Hi Jerome, others, of course suggestions are just suggestions and depend on whether you have time to work on them and what others think :-) Some feedback to you replies...
Given the point "slow boot, slow install, too few apps", I still think Lite should not be too lite and Live should have significantly more (pre-extracted) packages ready. I think games which come on CD often are INSTALL FROM CD, not RUN FROM CD, so being able to remove the Live CD to run apps from CD still seems not that important for me. Also, I think even when the installer THINKS that an easy target drive exists, it should STILL first ask the user before installing DOS (pre-existing C: found) or creating a new partition table from scratch (apparent empty disk). The "no drive writable for DOS" situation is likely to be common in "only Linux or NTFS partitions exist yet" context and the BEST recommendation in that case would be to ask the user to *abort installation, use their pre-existing* *Linux or Windows to resize their OS and add some LBA FAT* partition and then start the installer again :-) Of course it is fine to let the user decide to throw other OS away, but I would display a very clear warning about that first. >> Are tricks like those announced and well-visible during install? > I’ve mentioned it numerous times here and in other venues. It would be important to have such crucial information self- contained inside the CD / USB image, in a readme which will be included in the ZIP but outside the image and advertise it automatically during the install process, I think. Doing something which may or may not be what the user wants, without documenting what is going on, is not what I would advertise as "quick, easy, uncluttered". > It is officially mentioned in only one place... run > “setup /?” or (/h or /help or several other variants) That is a start ;-) >> Also the thing that CTRL+C can either open menu or kick you out? > Like I said, only do it when it is waiting for user input. Do not tell ME, announce it during the install ;-) >> Unless you make a temp file in a small RAMDISK which you should >> have anyway because pipelines in DOS actually are temp files ;-) > > And how would that help logging the partitioning process??? > > Reboot, bye bye log. Display the log, waiting for confirmation, before reboot: Better than only doing things behind the screen or letting each step scroll away while it happens. The user still gets a good summary bundled at one moment of the first half of the install process. Second half can log to target drive. > I have plans for things of this sort and many other improvements. > But all take some amount of time. Only so much of that available. Luckily WHATIS and APROPOS are pre-existing DOS tools :-) Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
