THE FREEDOS BETA 9 ("Methusalem") DISTRIBUTION RELEASE NOTES Bernd Blaauw 03 February 2004 This document based on prior Release Notes written by Jim Hall and Jeremy Davis -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to the Beta9 distribution! Please visit the FreeDOS web site ( http://www.freedos.org ) for more information on FreeDOS, including updates or possible problems with the Beta 9 distribution. Please read the errata. Further information about FreeDOS prerelease distributions may be found at http://www.fdos.org/ripcord/ Please read and understand the licensing information for all programs you install and use. For a list of programs available in this distribution see the file programs.txt, which includes information such as program name, license (copying information, note some programs may be available only for non-commercial use), and primary location to obtain program. In the meantime, some notes and things you need to watch out for: * You should generally use the latest kernel with included programs; format 0.91n requires at least kernel build 2033 and emm386 0.7 requires at least kernel build 2033. Other programs may have similar requirements. * Format now includes bad sector checking. Support for FAT32 partitions is almost stable. * The prerelease versions of the FreeDOS distribution contain only the BASE install set and it's corresponding SOURCE (directory SRC_BASE) We provide a bootable cdrom and a 1.44MB bootdisk. You may create a bootdisk from the cdrom using option 3 in the main menu, or in Windows using the autorun.inf entry (FREEDOS\SETUP\BATCH\BOOTDISK.BAT) an enhanced bootdisk is available from [ http://www.fdos.org/ripcord/beta9rc4/fdbeta9.img ] * The Fat32 enabled kernel has gone out of the experimental phase for quite some time. It's now stable. However, not all FreeDOS programs can handle FAT32 properly yet. * This distribution is provided only as an ISO image. Though disk images may be provided in a form suitable for 3.5inch 1.44MB floppies and others to allow booting from floppy and using the CD-ROM. [Please use the Beta 8 distribution or check for a newer prerelease distribution for floppy use.] * About bootdisk: The contents of the first disk is small enough to fit on diskettes ranging from 360KB to 2.88MB (most common: 1.44KB). It provides you with a freeware (and almost completely GPL) bootable diskette that allows you to run the Memory testing program Memtest86, to install FreeDOS, or to add programs yourself (for example, freedos allows PartitionMagic to access fat32 and NTFS drives). * About bootdisk creation: If an empty diskette is inserted, we create a standard FreeDOS diskette. However, if you insert a Windows 98 bootdisk, a dualboot is created on the diskette between the two operating systems. Because the provided ATAPICDD cdrom-driver is still experimental, we also support using a few well-known and stable cdrom-drivers which are contained on this very same win98 bootdisk. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- FreeDOS is a trademark of Jim Hall. It was claimed as a trademark to prevent its possible abuse or misuse. The name FreeDOS may be used by the FreeDOS community to refer to programs that are part of the FreeDOS operating system, or to associate their programs with FreeDOS.