Hi,
On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 1:00 PM, Christian Imhorst
christian.imho...@gmail.com wrote:
I am still a fan of a FD 1.1 bootable USB image. By this time I use
Qemu to build one, too. It is much easier to make the image bootable
with Qemu than with Grub4DOS or Syslinux.
QEMU is pretty great but a bit fractured.
The newest I can (successfully) compile on my old Lucid Puppy Linux is
2.1.3. I'm still using 2.2.0 on my laptop and desktop under Windows
(from http://qemu.weilnetz.de ). IIRC, his newer 2.3.0 build for
Windows (accidentally??) broke pcnet, so I don't use that one.
(Reported a bug but haven't heard back.) My Ubuntu 14.04.2 (Trusty
Tahr) jump drive only has 2.0.0, but it works, even (optionally) KVM
on my main desktop.
Today I wear an USB stick together with my key ring with a bootable
FD 1.1 image. I have created this image with Qemu and use some stuff
like FDNPKG, the latest MPXPLAY and ideas from METADOS for my FreeDOS
to go.
Mpxplay doesn't reliably work on most of my machines. Though I'm no
multimedia fiend, so I don't majorly care.
FDNPKG is a great idea, but we need more package(r)s. Well, I did try
to install something from there yesterday (under QEMU to RAM disk),
but it seemed to expect c:\games hardcoded. (Maybe I'm wrong?) Meh.
MetaDOS 0.1 is still on iBiblio, but it's extremely weak. I've been
heavily working on a much-improved 0.2, which is much more useful (to
me). It's almost finished (though I've been saying that for weeks).
The 0.1 release was just a very rough proof of concept. I don't know
if anyone else will appreciate it, though, but hey I tried.
I've tested this newer 0.2 on both floppy and USB (basically atop the
minimal RUFUS install) on my old P4 (RTSPKT) and (preferred) under
aforementioned emulators.
And if I need new things on this image I boot FreeDOS on the
stick with Qemu. In this way I can use Internet to load new stuff over
FDNPKG on the stick. Another possibility is to put the stick into the
USB port of my Linux computer just to copy stuff on this stick with a
terminal or a file manager. And to use FreeDOS to go I can easily boot
the stick with a computer.
I automated a ton of stuff in the new release. Most of it is grabbed
via either FTP or Wget (which itself is grabbed via FTP, initially, if
needed!).
It doesn't rely on FDNPKG at all. Granted, I like FDNPKG, but you have
to package things a very specific way first, and that's very tedious.
For the near future I like to build a FD 1.1 emulator like the ready
to use Raspberry Pi emulator package for Windows:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rpiqemuwindows/
So that you can easy run FD 1.1 with Qemu on Windows by executing a
run.bat. For Linux users like me I would put a run.sh into the ZIP
file, too, but Qemu executables just for the Windows users. :-)
I did make a run-qemu.bat in this new release (although I also
heavily test under VBox, which works with VT-X on my main desktop). If
you want, I'll email it to you, but it's nothing hugely remarkable.
BTW, like I said, I mainly test 2.2.0 on Windows, but I still have
0.13.50 (and even 0.9.0 on my laptop), so they all work reasonably
okay. I don't personally want the hassle of recompiling QEMU myself,
though, or lugging around full sources, so I haven't. I just assume
everyone can find it on their own.
--
___
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
