Hi Eric, > On Jun 2, 2021, at 6:33 AM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > > Hi Jerome, > > thanks for the explanation, but are we talking about DOS > RAM (at most 640 kB) here? Or EMS, XMS, protected mode?
FDIMPLES and FDINST are both made for 8086. FDIMPLES is limited to only using low memory (640k). I believe FDINST is as well. But, you’d have to as Mateusz about that. In my opinion, since they both need to do everything they do on an 8086, there isn’t much point adding support for memory over 640k. > In FDIMPLES, FDINST of FDNPKG, and other involved apps? There aren’t any other programs directly involved. When running the FDIMPLES exe, it does everything except the actual install or removal of the individual packages. The OS installer is different. It does not normally use FDIMPLES at all. Package installation there is handles through batch logic, V8Power Tools and FDINST. However, when running the installer in advanced mode, it will run FDIMPLES in a special mode to modify the package list. That is then passed back to the installer and the process above is used. > > How much RAM do you recommend to be free? As much as possible to prevent problems with very large packages. > Could FDIMPLES > shrink before calling FDINST and grow back when it exits? Yes and no. FDIMPLES was really only designed to modify the package list for advanced mode installs. All the the other stuff it does and restrictions that were added came later. It’s really not designed to do that. It really needs to just be redone. > > Note that Lukas had been booting from a Win9x floppy to > run the CD installer, as his BIOS does not boot CD and > he did not use the special installer boot floppy either, > so I expect his context to be rather unusual for the > installer and wonder which parts are likely to fail in > that situation and what could be done to warn the users > or, better, to work with arbitrary DOS boot disks :-) First… What OS let’s you boot a different OS to perform your install? You don’t boot MS-DOS 5.0 and try to run the MS-DOS 6.22 installer. You don’t boot CentOS and try to install Ubuntu. That being said. The primary installer does what it can to try and do it. However, the installer requires FreeCOM. So, if you boot MA-DOS, FreeCOM is loaded by the installer. This would really reduce the amount of free RAM. The installer itself and most of the utilities it uses can get by with fairly low amounts of free RAM. I don’t know off hand what the absolute minimum level of free RAM required for FDINST to be able to install all the packages in BASE or FULL. But, he didn’t say when it actually fails to install. Overall, I think the installer should just completely remove any support for installation under any OS other than FreeDOS. Permitting it under MS, PC or other DOS is rarely tested and probably flakey at best. > > Regards, Eric > > Jerome > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
