On Jul 2, 2025, at 11:00 PM, Lutalli via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
Oh, if the installation might take that long then maybe installing on a VM on the PC then copying all the files is better indeed.
Honestly, I’d recommend doing it that way.
Compression was a trade off.
Either cut the number of diskettes in half and save some time for most users. Therefore making most users happier.
Or, having twice as many disks and save a lot of time for a few users. Therefore making most users unhappy for needing so many floppies.
Can only pick one. Unfortunately, someone won’t be happy.
Even still, we get complaints it installs slow even on faster hardware (like a PentiumPro). Things like “it’s slow, it took 3 times longer to install than MS-DOS 6.2” … But, it’s nearly 4 times the size. So, that is actually faster. LOL.
Good luck.
:-)
There is a 3rd possibility. It could be an issue with VASK regarding CGA. It is possible that not being at least EGA, it may have a problem. Like I said, almost no testing on Sub-EGA hardware.
But honestly, you are probably better off installing to a standard VM like VirtualBox or QEMU. Creating a bootable floppy disk and copying over only the program and files you want.
I say that because the Floppy edition files are compressed. This cuts the number of Diskettes in half and reduces the install time on 386+ machines. But, decompression is CPU intensive and it takes longer on sub-386 hardware. It can be agonizingly slow on an 8086. I’ve heard sometimes 4 or more hours to install.
As for installing by hand using the Floppy Edition. Maybe.
The installer does a couple things on the FE. It partitions, formats, sets the active partition and transfers system boot files to the hard drive. Then looks at what hardware you are running and creates a few tags. It then runs SLICERX with those tags. SLICERX then extracts the files relevant to your system. Finally, the installer adjusts the config files (FDAUTO.BAT and FDCONFIG.SYS) for your installation.
If you perform all of the steps the installer performs, you could theoretically use SLICERX to install the OS files. Obviously, You would need to provide it with the appropriate tags.
But, SLICERX uses a similar method to read the keyboard. So, if that is where the problem you are experiencing during a normal install, you would get stuck when it prompts for the next disk.
However, if you were to copy all of the SLICERX archive files to a directory on the hard drive, you could extract from there and not be prompted for disk changes.
Definitely not the easiest way to get FreeDOS installed.
Not sure what you mean by “recompile the source files and write them to an IMG”
Thanks for all the replies!
Well I'm not sure if I should contact PocketDOS's developer to ask him to check if it's a bug in the BIOS implementation (maybe I will). And I don't know how to debug this myself...
As a debugging step, it would be interesting to boot the PocketDOS VM
with the FreeDOS Floppy Distro boot floppy and use F8 to turn
singlestepping ON. Accept the "SHELL=COMMAND.COM" line, but do not
accept the "\FDAUTO.BAT" line. You should get put into a DOS prompt.
That at least demonstrates that FreeDOS will boot on PocketDOS.
This is indeed interesting. After entering the DOS prompt I feel like I get more control over the whole thing.
I'm not gonna try manually running the installation process yet, but is there a way to modify the source code and recompile it to an IMG file? I'm thinking, if that's possible, I could probably skip that prompt (and maybe other similar ones too) by simply editing the code. Hi there,
I'm trying to install FreeDOS 1.4 (Floppy Edition) on an HP Jornada 720 using PocketDOS. The installer runs but I get stuck at "Do you want to proceed [Y,N]?". There the cursor is still blinking but I can't type anything. Same problem occurs with FreeDOS 1.3.
Also check this thread from the HPC:Factor forum. Does anyone probably know what is causing this and how to fix it?
Here's another question asked in this thread: Is there a command line setup flag to disable the graphical part of the
installer, and only run in text mode? Or what setup flag in the
"StepByStep" mode controls that?
Thanks in advance! Lutalli
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