Hi Eric, > On Jun 2, 2021, at 7:47 AM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > > Hi Jerome, > > if FDIMPLES is specifically used in advanced mode, where > more data has to be processed, I would suggest to consider > automatically enabling support for XMS when XMS is found.
Not really needed. When run by the installer, FDIMPLES does not run FDINST. It just manipulates the package lists and passes those back to the installer. Basically, FDIMPLES is 4 similar (but different) programs all mashed together. The original installer package list editor. A USB stick package list customizer that can alter the BASE and FULL sets on the install media. A front end UI for FDINST. And finally the rarely mentioned, a package analyzer and upgrader. It also includes features to import and export package customization lists and other stuff. > Do you say that the amount of required RAM does not depend on > the number of packages, but on the size of the largest ZIP? How? Yes. Package extraction is handled by FDINST. Exact requirements for it should be directed to Mateusz. I can really only speak to what I’ve observed. Reserving more RAM for FDIMPLES causes FDINST to fail to install really big packages. Eventually, I’d like to find the time to redo FDIMPLES. There are some features regarding multiple repositories and such I’d like to add. Such things would be extremely difficult with it’s current design. Although the original design was fine for the original intent of just “tweaking” the package list for installation. It is not suited very well for all the other things that got thrown into it. Nearly everything would be improved by a re-design. Mainly things like performance and it’s required memory footprint. The current version doesn’t even have mouse support to help keep its footprint down. It really really really needs redone. > >> FDIMPLES was really only designed to modify the package >> list for advanced mode installs. All the the other stuff >> it does and restrictions that were added came later. >> It’s really not designed to do that. >> It really needs to just be redone. > > That sounds tedious. But please explain in more detail. > >> What OS let’s you boot a different OS to perform your install? > > I generally agree, but it is easier for people who do not know > how to use a disk image to make our boot floppy, or are simply > too lazy because they assume DOS is DOS which may seem plausible. > > Maybe the installer could test if it runs on FreeCOM and abort > with a complaint if it is not? Should be easy enough for users > to start FreeCOM and not worth the effort to automate that. The installer used to test for FreeCOM. But without a guaranteed writable filesystem, I didn’t think it was reliable enough. So, at present… When you boot the install media, the installer just runs. If you run SETUP from the command line, it just loads FreeCOM and runs itself under that instance. This takes a second or so. But, the second FreeCOM uses very little memory. This guarantees that the stuff it needs from FreeCOM is present and there is sufficient environment space for the installer. It does have a couple other side effects. But, the installer manages those. During the original creation of the installer, the intent was to make it compatible with lesser shells like MS-DOS 3(ish). But, the extra overhead soon made that pointless. There is some legacy stuff in the installer from that time that will eventually be improved. Just one simple example are things like this: if “%1” == “/help” goto ShowHelp if “%1” == “/HELP” goto ShowHelp can be replaced consolidated with /I to ignore case if /I “%1” == “/help” goto ShowHelp > And as you say, if people load FreeCOM on top of another shell, > maybe even without having XMS drivers, it will severely limit > free RAM, so they better update their config and reboot again. > > Do you require any other FreeDOS specific things apart from > FreeCOM? I assume you require working XMS and CD-ROM drivers, > but not much else, so people could use other DOS boot disks > at their own risk. A good example would be that they already > have some DOS on their harddisk and know how to configure it, > so they want to use that to run our CD installer manually. Yes and no. The only FreeDOS specific requirement I know of is FreeCOM (with a fairly large environment). But, there are numerous tools required by the installer. There aren’t really any extra programs on the CD Boot Floppy. Since, it needs all of them, it uses those versions. Running the installer under another DOS is not really supported and I don’t feel it is worth the effort and time to determine. For example, checking if you can use fdisk from MS-DOS 5, 6, 6.22, PC-DOS 7, OpenDOS and on and on… instead of the FreeDOS version feels like a waste of time to me. If needed, just add a custom CD driver or whatever to the CD boot floppy. > > Regards, Eric > :-) Jerome _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
