Hi! > How many of you remember the DOS 6.22 install process? If possible, it > should aim for that. It's simple and straight to the point. It worked
As far as I remember, it was 3 floppies and only "base" software... Also, under which conditions would it format / partition your disk? > across all platforms and got DOS up and running with minimal fuss. Once the All platforms back at that time was harddisks of at most 8 GB, with older BIOS even only 1/2 GB, only CHS, only FAT12 and FAT16, because nothing else was supported by MS DOS 6.22 :-p Also, there was minimal fuss because people did not have dual boot. You only had to care about "already has older DOS" versus "this is a new empty harddisk". If you format all disks which have "no DOS" today, you get MANY angry users who are surprised by the demolition of their existing Windows, Linux or other OS. > setup is done, after a reboot, the FreeDOS package manager can run to add > additional software and system tweaks. I do not care at which point a reboot is needed. However, for those who install in a VM, it is best if the install process does not need too many virtual CD insertions or removals. The installer should be able to detect which steps have been completed: That way, you do not have to remove the CD before rebooting and still get a full install. > The package manager could be a 16-bit or 32-bit application. (I remember > PKZIP running perfectly fine on my Tandy 1000 EX before I had 640K RAM), so > FDPKG would have to work from a floppy disk/image on lower end systems (or > lower end in emulation) As mentioned earlier, computers older than 386 cannot normally boot from anything large and portable (CD, DVD, USB stick) so you would only install a basic DOS on them, maybe simply by hand: Take some floppy with pre-installed FreeDOS, FORMAT, XCOPY and SYS, done :-) You can always use UNZIP or FDPKG or similar later if you manage to connect a CD drive or network card to your 286 or 8086 for extra fun. On the other hand, if you have a computer which is less than 50 years old, simply use a generic boot CD or DVD with all the fun on it, with a small, probably bootable RAMDISK to make installation easy. And do not worry about what you whether you want 8086 ROM BASIC drivers ;-) At the risk of stating the obvious, please give the existing distros of FreeDOS 1.x and their installers a try and do NOT re-invent all wheels. Start by what is already is working and improve from there. This includes letting the FDPKG / FDNPKG installer do most work of nicely unpacking the per-package ZIPs and doing bookkeeping, batch install triggers and similar nice FreeDOS package management stuff. Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monitor Your Dynamic Infrastructure at Any Scale With Datadog! Get real-time metrics from all of your servers, apps and tools in one place. SourceForge users - Click here to start your Free Trial of Datadog now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=241902991&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
