Hi Mateusz and Michael, the installer should NOT try to be more clever or automatic than we can SAFELY make that. I disagree with Mateusz about the "simply give me a button to destroy my harddisk contents and put DOS on it" because that is too destructive. Default should be to ADD DOS to an existing FAT partition, if any.
Without checking or modifying whether that is the partition which is flagged as boot partition, or alternatively adding it to some existing boot manager which has config files on some other partition anyway. If no FAT partition is present, then you have two situations: 1. There is NOTHING at all, apart from maybe some MBR with an empty partition table, on the main harddisk or SSD yet. Note that we also have to check for GPT partitioning schemes here. 2. There is SOMETHING else on the disk already, but no FAT. In case 1, it is okay for me - IF we can safely decide if the target disk matches the case - to have a button saying "there seems to be nothing on your disk yet, overwrite it with DOS?" In case 2, the, hopefully experienced, user should be dropped to a prompt. There, they can decide to reboot and use better tools to make a FAT partition first. I certainly would pick a tool like GPARTED in Linux or the built-in partition editor of a modern Windows version at this point. OR the user can decide to try their luck with DOS FDISK and FORMAT. By running those manually and deliberately. But those two are FAR too destructive to hit you over the head after you made a wrong choice in some dialog from the installer about "what you want to do next"... As we see from the recent question by Josefh, people often just want to do something with DOS quickly. So a live CD mode, as far as I am concerned installing BASE + optionally more to some big RAMDISK, would be VERY nice to have for our installer CD. They certainly do NOT expect to burn a FreeDOS CD, try to get it to work by blindly pressing "OK" a few times and suddenly realize that this has completely deleted their Windows & data. I also agree that it would be very nice to have downloads with pre-installed FreeDOS in some popular virtual machine container format, as VM will be a popular way of installing a DOS today. Mike gives a nice description of the reasoning behind this :-) Regarding the package choice, I suggest a hierarchical menu: 1. One screen with one checkbox per category, with "BASE" as the only checked checkbox per default. The user can optionally check more boxes before hitting the "next" button. There can be 2. Buttons next to each category checkbox which say "select a custom subset of packages" which bring you to additional menu screens which do exactly that (although I doubt that lots of users would actually take the effort). Finally, the installer should make it very clear that for many use cases, BASE already is all that you need and that FDNPKG is a very convenient way to install and update those and other DOS packages at any later moment. Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
