Hi, > On Jan 16, 2022, at 3:07 PM, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote:
> I think it's better not to hide features - so yes, the FloppyEdition > installer should get its own entry in the CD boot menu. But from your > description, maybe it needs a different name. Hi, > On Jan 16, 2022, at 3:07 PM, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > I think it's better not to hide features - so yes, the FloppyEdition > installer should get its own entry in the CD boot menu. But from your > description, maybe it needs a different name. At present the LiveCD boot menu says: Use FreeDOS 1.3 in Live Environment mode Install to harddisk Boot from system harddisk Boot from diskette FreeDOS is a trademark of Jim Hall, 2001-2021 I don’t actually think we need the Boot from diskette option at all. Maybe we should git rid of it? We would need two install choices. In part, we could change the description text to help users decide which to run. When install to harddisk is currently selected. The description reads as “Install the FreeDOS 1.3 operating system from CD-ROM to the harddisk. For more information, visit the FreeDOS project website at http://www.freedos.org <http://www.freedos.org/>” I think is is difficult to describe the differences between the two installers quickly, accurately and in a way users can easily understand. There have been a lot of improvements to the Floppy Edition since RC5. Including, at boot language selection to run the installer in several languages. And a number of bug fixes. But, generally the Floppy Edition doesn’t look much different than in RC5. The biggest noticeable difference between FDI (the primary installer) and FDI-x86 (The Floppy Edition installer) is on the LiveCD the Floppy Edition boots into advanced mode. But, there a lot of other differences. Some little some huge. You should try the Floppy Edition.Hopefully you can think of how to word the menu entry and descriptive text. > On the second one, about the LegacyCD vs boot floppy to use the LiveCD: I can > see benefits to either solution. I'm approaching this from a "what's easiest > for the user" perspective, and I think keeping a LegacyCD is still a good > option rather than pushing those folks to a LiveCD + boot floppy. We still > have the floppy there for the even narrower use case where folks have a CD in > their system but cannot boot from CD - they'll need the boot floppy to access > the CD installer anyway. So I wouldn't change this, at least not for 1.3 > "Final." Might change that for "2.0" or whatever version comes after "1.3.” Agreed. It’s not like it is extra work to create it. Nowadays, it is really just a setting in the RBE. You left out your thoughts on providing an additional Live Boot Floppy image along with or instead of the CD Boot Floppy image. So, let me tell you a little story on the roots of the Live Environment. I still have this Pentium Pro I bought new back in late 1995 (or maybe early 1996). It’s CMOS battery finally died a couple years back. It lasted about 20 years so I’m not complaining. But on most machines, you can just swap out a coin battery. Not on this machine. The battery is integrated inside the real time clock IC. Which was soldiered to the motherboard. The machine would complain about a dead battery at boot. But otherwise worked fine. Except for one tiny problem. At power on or reboot all BIOS settings changes reverted to default. This meant that hard drives were set to “Not Present”. So for a ll intents and purposes, the machine was diskless. Then I found myself in need of converting a pile of 5.25 disks to image files. This was the only machine I had with a floppy controller. But everything I needed would not fit on a single 3.5 diskette. The machine is also very picky on what kind of CD it will boot. To make a long story shorter, I came up with a system to have a lite-weight startup process that then brought up all the additional stuff I needed from CD into a RAM disk (Pentium Pro has 96MB of RAM, it used to maxed out at 128 but a RAM module died a decade or so ago). This allowed me to image the 5.25 diskettes then compress them and write them to 1.44mb. As you can see, there is a use case for a floppy image to boot the Live Environment. But, think it is an edge case. How useful it would it really be to most users? :-) Jerome
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