On Tue, 30 Mar 2021 at 15:02, Adam Nielsen via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > > Even today, where is NT lite from Microsoft? > > Do you mean Windows PE? AFAIK that's available for free, even though > it's not open source.
I don't think so, no. PE is a limited live runtime Windows for booting off external media. I took "NT Lite" as a reference to NLite: https://www.nliteos.com/ ... i.e. the ability for the end-user to choose what they want included in Windows, and not to install (or at least to later remove) things they don't want. I have a test machine with Windows Thin PC on. This is the "thin-client", allegedly cut-down version of Windows 7, and it's still in active support – the last edition of W7 to have that status. It still has a bunch of junk preinstalled and you can't remove it. It's rather disappointing -- it is bloated and sluggish on an Atom with HT & 2GB RAM. > Microsoft doesn't really care any more about the OS. Its market share > is shrinking because the world is changing, which is why they > practically give away Windows 10 for free now. Agreed. The killer product in the MS portfolio is, as it has been for decades, Outlook + Exchange Server. Horrible broken email client that it is, it's the market leader by a long way, and it can do things no rival can do so well. MS no longer care if you run Office on Windows, Office on Win10, Web Outlook on a Chromebook or whatever, a remote-desktop session from some past-it old Pentium 1 box -- it doesn't matter. They still get the CAL revenues whichever way. > The threat *was* real many years ago when EFI and Secure Boot first > came out. Since then every computer I've used has had both EFI and > Secure Boot, and on every single one of them I had no problem just > switching it off and booting Linux. Microsoft isn't really that > interested any more in Secure Boot given the shrinking market share > of PCs. Secure Boot can only be disabled on x86 UEFI machines. For instance, it is immutably enabled on MS' own ARM-powered computers. > First you say you want SATA and USB support removed, but then you are > saying it must run on a modern motherboard? Which is it, you can't > have both! :-D Like I said, a deeply confused message... > I think you'd be surprised how many motherboard firmware updates still > require you to boot off a USB stick into - wait for it - FreeDOS, in > order to reflash the EEPROM. As of today, I don't think I have yet > owned a PC that has never booted some form of DOS to reflash its > EFI/BIOS chip. Maybe soon it will become one of those things you need > Windows for, but for the moment it's still something I have been able > to do without Windows. Sadly, yes, Windows *is* common for this now. However some ROM firmware can now read the BIOS update file straight off FAT-formatted USB (even a Windows self-extracting archive) and apply it to themselves, all insite the CMOS Setup tool. This is my favourite way: no OS at all required. > I've never heard of DOS or FreeDOS running natively on the Pi It can't. This is a question regularly asked by people who do not understand the differences between different CPU architectures. You can't run classic MacOS on a MIPS computer, or SGI IRIX on PowerPC, or Solaris on an ARM computer, and you can't run DOS on an ARM. But the OP seems not to fully understand these differences. -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
