Hello :-)
I've counted that the two images of FreeDOS 1.4, live and bonus, amount to 355567 sectors. This is still within the realm of possibility to fit it all on one CD, as 80 minute CDs can hold 360k sectors. What influenced this decision to make 2 CDs and not one when one?
Looking at the docs (PS: why call 1200k and 1440k "120m" and "144m")... https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.4/ LegacyCD 262M download, 267 MB ISO (uses "legacy" ElTorito boot) LiveCD 280M download, 302 MB ISO (uses new thing, bootable ramdisk?) BonusCD 383M download, 393 MB ISO LiteUSB 17M download, 19 MB used FullUSB 638M download, 657 MB used However, space for installation is 20/30 MB plain without/with sources and 275/450 MB full without/with sources, according to the readme. That number only is plausible if it does not include the Bonus CD packages? https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.4/report.html I see ctmouse still is "286+", but there should be an assembly-time option for 8086. I vaguely remember some forgotten 186 code years ago? I had not expected keyb to be 286+ with mkeyb being all CPU: KEYB is supposed to have an XT compatible mode, while MKEYB needs int 15.4f: AT model 3x9, XT2, XT286, convertible, PS/2 or any non-ancient BIOS. Also, SHSUCDX comes in two versions: 8086 and 386+, the latter being 0.1 kB smaller, so I would not say it ALWAYS requires 386 CPU... As we include 286+ ZIP and 386+ UNZIP, how do 8086 installs work? What does OTHER CPU for FDNET mean? The Bonus CD is required for the categories boot tools, development, disk untilities, editors, gui and utilities. Large Bonus packages: utility dosview 19 MB gui opengem 19 MB editor vim 12 MB ...and multiple development Bonus packages: Watcom Forth 23 MB Watcom C/C++ 30 MB SQLite 25 MB Perl 26 MB i16 new libraries 30 MB binutils 10 MB etc. > 55 MB total FreePascal 34 MB FreeBASIC 19 MB (plus 4 MB help) DoJS 42 MB Note that DJGPP is absent from the distro at the moment. You can collect 100s of MB of DJGPP packages, which would be a problem, but you may also include a small subset to compile e.g. DOSFSCK. So... the current distro misses a few 8086 compatibility chances and happens to be small enough to barely fit a plus size CD-R/RW. Interestingly, the INSTALLED packages would easily fit a CD, too. Of course you would need a different method of installing from "installed on a live CD" to fixed disk IF you want users to have more choice than just a fixed "FDISK FORMAT XCOPY SYS" script. On the other hand, you would not longer have to install some (which? I do not see a list in the report?) packages from ZIP to RAMDISK when using the Live CD. How much RAM do you need to use EVERYTHING excluding Bonus with the Live CD, by the way? I personally think we could EITHER make the live CD fully live and pre-installed (few packages will need writeable directories). OR we could offer a combined live-and-bonus CD as download. Given that the FullUSB download already offers exactly that, the main packages and the bonus packages in a single download, I would say there is little need for a combined CD. People can easily burn TWO CD if they prefer CD instead of USB and the required download sizes will be very similar either way. Also, it saves a bit of bandwidth if people have to decide if they want to burn both CD and burning is more reliable if you do not use the full capacity of the largest CD type. Jerome also mentions that point. So *I would suggest to keep the ISO downloads two-part* :-) It also allows us to add packages without removing others, as Jerome just pointed out, too. But *I also suggest to make the Live CD fully pre-installed* and/or document RAM and write requirements of Live CD use. In addition, I would suggest some 8086 compatibility updates and an update to the README to list Bonus space requirements. Best regards, Eric PS: I think Rugxulo has some experience with required space for useful subsets of Watcom C or DJGPP. Suggestions please. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
