odd instructions from video game easter eggs, cheats and power moves.
Things like “at the blah blah screen, press up up up left X down L2+R2 to
enable god mode"
It could keep CTRL+C from throwing you out at other times. But, it is an power
user feature. Most should just run “setup adv”.
>> [..] There really is no way to store a log of “the whole process”.
>> Anything prior to having a formatted hard disk will be lost.
>
> Unless you make a temp file in a small RAMDISK which you should
> have anyway because pipelines in DOS actually are temp files ;-)
And how would that help logging the partitioning process???
Reboot, bye bye log.
> [..]
>
> See the above suggestion to make an APROPOS batch script ;-)
> Actually it turns out that BREZEL already has one which simply is:
>
> @whatis /a %1 %2 %3
>
> The whatis tool looks in FREEDOS / HELP and FREEDOS / APPINFO,
> with hardcoded fallbacks and respecting the HELPPATH and PAGER
> environment variables. Robert Platt has written tool & batch.
> Note that it creates a database file, so do that with all the
> apps installed on the Live CD before putting that on the CD.
I have plans for things of this sort and many other improvements.
But all take some amount of time. Only so much of that available.
>> Yes. Far to many things get installed into %DOSDIR%\BIN.
>
> This is intentional AND useful. See the explanation above.
>
> Regards, Eric
>
> PS: My /usr/bin contains almost 5000 files, but with that my
> PATH is less than 250 bytes. In Linux, that is. But it is fine
> to move complex, MULTI-FILE DOS apps to separate directories.
Jerome
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