Hi Mark,
I am very keen on installers that allow human interaction to be all over and
done with
early on, and then you can leave the computer to get on with the copying and
so on.
I produced a system years ago that did a lot of this, including a system
replication
facility to format and install DOS plus other partitions (including PS/2, so
you can
guess how long ago it was!). I also am thinking of writing a new FDISK
program (some may
recall my Turbo Pascal FDISK from times long ago, that had quite a few
command line
options and disk tests, and a nice blue interface).
Well... Our FDISK could use some testing and fine-tuning with
modern things such as LBA, SATA, SCSI, SAS, alignment of the
partition start with multiples of 4 or 64kB or whatever instead
of the classic cylinders of 63 sectors scheme, and so on.
Talking about the installer, it is indeed very nice to FIRST
ask about the choice of packages and THEN unzip them all, but
I disagree about formatting and partitioning and so on. Most
computers already have Windows, Linux or both, which are hard
to resize without data loss, so I would recommend to use a CD
or DVD with for example GParted (graphical partition editor
which automatically invokes resizers etc) for preparations.
I also think that preparation in general is fast and can be
directly interactive, so you can react to problems manually.
This is more or less what the current FreeDOS 1.0 CD (ISO)
does, the only problem is that AFTER preparations it asks
which packages to install per category and then unzips only
that category. Because unzipping takes a while, you have to
go through several stages of wait a while, make choices for
next category etc until the installer is done and will do
some final touches, before and after a final reboot.
The situations I would like to see handled are:
1. simple diskette (or USB or CD or net-boot) of DOS that comes up quickly
with a menu
to allow the current system to be tested, a new system to be installed,
or the option
of dropping down to a command prompt.
As you know, I am a fan of the Rugxulo floppy which does not
provide installation but is just a disk ready to use. And of
course you can use SYS and XCOPY to install it to a FAT disk.
Another interesting disk is NWDSK www.veder.com/nwdsk/ which
is a DOS boot floppy with lots of network drivers and network
related software, including autodetection of network chips.
I notice that it is getting a bit dated, but probably this
also holds for the crynwr network driver collection?
2. A net-installer for PCs that have odd things happen to them (e.g. used
for testing
dubious hardware, checking for virus activity, used by students) so
everything that
was there can be wiped and the disk restored afresh quickly.
You could probably boot DOS via MEMDISK (of isolinux/pxelinux)
which is a bootable ramdisk which can be booted (with a floppy
image for initial content) from anything which can load Linux,
including PXE boot loaders... I think there are also some nice
boot things which can be done with GRUB (1, 2, for DOS?) but I
do not remember PXE network boot support there? Also it may be
problematic to keep the network boot driver in RAM while DOS is
running, does anybody have experience with this conflict?
3. Easy installation of FreeDOS onto a virtual PC (especially for dosemu
within linux,
but as general as possible), so a user's partition is mapped and
everything is set up
idiot-proof and neat from the start.
Dosemu already comes with FreeDOS pre-installed anyway ;-) You
can also access your Linux home directory as a DOS drive letter
(dosemu has a command line option for that) and use any directory
as the C: drive and any directory or floppy image as the A: one.
So it is generally easy to put more DOS into DOSEmu I hope :-).
4. Installation and replication of DOS (and other systems) quickly on a new
computer,
such as for vendors selling systems without Windows to install at least
something
that proves the computer works. Especially should consider the case of
selling
or installing reconditioned PCs where the previous owners' files are
sure to be
wiped and a simple working system and memory/disk/etc test programs are
installed.
DOS can still be a good first step in an install process (as an
alternative to grub,
for instance, yet with the ability to do lots of other things). System
cloning tools
need not care about what operating systems are being installed, and the
code has a
large overlap with what FDISK should do anyway, so I am keen to make an
FDISK with
replication abilities (that might make some of the FreeDOS install tasks
easier?).
For replication - in particular on many same computers - it is
probably sufficient to make and clone a disk image with any of
the normal tools for that...?
Additionally, we need to improve software packaging so
