FreeDOS 1.0

It is September, 2010 and FreeDOS 1.0 is the current release. I have a CD I burned with the 153M full release ISO image. I also have a 2.6G Fujitsu hard drive (a MPA3026AT) to install onto.

My motherboard boots from the CDROM (if it was not able to do this, I would have thrown it out long ago). I have the fujitsu drive as the primary master, the CDROM as the secondary master. I set the bios to autodetect the drives in LBA mode.

When I first boot the CDROM and go through the install, it seems perfectly willing to use the drive as is and install onto it. I am not comfortable with this and want to run FDISK, which the installer does not seem to offer as an option, so I hit the reset button and the next time the CDROM boots, I select the option to run FreeDOS from the Live CD. Then I type FDISK, delete the two partitions I find, and create a new partition to use FAT32 and to use the entire disk. FDISK does this and marks it active for me. After this, I hit reset and go to the next stage.

The installer asks for my language (EN), then informs me that my disk needs to be formatted, which is good and what I expect. It tells me that it will build a FAT32 filesystem and that I will loose all of my data. I tell it to go ahead.

Next I am presented with a couple of screens that I hit return to agree with. Then I see a screen showing me that it will be getting the install files from:

    X:\FREEDOS\PACKAGES

    C:\FDOS

It then presents me with two pages of packages. I did not understand what was going on at first, but apparently I can select or omit packages by checking on which I do or do not want. Once I realized that it was waiting for me, I just hit return (once for each of the two screens) and it got to work installing things.

It goes fairly quickly and it turns out there are more of these selection screens that I need to interact with. In each case I accept what it shows me (namely installing everything). I have a nice big 2.5G disk for it to use, so I would rather have it load up everything so I can fiddle. I note that the crynwr packet driver collection and the vim editor are included, which is good.

I thought it had hung in the midst of the vim runtime files, but on a closer look, I could see the CDROM activity light and the hard drive activity light blinking away, and indeed it finished without my intervention.

There are lots of games (and they are BIG), so I might omit these on successive installs.

It takes about 40 minutes to get through all of the packages, all lot of this was the computer waiting on me because I was doing other things while packages were being installed.

Once it was done, it offered to install a packet driver. I have a "tulip" PCI network card based on the Digital 21041 ethernet chip. It detects it in slot 1 with IRQ 0B, and puts something appropriate into the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, then tries to use DHCP to configure the network, but after some time thrashing around gives up.

Next it tries to use wget for something, I am not sure what.

Next it announces that c:\fdos\vim\vim70\vimrc_ex.vim => c:\fdos\vim\_vimrc conflicts with "vim32" and "vim16" and offers to remove it. I say no to both.

Now it is trying to run OpenGEM. I select "3" which is to exit and return to DOS. It tells me I can type "GEM" to run it, "SETUP" to set it up.

Now it is busy configuring packages and doing whatever it does with dependencies.

Now it is asking about my mailserver (I hit enter for none, I don't plan to receive mail on this machine). Finally it asks me if I am ready to reboot (I am).

I remove the CDROM and reboot and it comes up nicely using "option 2" (run with EMM386+ and SHARE)

Looks Good, now it is on to bigger and better things!