Hi!
Turns out I only had some 2020 Bochs and no boot "disk"
for it, so I could not easily test any hotkeys :-o But:
What if the DOS distro installer can be improved, so it no
longer matters which emulator or virtualizer people use? ;-)
As I’ve mentioned many times before, it already does that.
And has done that since FreeDOS 1.2.
I was not referring to "autodetect in which virtual
environment you are and do special things for that"
but to "be flexible enough with real or virtual PC
hardware to just work out of the box with all popular
virtual computers", in combination with "to make it
easy to install DOS on virtual computers, we could
have a disk image with pre-installed DOS, suitable
for all types of virtual PC, one size fits all".
Of course virtual computers today tend to be tuned
towards Linux or Windows running inside them, but
my hope was that a few hints for options might be
enough, something like "configure your virtual PC
to offer AC97 or HDA sound, SATA without AHCI and
BIOS instead of UEFI boot mode, then this FreeDOS
disk image should be sufficiently happy", leaving
"only" the issue that emulators often isolate DOS
too well. Because you need specific drivers to get
files out of or into the virtual computer, which
is a problem very elegantly avoided by dosemu2 or
dosbox or similar DOS specific environments.
There are drivers for DOS as client OS for some
virtual PC, but no universal ones. And there are
drivers for a few of the network cards a typical
virtual PC can simulate, but maybe not for those
simulated by default and maybe not at least one
for each popular virtual PC brand? In addition,
it is not very convenient to have to use a FTP
or NFS or SAMBA client or web browser for DOS
to transfer files, which in addition means that
you would have to run the corresponding servers
on the host operating system, on your real PC.
However when it comes to virtual environments, it
only has separate config files for DOSBox at this time.
In a perfect world, no special config would be needed,
because a generic config would be compatible enough.
But I agree that exactly because dosbox and similar
are MEANT to be used with DOS, it can be good to
have a special config to activate the special DOS
interaction helpers dosbox and others support :-)
... V8Power Tools program VINFO to detect if and what
virtual environment it is installing the OS. At present,
that is Virtual Box, VMware, QEMU, DOSBox and some others
Good to know :-)
As you may recall, the installer now uses this information
to also determine how to behave when a disk is not partitioned.
On real hardware when a drive has no partitions, the installer
will prompt to overwrite the MBR. Inside known virtual environments,
it just overwrites it and does not bother the user.
I remember that I would prefer if the detection checks
whether there is absolutely nothing that could get lost,
not whether the target is virtual. If the disk is REALLY
totally empty, then there is less need to ask. If it is
NOT, then even in a virtual PC I would prefer to be asked.
It also is conceivable that the detection just THINKS a
disk is empty, due to a read error. So I would prefer
the most cautious approach, even if it means that the
user has to press a few more buttons during install :-)
Big and little USB images, live and legacy CD, plus the floppy edition.
The floppy edition is a special case. The live CD could
get replaced by a live disk image :-) One which could be
either copied on USB or used directly as virtual disk of
a virtual PC, with everything pre-installed? Does that
live CD sometimes use "install to ramdisk on the fly"
strategies for some apps? Or does it really have every
app fully pre-installed? Would a live DVD make sense?
Of course old PC cannot boot from USB, but then those
could also be too old to have decent live performance
from CD, so people could rather boot the legacy CD and
install from there to their legacy PC harddisk instead?
As every installer, the legacy CD also offers a bit of
live DOS as well. So to keep the number of downloadable
install media at 5, the live CD could get replaced by a
live disk image suitable for both USB and virtual PC?
This would be convenient for users of virtual computers,
because they do not need to worry about installing to
actual disks when their disks are imaginary anyway :-)
Sounds similar to what the LiveCD provides.
Exactly :-)
Without the worry of having too small or too large of a disk image
Yes and no. DOS cannot use ISO filesystems for interactive
persistent read/write access, while it could use FAT on
a disk image for exactly that. In addition, users could
still take any of the better partitioning tools, as long
as it has disk image support, to resize the disk image :-)
If there are worries about bootability after resizing, a
pre-installed disk image download could contain TWO FAT
partitions, one of them as safely to resize D: drive :-)
With enough ram, it relocates itself onto a RAM drive...
...which is a bottleneck on old computers, while less old
computers can already boot from USB. However, BIOS support
for USB "disks" can be very SLOW, so maybe a RAMDISK has
advantages even on newer REAL computers? On VIRTUAL ones,
however, I would really prefer a virtual PERSISTENT disk.
disadvantages are a slightly longer boot time and changes are not persistent.
Exactly.
But the user could have a virtual HD attached to remedy that.
The idea was that SHIPPING FreeDOS pre-installed on virtual
harddisk would both remedy that AND completely avoid the very
need to perform an installation at all :-)
Regards, Eric
_______________________________________________
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
