Hi all, I cleaned up and improved the config / autoexec of the 1.0 preview fdbasecd of 3 august, both the ones of the virtual (for me: real, because isolinux 3.11 does NOT boot with my older BIOS, while older iso- linux had no problems) boot diskette AND the ones which are installed on harddisk. The result, with embedded comments, can be found at:
http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~eric/fdbasecd-3aug06-ideas.zip Note that this also involved adding files to the virtual disk. The current files mention the com / exe file extension explicitly to workaround a bug in the FreeCOM of the tested iso. This is not part of my suggested changes for the next iso :-). ODIN directory comment: (fd)config sys and (fd)auto(exec) bat of ODIN should be removed. They are from an old version anyway. The HDD bat file on the virtual disk should probably be removed. The PG tool should be added to the BASE distro - it is part of the setup tools anyway. Actually, all tools from the setup directory should also be available later when you run FreeDOS from harddisk. It is interesting that c:\dir\nul exists if c:\dir exists but that it does not exist on cdrom drives. Current FreeCOM does not support "; ..." comments, only "rem ...", why that? Is that a bug? There is a bug in COPY which overwrites the first 4 bytes of the source file name quite early in the process. Sometimes. Hard to say when it does and when it does not. Sometimes it crashes FreeCOM then. When using XCDROM, the NLS directory on CDROM is broken. When using OMI to copy the whole cdrom as iso to harddisk, and then mounting the iso rather than the actual cdrom, the problem goes away. Note that I had to edit the batches to make iso file mounting actually work. Line 3 in autorun and lots of lines in several text files talk about old versions of stuff. Even the default harddisk config still mentions the benq drivers, it seems. Unless the installer now no longer replaces existing config...? One example for wrong text is the "Ready..." text which talks about copying cdrom contents (only iso is actually supported) or creating diskettes (not supported either). The default harddisk MODE lines have two bugs: You should NOT loadhigh MODE, and the filename should be %dosdir% relative but the autoexec should mention %dosdir% not the VALUE of dosdir at the time when autoexec was created... :-p. The year 2006 is MMVI, I believe, not MMIV... In some text files. The safe mode / plain prompt is very basic. Even on isos which contain no real livecd part, there should be a "prompt" mode which loads most drivers but does not start the installer. A small editor (TED3 for example) and LBACACHE should be added to the virtual boot disk. Maybe also MEM and PG and MORESYS. On the other hand, many things which ARE on the boot disk at the moment, and are even in the autoexec of that disk, should NOT be there but should rather be in the normal cdrom installer directory! Reason: Caching will focus on the latter and the installer should be self contained. If half of the work is only possible if you boot from a special boot disk which contains special tools which are not available on the rest of the cdrom, then that is bad. See my comments in the zip. The "full" menu item in autoexec on harddisk should load SHARE. On the other hand, the "no drivers" menu item certainly should NOT load DOSLFN and so on. See my suggested changes. The linebreaks in the .en files for localize / pbatch seem to be Unix ones. DOS ones would be better for TYPE and some editors. The F.R.E.E.D.O.S. "everything installed, reboot now" timeout should be MUCH longer, or even infinite... Note that I also reduced the amount of CLS in my suggested autoexec changes at other places. Info whooshing by is still better than a black screen with just a bit of "I am installing" text on it. The users should see what happens. The default config sys on boot disk and harddisk use too many "!". If you move TEXTINST exe to the ODIN directory, the PATH during the install can be shorter. The kernel on that ISO still shows the "map_cluster: empty" text when creating files. So it is a test version of 2036, not the current version ;-). Bootlace, Attrib and Command on the cdrom should be UPXed. Including UPX itself on the cdrom would be an idea. The LFN=N default option can probably be changed to LFN=Y along with a suitable "rem ..." line with the next FreeCOM, but that should only be done in the harddisk config, not in the boot disk config. The LH command somehow manages to leave all free UMB space blocked with a dummy MCB now, which does not usually affect later invocations of LH apparently. But at least the MEM output looks strange. The ODIN directory features XDMA but not XCDROM. There are new EMM386 2.11 troubles: Jazz Jackrabbit crashes (returns to DOS) with either a page fault or a GPF as soon as you use the NOEMS option of EMM386 now. Lemmings 3d needs a page frame anyway, so it "cannot find EMS" if you use the NOEMS option... The Stargunner game always crashes quite early with EMM386 2.11, even when using DOS32A instead of DOS4GW. On the other hand, Descent still works with DOS32A, and the CTS Toasted 96 demo even works with both DOS32A as well as (certain versions of?) DOS4GW. Hope the tests and config / autoexec change suggestions help to improve the distro again :-). Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
