Although there has not been a lot of feed back on what to do with the excessively (nearly 1GB) BonusCD in T2210, I think the majority of feedback has been in favor of splitting off the development packages from the BonusCD on to their own DevelCD.
And, we should do this instead of dropping packages for several reasons. The main reason is for the convenience of users who may be on older hardware or without network support. Those users might experience some difficulty getting all of the programs they need into their “DOS” machine. It has also been suggested to provide a “Developer Oriented” release of FreeDOS. One that is specifically geared towards DOS development. Another suggestion has been to just slim down FreeDOS to basic DOS. Leaving it up to the user to find, download and install what they want after the OS has been installed. Personally, I don’t think dropping everything except basic DOS is the way to go. I think doing so would be off-putting to most “New” users. Although they would have a fully functioning DOS, it really would not do much on it’s own. It would require them to go get other software or games and create a usage barrier that most would just uninstall the OS an move on to something else. Most “modern” operating systems either provide numerous bonus software. They do this by either providing it on their release media or through an easy method of downloading and installing software. There are many examples of this in the Linux world. For example, openSUSE does both. It provides thousands of extra packages on it’s release DVD and also connects to a download center to provide them. Although the next major version of FDIMPLES will most likely support online repositories, it is being written %100 in assembly and not coming soon. Even once the new version of FDIMPLES is ready, general networking support under FreeDOS is very limited. This leaves us with providing additional packages on the release media for the near future. I’m unsure of the best solution to the problem. I don’t think providing a Developer Oriented skew of the OS is a good idea. With the LegacyCD, LiveCD, LiteUSB, FullUSB and Floppy Edition, I think we provide to many OS skews already. Since we want to support a wide range of DOS hardware, we really need to keep the Floppy and CD version around. We could probably drop the LiteUSB for several reasons. I think it’s direct usage is very limited and most users probably opt for the FullUSB version. Also, every “how-to” and video I’ve seen online that shows how to create a bootable USB stick for FreeDOS uses the LiveCD to create it. However, occasionally, I do see questions on how to write one of the USB media to a flash drive. We could also probably drop the LegacyCD as well. There is only a very limited range of early hardware that cannot boot the LiveCD. But, it can boot the LegacyCD. That hardware will most likely also have a floppy drive. If their CD drive is supported by the drivers, they could boot using the “Floppy Boot Image” included in the download zip. Once that is done, they can install from CD. So where does that leave us? I think there are at least two practical solutions at present. First, split off all development related packages that are on the BonusCD onto a new DevelCD. This would require very little work. The Release Build Environment (RBE) is already capable of creating multiple extra package discs images. However, I will probably want to add some functionality to use specific labels for them. At present, it would generate BonusCD0 and BonusCD1. It will not be hard to update the RBE to use custom labels for the discs. This first solution implies we may eventually have a GamesCD, UtilsCD and others as well. If we go down this path, perhaps we should start separating some other packages on to their own media as well. The second option is to go big. On this path, we could do away with the BonusCD. We could keep the LiveCD as-is. But, we could also provide a LiveDVD. I do kind of like the idea of providing as much quality software as we can on a single disc. On this path we may not need the USB versions. Most users tend to use programs like Rufus to create bootable USB drives from the LiveCD. I don’t know if there is a good solution to this issue. But, I am certain we can not provide a "950Mb BonusCD.” If you have any comments or other suggestions on the problem, please speak up. :-) Jerome _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
