Hi Jerome, Laaca, others, Given that I have verbose thoughts about Laaca's review and your replies to it, I hope you have some time. Thank you for reading.
> Many people run FreeDOS on bare metal... > > However, the overwhelming vast majority of users do not do that. I guess "many" are still many enough to add a nice UHDD cache to make the install significantly faster. Also, try something like DIR /S > NUL to pre-cache directory data at some early moment. As I never use DOSLFN or LFNDOS, I do not know whether they have the need to become "better"? I think UDVD2 already is quite nice, not sure what "ASPI driver" is about, maybe USB storage drivers? A task switcher does not sound like a core feature given that the "overwhelming vast majority" rund DOS inside one or more windows inside some other operating systems anyway. We have TriDOS. Hmm. It is good that the CD contains separate app package zips, but it is still a good suggestion to pre-install MORE in the Live CD area, so FEWER of them have to be unzipped while entering Live CD mode. All packages which are pre-installed to a directory on the CD 1. make the CD larger but 2. do not have to be unzipped (slow) into a ramdisk (where space is limited) :-) Please DISABLE swapfiles in your installer cwsdpmi configuration! You could only swap to ramdisk until the target drive is formatted and ramdisk is too valuable to be used for swap if you ask me. As far as I remember, we have package managers with built-in unzip library. Not sure whether they show progress bars BUT I think a progress info like "N out of N APPS unpacked" will be sufficient to at least get an idea of the unpack progress. Note that 7zip WILL give a progress indication and is part of the distro anyway :-) Have not compared RAM use to unzip though. As you explicitly want to support people with low (HOW low? Do not overdo it!) amounts of RAM, I think it is again better to have more pre-installed and fewer live-ramdisk-unzipped packages for the Live CD. Even when this means you can squeeze fewer app packages into 700 MB. You now only have 20 MB and 600 MB zip download categories and separate Lite, Live, Legacy and Full versions. Lite ONLY exists for USB and I think it is TOO small. Basically nobody will be limited to a 32 MB USB stick. Better make the "lite" version a BIT larger with more non-BASE apps. Like 55 MB or 110 MB or something like that :-) The Live version only exists for CD, why not for USB? And why do Live and Full (USB) or Legacy (CD) have to be separate downloads? Also, why not call it "Full CD", like "Full USB"? The purpose of a Live CD is that you can ENJOY APPS without having to install the operating system in question. If you only include BASE apps, you should call it "boot disk" ;-) > Perhaps more software will be pre-extracted on the CD and > not made “active” on a RAM disk in 1.3-FINAL. However, this > has some trade-offs. You really can’t remove the CD... It is still better to have (more) pre-extracted apps :-) > Some programs cannot be run on a read-only filesystem. Which? Probably only a few apps would complain about that. You could provide a SIMPLE batch script which, when there is enough RAM, can be run by the user to copy all pre-extracted apps into the ramdisk and update PATH. Then they can remove the CD and still use all apps. But I think it is quite okay that a Live CD wants to remain inserted into the CD drive. I would like to hear opinions about FDISK, XFDISK, SPFDISK, AEFDISK and RANISH partition managers from *everybody* :-) They were all part of the 1.2 distro after all. > Regardless, RC4 does a much better job than RC3 to auto partition > blank hard disks. On a clean system or VM, most users will no > longer even see FDISK. To ME that sounds like "it will auto destroy ALL your data when it accidentally mis-detects the disk as being empty, without even asking you first!" :-o Please clarify. > The easiest way to run in advanced mode is to exit the > installer and run “setup adv”. But, ... CTRL+C ... Are tricks like those announced and well-visible during install? Also the thing that CTRL+C can either open menu or kick you out? >> FDCONFIG.SYS. It is important because on the tested notebook (Dell >> Latitude 610) the first two options did not work for me... Which options are the first two? Probably those with EMM386? Is it possible to use more "humble" default options to fix them? > There really is no way to store a log of “the whole process”. > Anything prior to having a formatted hard disk will be lost. Unless you make a temp file in a small RAMDISK which you should have anyway because pipelines in DOS actually are temp files ;-) I support the request that HELP offers a README or INSTALL file, for example outlining the step by step phases of install, with info which are optional, which are required and at which moments the user can make which rough type of choices, so people know what expects them and get an idea where they got stuck in case they do get stuck at some point, by bugs or by unwise choices. Regarding "when a package is installed, add it to help": That is exactly why each package has a FREEDOS / DOC / PACKAGENAME directory for documentation ;-) And please do not make things unnecessarily complex by pulling the FREEDOS / HELP / file collection apart. Just install the whole htmlhelp anyway. Also, HELP / already is where PACKAGENAME.LANGUAGE text files belong. Maybe it would be a funny idea to have an APROPOS tool which greps keywords in FREEDOS / APPINFO / *.LSM description lines and (!) *.LSM file names :-) >> ad 5) In harddisk mode and live CD mode must be easily available >> utilities for system informations, disk/file recovery utilities I do not think that a DOS Live CD could be any decent replacement for the already great Linux based disks with GPARTED, TESTDISK, PHOTOREC and similar tools. But I do think there should be some more apps in the Live CD in general to make it more USEFUL. It is not fun to occupy an entire CD or USB stick in the hope of getting a real Live CD and end up with not much more than what you would get with a single boot floppy. Actually I have tested the last claim in my BREZEL floppy set long ago: The first floppy contained 50+ BASE and 40+ non-BASE apps, NLS and htmlhelp. The second floppy contained CPI, circa 30 additional apps, including a few closed source ones (UNRAR, TE, the HIEW hex editor, the LIST text file viewer etc.), more readme files, German htmlhelp or 12 command.com languages :-) The third disk, finally, just contained a ZIP with DOC / *.* >> Also some picture viewer and converter should be available even in the >> basic installations. Mpxplay also could be also in basic installations. > Using programs like FDIMPLES it is not difficult to install such things > afterwards. I support the suggestion to have media viewers in "more default" categories of what is installed, and pre-installed in the Live CD. Whether this should include paint programs - I have no opinion. I do NOT support the suggestion to move archivers into a separate directory. Maybe unless they consist of so many individual files that they would make a mess of BIN, DOC, APPINFO and HELP. For comparison, at the moment, DOG (shell, 1 file per command), Arachne (browser), Emacs, FreeBASIC, GhostScript, OpenXP, Lynx browser, Pacific C, Pegasus Mail, SETEDIT and various games are better off in their own directories, while several 100 single executable files can nicely stay together in the BIN directory because you would not want PATH to become too long in DOS. Apps may need few extra files, maybe a BAT or DLL or CFG file, but the average of files per app in my FreeDOS BIN directory is below 1.4, to give you an impression. I would NOT create extra directories for apps just because they dare to require 3 files. > Simply issue the command “type ..\pkg-info\senet.lsm” See the above suggestion to make an APROPOS batch script ;-) Actually it turns out that BREZEL already has one which simply is: @whatis /a %1 %2 %3 The whatis tool looks in FREEDOS / HELP and FREEDOS / APPINFO, with hardcoded fallbacks and respecting the HELPPATH and PAGER environment variables. Robert Platt has written tool & batch. Note that it creates a database file, so do that with all the apps installed on the Live CD before putting that on the CD. > Yes. Far to many things get installed into %DOSDIR%\BIN. This is intentional AND useful. See the explanation above. Regards, Eric PS: My /usr/bin contains almost 5000 files, but with that my PATH is less than 250 bytes. In Linux, that is. But it is fine to move complex, MULTI-FILE DOS apps to separate directories. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
