> On Oct 22, 2015, at 9:12 AM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > > Hi Jerome, > > indeed if you have a 386+ and un-bootable CD/DVD, then > you should be able to run the installer after opening > the CD/DVD with CD/DVD drivers of your previous DOS :-)
Yep. > > What I mean is that if your computer is OLDER than 386 > then it does not make much sense to expect CD/DVD at > all, so for such computers, a floppy distro is better. Probably, yep. > > I know that technically you COULD have CD/DVD on 8086, > it is just very unlikely, so it has very low priority. Yep, and assuming you can find an actually working 8086 that someone wants to install an OS other than what it had shipped with originally. > > A floppy distro can be created as follows: You install > all BASE packages to harddisk, then format a few floppy > disks, SYS the first such disk and XCOPY your FreeDOS > directory to those few floppies. You will see that all > of BIN and some other useful stuff will fit completely > on the first floppy, including NLS and localization… Maybe, but it would probably be easy to just through some more stuff into the installer to do a from floppy install of packages. > > You could use the second floppy for HTMLHELP and LSM > files and the third for other documentation and mixed > other files. This is just a rough sketch, you can try > a few variations until you get the impression that it > is possible to do most work with the first floppy and > that it is possible to install to harddisk by copying > all floppy contents there after manually doing, when > needed, the usual FDISK FORMAT SYS steps. This means > that the installer magic does NOT need to be working > for really old computers, so it can require 32 bit :-) The installer’s magic should work fine on an 8086. :) > > People with old computers can XCOPY those floppies to > their computer and be happy. IF they are still NOT yet > happy at that point, they can find a way to open the > CD/DVD (either as actual disk or as ISO) and open the > files in there, either with a 16-bit FDNPKG or simply > by using the 16-bit Info-ZIP UNZIP as approximation. The installer currently makes use of Info-Zip for doing a zip backup and for extracting packages. If someday there is a 16-bit FD(N)PKG, It will be easy to modify the package handling if desired. It would just be a couple lines in the FDIPKG.BAT file. > > As no 16 bit FDNPKG is available yet, you do not need > to worry about the CD/DVD supporting 16 bit at once. I like to worry. It gives me something to do with all of my copious free time. :) > > Cheers, Eric > > PS: Almost all of BASE is 16 bit, but not everything. > Still I suggest that the floppy distro includes e.g. > some EMM386 variant of your choice, because there can > be owners of 386+ computers without CD/DVD drives :-) > So you can simply put ALL of BASE in there and UNZIP. > My thought is that the “boot image” for the installer support the widest range of hardware and contain utilities to do system repair, recovery and of course installation. All packages that would be available for installation would reside on the installation media. Of course, a CD would contain both. :) > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
