Hello all, Some of you might recall a smallish 8086-tailored FreeDOS distribution I did some time ago, called Svarog86. Today, I present Svarog386 - a much more generic FreeDOS distribution, targeted to 386+ computers.
Why would I need to create my own distro, instead of relying on vanilla FreeDOS, you might ask. As much as I find FreeDOS a truly amazing project, I feel it is a little constrained - mostly because it needs to be extra careful about legalese. Also, it has a quite long release cycle (which is nothing abnormal, given the very low DOS activity these days). Still, these two reasons led me to the creation of Svarog386. It's a 'rolling release' distribution, which means that there is no versioning of the distribution. Whenever a change is made, the distribution ISO is immediately updated. Once installed, one is supposed to use the FDNPKG package manager to keep the system always up to date (either through online package repositories, or - for out-of-grid systems - through a newer version of the Svarog386 CD that would act as a local packages repository). The package-inclusion policy is also much less strict than the one enforced by FreeDOS. Basically, Svarog386 can include potentially anything that is free to use (no cost), actually useful, and of reasonable quality, as long as it all fits on a single CD. Finally, Svarog386 doesn't come with an installer. It's a bootable CD that provides the user with means to install whatever he needs on his hard disk, but there is no hand-holding whatsoever - it's up to the user to partition his disk (with FDISK), format it (with FORMAT), and make it bootable (with SYS). Those of you who followed my FreeDOS packaging work these last years know about the "all_cd.iso" file that I was updating from time to time on iBiblio. Svarog386 is exactly that, simply I decided to run it as a separate product from now on (meaning I am unlikely to do much FreeDOS packaging in the future, but of course I'd be more than happy if FreeDOS used FDNPKG as its core updating tool, along with all the packages I created during past years). http://svarog386.viste.fr cheers, Mateusz ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mobile security can be enabling, not merely restricting. Employees who bring their own devices (BYOD) to work are irked by the imposition of MDM restrictions. Mobile Device Manager Plus allows you to control only the apps on BYO-devices by containerizing them, leaving personal data untouched! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/304595813;131938128;j _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
