In answer to the question of whether you need to continue providing iso
images in the archive, For what it's worth, my opinion is: yes,
absolutely, and here's why.
99 percent of the time, when someone comes to the dos archive to grab a
dos distro, they're downloading the iso image. Why? because it's
simple, convenient, and quick. Folks see the ISO image, and download
the image, thereupon obtaining everything there is to obtain for that
particular release in one fell swoop with no fuss, and no muss. The
image is ready for use, either for burning onto physical media, or by
mounting under your os of choice, with everything wrapped up in a single
easy to use package without having to do a thing to make it happen.
It doesn't get any simpler than that.
If you want folks to try and/or use dos, you need to make it easy for
them to do so, and the ISO images do exactly that.
I personally think dropping them from the archives would be doing the
project and the future users a grave disservice.
Of course, that's just the opinion of a single user, and you are of
course free to do as you wish, but I'd wager that if you do drop them,
you'll be fielding multiple questions a month from new users asking why
there isn't an image available for download.
Sometimes, the latest version isn't what the users want/need, and having
the version they do want/need in a format that is simple and easy to
operate on/with is just the thing.
ISO images are the first thing I look for when downloading new operating
systems I want to try, and I'm sure it's similar for plenty of others.
On 6/22/2025 9:14 PM, Jerome Shidel via Freedos-user wrote:
Earlier today FDRepo was deployed to the Official Download and Update
Repositories on IBIBLIO.
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/
That transition has gone very well. But, there are a few more things
to work out.
For many years (and prior to me managing the repos), the repositories
have provided an ISO image that
contains the latest version of the packages in that repository. FDRepo
is currently configured to only provide
an ISO for the 1.4 and latest repositories. Those ISO images are very
large and obviously require a large amount
of bandwidth to provide.
To me, it seems like a big waste of resources. Resources we are
graciously provided for free.
Do we really need to keep supplying them?
Thank you for your thoughts on this.
:-)
Jerome
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