Hi Rugxulo :-) > What practical choices do we have? [for old PC] > > 1). Stick to lowest common denominator. E.g. 8086 with conventional > memory only (say, full 640 kb).
That would be easiest: People can use Mateusz' 16 bit version of the package manager to add more packages at any time, manually deciding what runs on their PC :-) > 2). Separate binaries for different machines. E.g. 8086 (raw), 186 > (EMS), 286 (XMS), 386 (VCPI), 486 (DPMI). Usually this means separate > code via compile-time ifdefs. For things like EMS and XMS drivers I would simply put them on the floppy distro: If you have 386+ then you select a config.sys option with EMS and XMS drivers and if not then you have only wasted a bit of floppy space. Doing separate compiles of the same app for different CPU rarely makes sense. Even DOS extenders often have support for many sources of memory (raw int 15, XMS, VCPI, DPMI and so on) compiled into one binary. It is simply not worth the effort to maintain multiple exe files and then pick one of them, if you can have one file supporting all variants for just a few KB more. So the question is: For WHAT would you want separate binaries? Definitely for FreeCOM command.com, because the XMS swap and the non-XMS swap versions optimize and behave in rather different ways. But that already is the only thing that I really matters. Even a FAT32 enabled FreeDOS kernel is not wasting much speed nor memory if you use the 8086 version on a modern PC. Of course for the CD/DVD version of the distro, it is a very good idea to use 386+ versions of both kernel and FreeCOM. But for a floppy version, I am not sure if it would be worth the disk space to include them, instead of just sticking to the 8086 version of both. As said, people can always FDINST / FDNPKG stuff later. > 3). Some kind of hybrid binary setup with runtime checks > for whatever is available (e.g. CPUID). Too much effort compared to the small target audience of "people with PC which cannot boot from CD but who want a FreeDOS distro". Also in particular that group knows the museum PC that they have much better than some tool could figure out at runtime for them :-) > Do you want everything to run in bare DOS? Do you want to dual boot > DOS and Windows? Or do you run your DOS stuff inside Windows? Case 1 is easiest, case 3 usually is not FreeDOS related, as they would use NTVDM. Of course they can add packages of FreeDOS apps to improve their collection. If case 3 is done with a virtual PC in a VM, it is just like case 1... Maybe appart from wanting more drivers like VMSMOUNT then. Case 2 is too hard to do well automatically, FreeDOS does not have sufficiently powerful partition resize tools and the like. Be glad that Linux usually manages to install a dual boot without breaking Windows, but don't try in DOS. The only case 2 thing that you could do is dual boot with a FAT-based Windows on the same partition, making use of known properties of Windows boot menus. However, PC with such old versions of Windows probably are exceptions now. Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
