Hi Jerome, to answer some specific parts of your mail:
Yes, it is useful to have two different boot style CD
images and not only the more compatible variant plus
a boot floppy image. Because the latter would mean
that people which could boot CD only in the less
common style would need a floppy drive to boot some
special floppy which in turn boots the common style
CD "manually", but not everybody with an old CD boot
BIOS automatically has a floppy drive to boot this
workaround :-)
And no, to answer the other question, it does not
sound very useful to me that you can install floppy
edition style from the CD, even when it only is an
easter egg.
So: LiveCD yes, LegacyCD yes, additional boot floppy
images beyond those on the CD itself used by the BIOS
to boot no? And as you know, I suggest having a nice
BASE plus some extras set of things pre-installed on
the LiveCD, without first having to unpack them to a
RAMDISK. Most BASE apps do not need to be copied to
a writeable drive to work, so precious RAMDISK space
can be saved by running directly from the CD.
Also, regarding some earlier question on this list,
I think it would be nice to have the bootable USB
"live stick" pre-installed in similar ways. This
lets users start to enjoy DOS immediately without
needing this "use a partition manager to create a
second FAT partition on the stick in remaining space
and push the installer to install to D:" trick :-)
I agree that USB boot support may not always let
you write to the stick, but then again it helps
to have more pre-installed DOS apps on the stick,
so people have to install less into some RAMDISK.
We should expect DOS users to be able to realize
whether or not writing to USB fails on their PC.
There should be a warning about which drive is RAMDISK,
so people are not disappointed to lose data THERE.
Last but not least, some mails mentioned FDISK
problems which do not happen with 512 MB or larger
virtual computer drives, but with smaller ones,
such as 500 MB so I wonder whether this actually
some FDISK automatic LBA decision gone wrong?
The limits for various CHS schemes are in the
500 to 530 MB range and around 8 to 8.5 GB.
It would be nice to have a tool for popular OS
which extends the boot partition to the size of
the stick when using a DOS USB boot image, but
that takes effort, so I think a flat diskimage
which requires a stick of at least 150% of the
space actually filled with installer data will
be most universal: People can use any diskimage
writer of their choice to "install" it, which
avoids questions like whether RUFUS etc. would
understand contents well enough to tune them?
Regards, Eric
PS: I agree that CoreBoot or SeaBIOS as base of
a CSM (or whatever the acronym was) to get BIOS
style services on UEFI systems would be cool :-)
Regarding a pre-configured Linux which simply
boots into DOSEMU2 or similar, those exist. But
you could even use DOS in DOSBOX-X in HX in DOS.
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