Hi Jon,
FreeDOS supports 28 bit LBA, so depending on whether you have BIOS bugs which require lower limits, you could use any size of harddisk as long as all partitions used by FreeDOS end within the first 128 GB ;-) Not sure whether Windows 95 supports LBA. MS DOS 6 does not, but it does not support FAT32 either: You could put the FAT16 disks in the first 8 GB (reachable without LBA) and add FAT32 and other partitions for the other systems after that. Note that if the ISO does not fit on your partition, then copying all ZIPs from the ISO on your partition and then unzipping them would not fit either. But the good news is that the BASE system is a lot smaller and there is no need to install the sources, in particular not of many packages at the same time. So you could just mount the ISO in your Linux and then manually unzip a few ZIPs of your choice to your DOS partition to use very little FreeDOS disk space. I agree that mounting the ISO in DOS is not a good choice if you want to keep your partition sizes as they are now. To answer the question which packages are BASE, check > http://www.freedos.org/software/ The idea is that BASE has similar functionality to what you get with a 3 floppy MS DOS installation or with the DOS mode of Windows 95 or 98. Of course there are very interesting packages in the other categories, but unless you have plenty of space, you will not usually want to install all from all categories! You probably will not even need everything from BASE, depending on your taste. The theoretical minimum would be the kernel and FreeCOM command.com plus of course SYS (I even have a Linux Perl script to create artificial boot sectors without having to boot DOS first, but that may need extra manual steps) but in practice you want to add at least a few drivers such as HIMEMX and CTMOUSE and for example FreeDOS EDIT. The SHSUCDX driver and CTMOUSE are small and effective, but I can imagine that you prefer to keep your old low level CD ROM driver on top of that, if your drive is old. > http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/group-base.html We did have older installers which tried to automatically insert FreeDOS at places where other MS operating systems already are present, but there are too many possibilities to smoothly handle them all and in particular new Windows versions have too little DOS in them for our installers to be able to properly edit multi boot related files. So this is something to be better done by hand. As experienced DOS user, you will understand how to do it and as human, you will be able to adjust it to your system :-) The only FreeDOS things which need more work than unzipping packages into a common FreeDOS subdirectory are the two boot config / autoexec files (which you should customize anyway) and the initial boot process: You need the kernel.sys file to be in the root directory and you need a boot sector at a place where your boot menu can load it. In your case, this will probably be a file opened by GRUB, generated either by running our SYS with special options or even by my old Perl script, but for normal users, it would just be put into the boot drive boot sector by running SYS without options, which will very likely damage your other boot menu options. You probably know how to install and if necessary repair those. For the rest, even your command.com can be in any location as long as your config / autoexec points to where it is. Regarding your user space installer, where would you want to run it? Inside an existing DOS? Then it would have to leave the SYS and config / autoexec edit steps to the user, as too many variants are possible. It would basically just be some way to run the package manager with user-specified source and target locations and a wildcard list of packages to install. Maybe some experienced package manager user can give us the syntax for doing exactly that with very little typing :-) You would neither want to FDISK nor FORMAT when doing those steps from an already existing DOS, obviously, to keep that. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
