Hi Oleg, > > distros if wanted. You cannot boot from CD on pre-386 anyway.
Most BIOSes only introduce CDROM boot late in the 486 days... There is Smart Boot Manager which can be booted from diskette to boot from cdrom, and there is SHSUCDHD which can mount the CDROM ISO from disk even if you have no cdrom drive, but if you ask me, a diskette distro is better for such computers. And of course you can always go the manual way: Unzip the zips into a fdos directory... :-). Several components and drivers exist in separate pre-386 versions, and Joris made a special diskette distro for that. > IMHO i18n should be done by _POST_install_ scripts. On one hand, that would make the installer much easier. On the other hand, it is nice that the installer can do the keyboard and font config for you... > Why? I have not only working system, but a _sources_ for > every package, even for bootdisks. I could recompile any Yes but the point is that you have the sources SOMEWHERE. Usually not all of them unzipped on your harddisk... For example I compiled Bochs today and it took like 80 MB of temp space to compile a binary of 11 MB (uncompressed). The sources are ca 10 to 15 MB. Of course I will keep the TGZ, which is less than 4 MB, but I will not keep the 80 MB of temp stuff floating around on my harddisk ;-). Another example is SuSE Linux: No sources are installed, but all are on cdrom, and if you install them, they are put in a global "source" directory... :-). > For example, I could (and I did) recompiled GCC with AVR support. > So (IMHO!), all sources should be installed *if user requests that* > (by checking _one_ checkbox). But did you actually need the kernel sources, openoffice sources, mozilla sources, x11 sources... to compile GCC?? No you did not. A checkbox "give me ALL sources" only helps harddisk vendors ;-). > Why metakern? This is triggered when the installer detects another DOS on the disk. Metakern lets you create a multiboot menu without having to modify anything outside the DOS/Win9x partition itself. > There is a port of GRUB for DOS. Installing GRUB as > default bootloader would be a nice idea... I disagree. What if the user already has Lilo or Grub for Linux or simply the WinNT/Win2k built-in boot menu? Then it is more "polite" to have our menu "inside" the DOS/Win9x menu item and not overwrite the global existing boot menu with Grub for DOS. And of course it is very hard to read the existing Grub for Linux or Win2k for NTFS boot menu config at all, so you cannot merge it with a new boot menu. > About Open Watcom... Can we use it as main FreeDOS C compiler (like GCC > in Linux systems)? Now we have many packages that require OW, GCC, BCC, > TCC, Digital Mars C, etc. for compilation. Also porting all assembler > sources to NASM is a good idea. Any FreeDOS user (if he want) should > be able to recompile _any_ program. OpenWatcom is very big, so compiling with (free) Turbo C 2 should be acceptable. Digital Mars and Borland C/C++ are exceptions and should be reduced if possible if you ask me. As for the Assemblers, I can compile most things with NASM and ArrowASM (a small free ASM which can do a bit of TASM and MASM syntax). DJGPP (GCC) is perfect for porting Unix/Linux tools, porting those again to OpenWatcom would be a lot of work for people that we do not have. So as you already guessed, I suggest to limit ourselves to OW, DJGPP, TC2, NASM and ArrowASM :-). > > think that there should be a choice "install everything > > which can be installed without INTERNET connection": > IMHO it is better to document which packages require internet > connection. Installation program should warn if any selected > package require such connection. The usual problem today is that people see a menu "small or all?" and then think "hey minimal is probably only kernel and commandcom" (while small/base actually means "full DOS but no fancy extra apps" ...) so they select "all", then "all" includes a dozen or so files which have to be fetched with WGET, WGET crashes after the 6th file and they throw FreeDOS away... > <offtopic> Can I include proprietary drivers (such as aspi or network > drivers) in *GPLed* FreeDOS distribution? Or I should made that > distribution free for any non-commercial use? </offtopic> We include only GPLed drivers, but there are several packages that run a WGET to download proprietary free drivers. See above. Well actually we also include a few REALLY free drivers with mixed other licenses I guess. But for example USBASPI and ASPIDISK are not on our ISO, only WGET commands for them are on the ISO. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
