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Disgusted by FreeDOS 1.3RC installation CD (Users)

posted by Laaca Homepage, Czech republic, 29.04.2021, 23:04

Well, I wrote quite crititical review about FreeDOS 1.3rc. It was reposted into FreeDOS user forum and was few times commented and it is of course commented also here.
Just to be clear - I don't complain about DOS as such but specificaly about FreeDOS 1.3rc and mainly about installer.
I will try to summarize my criticism into several categories:
1) Missing DOS/FreeDOS features
2) FreeDOS live system from CD
3) FreeDOS installation
4) Help system
5) Packages

ad 1) Here is not much to say. I miss some feature in modern DOS system but it is not fault of the FreeDOS community. I would like to see a better LFN driver, better disk read/write/seek performance (much worse than f.e. under Win98). We do not have a good ASPI driver we do not have a good task switcher and so on and so on. But again, this is not the point of my criticism.

ad 2) Why the booting starts with unzipping of many basic utilities like ATTRIB.ZIP, FORMAT.ZIP, COMP.ZIP and so on. Why it just does not unzip something like BASE.ZIP which would contain all this basic utilities? You forgot how slow is the file seeking on the CD on the real hardware? Sure, the contiuous read is fast on most of CD drives but seeking and opening the large amount of small files is a pain.
And after this we have only very bare system with only few applications/utilities. It is much worse than very ancient Live CD of FreeDOS 0.9a which I have and occasionaly use (although it is also a .BAT files complicated mess). In 0.9 it ended in rather primitive menu system but working system which allowed many tasks. Even much better is Hiren boot CD. I heard that it is based on Linux or Windows. But I have a completely different experience. I have a older version (Hiren 9.5?) which is DOS based. The boot proces ends in quite nice menu sorted into categories and subcategories which instantly allow quite wide spectrum of useful things what to do in DOS.

ad 3) Installer should be generaly much more user friendly and should inform a user about the process. It would be nice if it could perform a system scan in the begining and resume the system from point of view of DOS compatibility.
Like "Warning, no IDE/ATAPI interface, optical drives will not work" or "Your processor does not support a 32-bit protected mode - the install set will be adjusted for it".
In case when some existing disk partitions are present it should offer the installation of boot manager (preferably BootMGR by BTTR software). FDisk should be replaced by some better alternative.
Also - the user should be prompted to choose a variant of installation (very basic, extended, full) and also a list of desired applications via a expandable list for custom modifications of the options above.
I like the point that current installer creates a multi configuration FDCONFIG.SYS. It is important because on the tested notebook (Dell Latitude 610) the first two options did not work for me and only the other options were working.
And finally - after the installation must be displayed (and also saved into some protocol file) some summarization of whole process.


ad 4) Help system must be totaly reworked. After writing "help" should be displayed some overview like:
* FreeDOS core files and installed into C:\ and C:\FDOS\BIN. Other available disks are: .....
* For your convience are prepared these BAT scripts
- for filemanager write "dz"
- for system info write "sysinfo"
- for more info about applications in C:\EDITORS write "help editors"
- for more info about applications in C:\SOUND\ write "help sound"
...
- for more info about DOS core utils and DOS batch language write "help dos"

ad 5) In harddisk mode and live CD mode must be easily available utilities for system informations, disk/file recovery utilities, BIOS tools and so on. Because it is still a traditional playfield for DOS systems.
Also some picture viewer and converter should be available even in the basic installations. Mpxplay also could be also in basic installations.
It is also wise to have a special C:\KOMP\ directory (listed in PATH variable) where are all file archivers like ZIPINFO, UNRAR, 7ZIP,....
I like the quite rich \UTIL\ directory on the installation CD but it must be somehow sorted. Idealy combined with something like DESCRIPT.ION files.
There must be some discussion which programs are missing (some painting programs like GrafX, PictView, SEA?...). And maybe some programs could be removed from distro? (B64?)
Very controversal point is the mania to install all applications into universal directories like \BIN\, \APPINFO\ etc.
If everything will be installed into C:\BIN, terrible mess will happen

---
DOS-u-akbar!

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