Hi Jon,
for your advanced multi boot project, you could boot FreeDOS from floppy and use the SHSU... drivers to open the ISO file of the install CD as if it were a CD drive, after using your Windows or Debian to copy the ISO to your DOS/Win95 harddisk. The ISO has plenty of ZIPs to use with the package manager, but you will be unable to see most of the apps which do the install process, as those are in a boot disk image inside a separate area of the ISO ;-) You can manually use the package manager to install the FreeDOS packages of your choice to some FreeDOS specific directory on your harddisk and you can use special options of SYS to create a FreeDOS boot sector file and then add that file to your boot menu, such as GRUB, instead of using SYS the normal way which would overwrite your MS DOS or Win95 boot sectors. I would NOT use the normal install script, as that does not have specific precautions to behave well in a system such as your PC which has already 2 MS "DOS" style operating systems installed. As you mentioned, you can use fdauto.bat and fdconfig.sys for FreeDOS: When our kernel finds a fdconfig.sys, it will prefer that over config.sys, so you can keep configurations separate. In your fdconfig.sys, you can then set up the SHELL line such that FreeDOS will use FreeCOM command.com with fdauto.bat as alternative to autoexec.bat, again allowing separate configs. Again, you should set up those things manually, because the normal installer is likely to damage your MS DOS config etc. You will normally only need the "base" subset of packages and you could just clone a floppy based distro if you do not want to use a package manager. However, the package manager should be able to do package groups without having to select them one by one. Or just use a command.com FOR loop to unzip a group of ZIP files with packages: This will not have any extra comfort (package managers check dependencies and run pre / post install scripts etc.) but it will get close enough to get started :-) As a really old starting point, you could check out the files on the 2.88 MB double sized "Rugxulo" 2008 floppy and xcopy those, without having to use any package management at all: https://www.auersoft.eu/soft/mixed/ Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
