Hi Tom, Marco, > > That I have in mind is mass storage, mainly flash memory stick... > > Boot from cd-rom is OK as emergency tool but is a static > > system where you can't save your preferences or documents, > > will be better to have a portable USB system able boot on real > > or virtual machines as Damn Small Linux does.
> if you can boot from an USB stick, this stick is already > accessible from DOS. You need USB drivers only for other disks. This is true but OLDER computers only have USB mouse/keyboard support, not USB storage support in BIOS. Those could still be booted from CD/DVD, and USB storage could be used to store the files of the user. This is similar to what Knoppix did a few years ago when Linux NTFS drivers could not write files and/or users did not want to write files to their Windows disk after booting Linux from CD/DVD... Basically all current USB DOS drivers are "freely downloadable from the vendor homepage" but have too unclear license to let us include them with any distro. Admittedly, other distros do care a lot less about this but yet others think that you may only use those USB drivers when using USB devices or controllers of the same brand for which the vendor made the driver. On the way towards a free DOS USB storage driver, having a free open source ASPIDISK replacement would be a nice step. See my explanation in my previous email... :-). Talking about free components, I also have some open source code snippets for PCMCIA - you could combine them with other existing free non-DMA IDE access code and some PnP init stuff to make a "PCMCIAASPI" driver similar to USBASPI, for compact flash and similar disks. Problem is that the PCMCIA snippet is in Pascal while open source IDE code typically is in ASM. Thirdly, it would be nice if Bart Lagerweij of nu2.nu could make his Eltorito cdrom driver open source, maybe somebody could send him a pizza for motivation :-). The Eltorito sys driver is mainly glue code between BIOS "special INT13 CD/DVD access after booting from CD/DVD" interfaces and the generic DOS cd/dvd interface expected by SHSUCDX, MSCDEX and the like. Eric :-). ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. 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
