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 that any >> dependencies are checked prior to attempting installs and packages have >> an opportunity to run run pre- and post-install processes or scripts. >> It should be a single file, ala rpm, although there are strong arguments >> as to why it should be something akin to the windows installer. This is exactly what FDPKG, FDUPDATE and our 1.0 installer already do - they use ZIP but the ZIP contain a few files with fixed name and special meaning for things such as "list of dependencies" or "things to do after install" or "before update" or uninstall :-). Eric > I like the idea of self-executable zip archives for distributing packages, > and some > standards for naming documentation (that might make OpenOffice interchange > easy) and > a policy of a compressed source tree archive within the archive, again: with > a standard > for naming files to avoid clashes when upgrading, avoid duplication, and make > it clear > to people looking at the files what they are. Ideally, there should be a > ready-to-use > executable in the distribution that will work on the lowest common > denominator computer, > plus it should be possible to take the source tree and produce a new > executable optimised > for the local hardware automatically by an installer program... which I > really would like > to see named "Packman" (for package manager). As with rpm and deb packages, > there > should be a searchable record of files involved with each package, packages > installed, > and packages available for installation. It should be possible to set > policies to only > ever use packages from selected sources (already on local disk, from CD/DVD, > or selected > websites), and another security-conscious requirement: to easily compare the > contents > of all files with the distribution package (or just a selected file on the > PC) and say > whether the file has not been changed/corrupted/infected/updated, or (for > config files) > what changes have been made. > > Mark Aitchison, > Christchurch, New Zealand. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. 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