Hi there, On Mon, 23 Sep 2024, Orson Yancey via Freedos-user wrote:
... It would be helpful to novices, like myself, if on the Download FreeDos 1.3 page, if there was a link to some information on how to write images to various media.
Maybe there could be a little bit more in the README included with the downloaded archives, but I guess this is the sort of thing which would be better on the wiki. As you've probably seen the wiki has been down for a couple of months after a spam attack. (Incidentally I'd be very happy to help if anyone wants to drop me a line about it. The message might be rejected, but don't worry - I'll still see it.)
It would be helpful to have a compiled list of many programs that could be used to write images of FreeDOS to various media, i.e. to CD/DVD, flash drives (USB Sticks), and diskettes. ...
I'd be surprised if there weren't already something along those lines in the wiki but my feeling is that any such list is likely to be what they call 'brittle', in that new utilities appear and old ones become outdated/forgotten/unsupported, no matter whether they're commercial or open source. Far better in my view would be something explaining what's involved in the process of writing a boot device and how to go about searching for tools which can do that. Sure, there's no reason to forbid making a list of well known tools in the wiki - for example it's hard to imagine that 'dd' will go away anytime soon - but it's much better to understand what you're doing than to point and shoot while following some recipe. If something goes wrong when you're in the middle of a complex recipe and you don't understand what's going on, then short of starting from scratch with the same recipe, which may fail again, you have little chance of recovering without help.
These image programs could be listed by which operating systems the image writing programs run under, listing from Windows 2000 to the latest version Windows.
And Windows 95. :) And MacOS, Linux, and FreeBSD, and ... :)
I do understand that Rufus is big in the Linux community ...
I've been using Linux for decades but until reading your message I'd never heard of Rufus, so I searched for it. I don't know if the Rufus that I found is the one you mean, but the one I found is Windows only: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#user-content-Do_you_plan_to_port_Rufus_to_LinuxMac_OSSome_other_OS I'm not saying that the Rufus I found is no use, but it's no use to me because it's generally trivial to write an image to a boot device on a Linux box. While it's probably a little less trivial to produce that image in the first place, for FreeDOS images somebody did it for you. Oh - please let me take this opportunity to shout "THANKS!" for that.
I have not been able to determine whether Rufus will write images to diskettes.
What little I read told me it's just USB sticks. In the Linux world we're spoilt by having the raw devices exposed in the filesystem, so that a simple tool like 'dd' can just write an image to something in /dev/ whether it be a floppy, USB stick, SD card, hard disc, whatever. There are issues with some of the technologies for optical discs which mean that a simple write process isn't sufficient but that's a problem with the technology really, not with the OS and tools. Of course the tools do exist to write optical devices under Linux, but my DVD writer hasn't seen much action since we've had USB sticks of reasonable sizes. It's a lot more convenient all round to use flash memory. There are, believe it or not, still businesses which use floppies, so I do write the odd floppy now and again. Thesedays I mostly use a Greaseweazle. I wish forty years ago I'd known even a quarter of what I've learned about floppies in the past couple of years. :/
Don't laugh, but I have been running only MS-DOS machines and Windows XP machines.
The last Windows version that I worked on for a client was Windows XP. The client had bought a CNC profiling machine. Think of a thing which in about fifteen minutes can cut into little pieces a sheet of steel which is ten metres long, three metres wide, and four inches thick. Well a couple of years ago they had some problems with it, and called me in. Yep, it was running Windows XP. I told them to ask for their money back (about a hundred grand) but the supplier already went bust. Imagine some kid using a CNC plasma cutter to write rude words in four inch plate. A couple more rules in their firewall ensured that XP at least couldn't talk to the internet any more. Then I reinstalled it. Production resumed. Nobody laughed. Well... a couple of the guys on the shop floor did, but nobody who could sign a cheque.
... in the process of setting up some Linux machines. I hope to soon have Linux Lite and MX linux running on some early Pentium IV's.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/hacker-boots-linux-on-intels-first-ever-cpu/ :) Kudos to you for not wasting old tech, but Linux won't run on 32 bit CPUs for ever. My desktop Linux box has been running on RPi for some years. I use a remote machine for hosting my home directory, so my desktop is totally silent and it uses, oh, about ten watts.
... would like to run FreeDOS over the long term.
It seems like you and I are starting the FreeDOS journey at around the same time. I've used it just a few times in the last twenty years for odd jobs but I've been very cautious about using it for anything which involves making money. I support businesses which use MS-DOS machines to run their day-to-day operations and I'm absolutely terrified of the potential to screw up an entire business by something like changing an operating system from MS-DOS to FreeDOS for no good reason. However, there might be a good reason coming up soon and I need to prepare for that if it happens. Basically I'm running out of old machines but one of the less old machines won't run the software I want it to run and I don't know why. I also need to handle PCI expansion cards more sanely e.g. for serial ports. Debugging MS-DOS without the source isn't my idea of a useful way of spending what little time I have left on this planet so I want to use FreeDOS with my DOS software. That will mean quite a lot more education for me (and probably some sleepless nights, but I'm only really happy when I'm learning:). -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
