Hi Jerome,
if you do not believe that anybody will fix bugs, why do you even update the FreeDOS distro? Please make at least some published list of all bugs you encounter and discuss it here, too. It CAN happen that people fix bugs, even of other maintainers. What are the new beta fdisk 131 features which default 121 is missing? So... SLICER is something like TAR? A tool to put many small files in one large file and back, uncompressed? In which sense is that better than e.g. XCOPY, combined with some list which packages will require which CPU? > installer detects its running in VirtualBox, passes the i686 tag You should rather use something like CPULEVEL which detects the CPU compatibility, not the brand of the simulator... A general problem with your 720 kB floppy: It is hard for users to create an actual floppy from it. So depending on how widespread 360 kB, 720 kB, 1.2 MB and 1.44 MB drives are on older-than-386 hardware, you should provide disk images for all sizes, for easier DISKCOPY or DD writing. > Sure. But, why can’t the user add what they need? If you use that reasoning: Why on earth write an entire 8086 answer to TAR, with an entirely different archive file format, not compatible to anything else, just to automate something which YOU recommend to do manually? > If I put MORE, CHKDSK, GREP or whatever on the diskette image and left > 2K free, how could a user that needed to put BOBASAPI.SYS know > what (if anything) they remove to fit there text to speech driver? With several very easy ways to save space (remove duplicate kernel, remove duplicate fdisk, less fdisk ini file comments) you will not have to worry about every kilobyte even when you use SOME of the saved space for a few selected additions :-) And you are not seriously implying that there are 8086 CD-ROM or text to speech drivers which would be crucially important for your 720 kB 8086 installer floppy, are you? > That is why there is a Boot Floppy for the CD installer. > The Floppy Edition is not meant to be used to boot then run > a different installer. Hmm okay. I was not aware that the two are so much different that neither is meant to be used in any way with the other. Does the boot floppy for the CD installer contain all the drivers needed for CD / DVD / ISO access, fast access to harddisks, caching etc.? > Probably just pull COUNTRY.SYS in favor of MKEYB. Make sure to check whether MKEYB works on 8086: It might require AT level BIOS functionality. If FDISK, FDAPM and several V8 tools all feature reboot, you clearly do not need FDAPM on 8086 hardware :-) > The Floppy Edition is “a work in progress” > It also has a far wider range of support for different installation scenarios. At the moment, it seems to be very much specialized for 8086, containing barely any support for newer hardware. I agree that it is important to be able to install from different sizes of floppy when you make a floppy distro, though :-) It is hard for users to change disk sizes themselves, as this requires them to have at least 2 drives of suitable sizes, or diskimage related tools for other operating systems. But users who can handle such tools probably do not need floppy distros. Eric ;-) _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
