On Mon, 16 Sep 2019 17:13:42 +0200 Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
> Hi Jon, > > > To answer the question which packages are BASE, check > > > http://www.freedos.org/software/ > > The idea is that BASE has similar functionality to what > you get with a 3 floppy MS DOS installation or with the > DOS mode of Windows 95 or 98. Of course there are very > interesting packages in the other categories, but unless > you have plenty of space, you will not usually want to > install all from all categories! You probably will not > even need everything from BASE, depending on your taste. My question isn't actually what packages are in base. My question is, given the presence of an existing MS-DOS install, what is the minimal set of packages that would need to be unpacked onto the MS-DOS partition *in order to get the package manager running*. Once the package manager is running under MS-DOS, I can use it to pull in any other desired components of FreeDOS, then add a boot option for FreeDOS to GRUB. Do I just need to install the package manager itself, or does it have other dependencie? For instance, does it use batch scripts that require FreeCOM? Does it, in general, require the presence of any FreeDOS components other than itself? > We did have older installers which tried to automatically > insert FreeDOS at places where other MS operating systems > already are present, but there are too many possibilities > to smoothly handle them all and in particular new Windows > versions have too little DOS in them for our installers to > be able to properly edit multi boot related files. So this > is something to be better done by hand. As experienced DOS > user, you will understand how to do it and as human, you > will be able to adjust it to your system :-) Fair enough. > Regarding your user space installer, where would you want to > run it? Inside an existing DOS? Then it would have to leave > the SYS and config / autoexec edit steps to the user, as too > many variants are possible. It would basically just be some > way to run the package manager with user-specified source and > target locations and a wildcard list of packages to install. > > Maybe some experienced package manager user can give us the > syntax for doing exactly that with very little typing :-) > > You would neither want to FDISK nor FORMAT when doing those > steps from an already existing DOS, obviously, to keep that. The userspace installer is a separate idea from the "within DOS" installer, and would run from within a multitasking OS such as *nix or Windows (modern NT-kernel Windows, not DOS-kernel Windows). The primary component would be a *nix or Win32/64 implementation of the FreeDOS package manager, which would unpack FreeDOS packages selected by the user to the mountpoint of a specified FAT partition or disk image. Optional functions could include writing a boot sector and providing a default autoexec.bat / config.sys when there is not an existing DOS installation on the disk / image provided, and potentially even creating a new disk image or partitioning a disk. If the above optional features were included, it present the user with the following menu when run: "Welcome to the FreeDOS installer for Linux! Do you want to: 1) Manage FreeDOS packages on a FAT partition mounted on this machine? 2) Create a FreeDOS disk image for use in a virtual machine? 3) Install FreeDOS to an unused disk or partition on this machine?" _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
