> On Sep 18, 2015, at 10:50 AM, Eric Auer <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi! > >> Disc boots: >> >> Offers to install or quit. > > What happens if you select "install”?
Ummm,, the installer continues running. ( Not sure what you are asking? Do you mean, will it still setup a LiveCD environment? Or something else? ) > >> (note: if DOS is already installed, setup does no “launch”. >> The installer does this specifically for the disc to be used for recovery >> and whatnot. >> What makes a better recovery disc than a live OS?) >> >> if quit it sets up a live environment, should only take a couple of seconds. > > You can make "quit" and "start live CD mode" separate items. > If the user just wants a minimal DOS, actually quitting the > boot process might be sufficient even without live setup… You would have booted FD. So, basically you are already running a LiveCD OS. However, it would not yet be optimized to run from a RAM disk or as a very useful LiveCD OS. It may be better, to either just exit the installer and in it’s closing messages inform the user that they can do: Welcome the version 99.99 of This OS… to restart the setup program type ‘Setup’ to start a live version of the os enter “LiveCD” reboot - reboot Enjoy :-) etc…. > >> Then, if they wanted advanced mode. They can just relaunch the setup.bat /a. >> >> The live environment should not interfere with the installer. > > IMHO the live environment can be a target for the installer, > to simplify things - same install process, but to RAMDISK. It > would of course skip the "SYS target" and "reboot" steps ;-) > > > > To reply to a second mail: > >> Also, what if the user has a partition which is utilized by another OS >> but isn't crucial? (Linux swap comes to mind.) Yes, they can easily set >> it back up again if they trash it with their FreeDOS installing, but in >> a perfect world the installer would check the partition signatures to >> see if they match up to anything important, even if there's no actual >> files or filesystem. > > Even if you only kill swap partitions, you break stuff. In the > best case, DOS gets deleted the next time that you use Linux. > In the worst case, Linux was hibernating on swap and you crash > the hibernated session. Plus on the next Linux boot, swap can > not be activated (assuming Linux does not automatically format > the swap area when it detects it being broken) and Linux could > run out of memory during the next boot… > > In short, other partitions are never not crucial! Either there > is free space (unpartitioned space) or there is a FAT partition > or it has to be considered valuable. So in case 1, you may make > a FAT partition there. In case 2, you can ask the user if it is > okay to install DOS to that drive - probably showing the user a > directory listing to help them to decide. In case 3, you have to > abort the install process and let the user proceed only by hand. > > Sub-cases: 1a there are no partitions at all - this is so simple > that automated partition creation is rather safe. 1b If there are > a few partitions already and some free space between them, it MAY > happen that operating systems get confused by adding a partition > as that could influence their drive letter numbering - thus WARN > the user or suggest to proceed by hand. 2a if there are no files > on the found partition yet, assume that the user made it for DOS > and be happy. 2b if there already are some files, warn user first. > > Cheers, Eric > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
