> On Sep 10, 2015, at 6:10 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
>
>
> Hi, nitpicking and ideas coming up :-)
>
>> This gives the user the ability to partition and format elsewhere.
>> But, you cannot do an install without the drive C:.
>
> Actually a "live CD" mode would be nice. Give the user some menu
> item to load a large ramdisk and install (with fdpkg / fdnpkg) a
> bunch of DOS programs to the ramdisk, so the users can directly
> enjoy a spontaneous DOS session without having to format away the
> already existing OTHER operating systems on their computer.
That would be great. I remember DOS days with a 20MB hard drive.
Could do a lot with a couple hundred MB ram disk.
> Note that DOS lacks sufficiently powerful tools to resize other
> partitions to ADD DOS without destroying other partitions, but
> modern computers are so powerful that people can easily install
> DOS to a completely empty VIRTUAL harddisk in a virtual machine
Yep, thats how I’m building and testing the bath based the installer.
1 VM with FreeDOS 1.1 that builds a Installer Floppy.
1 VM that is empty to test it on.
VM’s are so cheap anymore. :)
>
> So we already have at least five use cases :-)
>
> * install from floppy XCOPY style to pre-386 computers, allowing
> the user to later add packages in a more manual way via FDPKG
>
> * install from CD / DVD / USB to completely empty (virtual) PC,
> making sure that there really is no danger to damage other OS
>
> * install to ramdisk for a live CD session, possibly offering a
> choice between small and large selections of DOS packages
>
> * install to existing formatted FAT C: partition, minimizing any
> damage to already existing contents of C: - in particular, ask
> the user whether SYS should overwrite the boot sector or if it
> should only provide a boot sector FILE that the (expert) user
> can add to their existing boot manager. Maybe also let users
> decide if they want autoexec / config to be replaced (with a
> non-destructive backup!) or if they want to use fdconfig.sys
> and fdauto to keep FreeDOS and ... DOS / Win config separate.
I don’t see a way to install the KERNEL.SYS without updating the
boot sector. But, should always at least ask to back stuff up.
> * install in a destructive way by partitioning and formatting if
> the user REALLY knows that this is the right thing to do... Do
> not try to decide about those things automatically! Not even
> Ubuntu (which tries to have installation for dummies) does it.
> As far as I remember, Ubuntu offers "install to free space" if
> the user has provided free space (e.g. really empty harddisk,
> or by shrinking Windows from within Windows manually before),
> "custom install" (with a nice gparted style partition resizer
> and editor) and "install instead of whatever was there before,
> destroying existing data" (but clearly warning about risks).
Nuke and pave option. Might be a good idea. I’ll probably stick it in there.
> I am sure I have forgotten many cases and issues, but have a look
> at the OLD FreeDOS installers to see what and how they did, plus
> have a look at the old discussions about the topic :-) Our older
> installers are from the time when Windows (e.g. XP) still could
> be installed on FAT partitions, so they for example tried to see
> if you had Windows on your C: drive. If yes, they tried to add
> FreeDOS to the built-in boot menu of Windows and tried to use a
> DOS specific set of config files without damaging Windows files.
I think adding stuff to a boot menu for Windows, grub, lilo or whatever
is way beyond the scope of a batch based installer. At least, without creating
additional utilities. Unless some DOS based tools exist for this already?
I don’t think that will make it into the installer.
>>>> 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 :-)
>>>
>>> Even a lot of 486s can't do El Torito. My 486/133 couldn't.
>
> For even more nitpicking, there are some fancy tricks and floppy
> based boot managers to boot from CD / DVD or USB on 386+ PC and
> people even managed to connect CD / DVD drives to 8086... But is
> this worth big special efforts? Probably not: 386 owners can go
> the "floppy basic install, then use fdnpkg" route :-) They can
> use fdnpkg and the ZIP packages from any normal "if you could
> boot from CD drive" install CD, without booting from that CD,
> after finding & installing ancient CD drivers for their drive.
(Please forgive me if I misquote or misunderstand the following Jim.)
Jim says he wants a super simple, nearly option free installer.
With basically two choices:
Full install
or
Full install with sources.
This is for support purposes and wants all installs to start off with the
same set of software. That way it is much easier to troubleshoot problems.
The user can always install more software after the install is successful
and the system is working.
There are a couple other reasons. But, I see this one as one of the primary
issues
(It will also make my life easier while building the installer) ;^)
> Cheers, Eric
>
>
>
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