I am a bit overwhelmed by the discussion following my post. I will try to address some points.
In my opinion the CD should be easily usable by first-time FreeDOS users and not only by experienced DOS developers. This is the view I had when testing the CD. Bernd Blaauw schreef: ;-) >The idea is people select what to do in the Isolinux menu, thus skipping >any CONFIG.SYS menu. However there should be a short timeout to select >alternative options in case JEMM and the computer don't like each other >very much. I cannot see a reason why the ISOLinux menu should automatically choose a selection after five seconds. Why not give the first-time user ample time to read and think about what selection may be best for him? >After all, computers are turning into "single-disk fully NTFS-partitioned" >systems. Another reason against the automatic selection of the FreeDOS installation menu entry. >Is there any driver for read-mounting harddisk images (maybe SHSUFDRV) in a >situation where you boot from a separate bootdisk, access the CD and mount >this (single-partition) harddisk image? El-Torito is meant to be used to boot from and the disk can usually just be accessed when supported by the BIOS. Windows XP cannot do it by the way. I think most BIOS versions support El-Torito. If the BIOS can boot the OS from an El-Torioto CD which is set up as a floppy disk emulation it can also boot from a CD that is set up as a hard disk emulation, both are included in the El-Torito standard. So you do not need a new PC for that. You can download one of my Live-CDs and test, just enter CTRL-C at the first prompt and you skip all the USB stuff. It took me quite a while to figure out how to make such a CD, but I documented it: To set up a El-Torito hard disk emulation CD please look at chapter 4 of my Bochs tutorial: http://peter-bochs.googlecode.com/files/Bochs%20-%20a%20Guide%20and%20Tutorial%20for%20Windows.pdf >Wait for the DEVLOAD developers to release a version (3.24?) with that bug >fixed. Regarding the drive letters and devload: I do not think this is a bug in devload here. On my Live-CDs I use devload in the autoexec.bat file and it assigns a new drive letter just fine. >please try if skipping JEMMEX solves both I do not really care if Jemmex is loaded or not, I just feel if this CD shall become a major FreeDOS distribution, there should be no crashes. Also loading a keyboard driver should not cause a crash. >Just wanted to add to the above by saying it would be awesome if a >semi-full USB stack would exist. Basicly: recognise USB equipment whenever >not booting from it. DOSUSB has a problem to query the BIOS to find out if DOS was booted from a USB device and where this device is connected to before starting its own USB support. Only a few BIOS versions will allow to retrieve the information that drive C is a USB disk and still I do not know where the disc is connected to, so I did not implement that. I recommend to exclude that controller manually after figuring out where the boot disk is connected to. This works for embedded applications but remains a general problem. If a customer would like to have that I would look into it again but so far this never came up except by Eric. As for the keyboard and mouse driver, I agree that one could add more features to DOSUSB but that is still on the todo-list. Georg ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA The must-attend event for mobile developers. Connect with experts. Get tools for creating Super Apps. See the latest technologies. Sessions, hands-on labs, demos & much more. Register early & save! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-blackberry-1 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
