Hello all, I’ve got a couple thoughts regarding the OS release media I wanted to throw out to you all. These are just things I was pondering and by no means I’m I saying any of these are going to happen. They are just some ideas I’d like to share with you and get feedback on…
As you know, the LiveCD uses multiple boot images. A floppy one that starts the Live Environment. A second floppy one that launches directly into the installer. Finally, a third small hard disk image to run the FloppyEdition installer without need for OS level CD support. Do you think the FloppyEdition installer should be given it’s own entry in the CD boot menu? Or, leave it as an “EasterEgg” boot by selecting the copyright notice on the menu? Personally, I don’t see either as a perfect solution. If it is left as an EasterEgg, many people will never know it is there. Don’t forget, that installer does not need any OS level CD support. If a machine can boot it, it can pretty much install FreeDOS on anything. On the other hand, I think moving it to it’s own menu item will just confuse users by having 2 different “Install FreeDOS options”. Another possibility is drop the current “Install” option. Replacing it with the Floppy Edition. Maybe call it something like “Install FreeDOS BASE only.” After all, there is no problem running the primary installer from the Live Environment. But again, I think users will pick the wrong thing. This now brings me to the Legacy CD. It boots using a different process than the LiveCD (See numerous previous posts on those differences). This provides CD booting on a narrow range of hardware that can boot from CD but not use the method employed by the LiveCD. There is a CD Boot Floppy included in the LiveCD download zip archive. So, do we really need to keep the LegacyCD around? The emulated Floppy the LegacyCD boots is the same as the current LiveCD’s boot to install menu option. If the LegacyCD sticks around, the image it boot’s could be switched to the one used by the LiveCD’s boot to Live Environment. This would provide a Live Environment on that legacy hardware. But, then what would we call things. They’d both be LiveCDs. Finally (at least for now), along with the LiveCD and LegacyCD a CD boot floppy image is included. We could include a second floppy image to boot the Live Environment when direct booting from a CD is not possible. But, it could also cause confusion on what to use or burn to CD or Floppy. So, IDK. I changed my mind. Thats not all just yet. A lot of users want to run FreeDOS from USB. As I see it, there are several issues with that. First, you cannot guarantee that when booted from USB that drive will be writable. Personally, I’ve never seen when it was write protected. But, during the early days of developing the installer for 1.2, I learned that it was sometimes the case and attempts to use it for temp storage resulted in the users machine screaming very loud beeps and throwing write errors. So, the installer was modified and always assumes it’s boot media is write-protected. Next, I don’t think users want a temporary Live Environment for USB usage. They probably want the programs they install and the changes they make to remain for next time. They also probably want the full capacity of the USB drive. That is problematic. Without spending the time to write our own custom “Write to USB” program, most will be stuck writing the standard USB images directly too the USB media. I don’t see us making our own custom image burner to stretch the filesystem for all the major OS platforms. So, that’s out for the foreseeable future. Probably most systems will only do USB HD emulation when booted from that USB drive (although I have some machines here that do it even when booted from the HD as long as the USB stick is inserted), the best solution I’ve come up with has been around for a while. More or less I refer to it as an OEM style install. I demonstrated it in a YouTube video with FreeDOS 1.2. Basically, you just write the USB install image to the drive. Then boot it and exit the installer. Use FDISK to create a separate partition on the USB drive and reboot. Because who knows what all drives are in the machine and how they will be ordered, use FDISK to verify the drive letter. If its drive D:, just run the installer again. If it is not drive D:, run the installer in advanced mode and tell it the appropriate drive. Once install completes, just reboot. It will boot into the installed partition. This leaves the original installer boot partition as a “OEM” style recovery partition. It also lets FDIMPLES use that recovery partition as a package source to add and remove addition programs. Not a perfect solution. But one I’ve used many times on internal hard drives and even USB sticks. Ok, finally for now (this time I mean it). We come to UEFI and modern hardware. With modern hardware vendors dropping support for Legacy BIOS and users wanting to run FreeDOS on modern machines, I only see three solutions. First… Oh well, they can run it in a virtual machine and we should no longer worry about native hardware support. Second… I really haven’t looked into this one at all. But, I think it would be possible to use Core Boot, SeaBios or something else to provide Legacy BIOS support ourselves on UEFI only systems. This would be a good deal of work. It also still leaves the problem of sound drivers and other hardware support. This might also require some thin hardware emulation layer. But, it should be doable. Third… Create a custom extremely slim Linux distro to boot the system and provide basic hardware support. That OS would boot directly into a VM platform like QEMU or DOSBox and run FreeDOS. Overall, I think this might be the best option for UEFI only systems and modern hardware. It would provide support for sound and networking through Linux drivers. It could be easily slowed down for older games. It could even be used to run FreeDOS on non-x86 based hardware. Some of the disadvantages of doing this would be the need to technically maintain two operating systems. Since even the lite weight Linux distros are more bloat than we would want or need, we would have to do our own. It would also require creating some Linux programs to easily manage things on the host OS. Perhaps this should be done as a completely separate project from FreeDOS. Something like a RetroPC project. However, their may already be such a project in existence we could use. We could then either release a version or just point people at it for modern hardware. :-) Jerome _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
