THE FREEDOS Ripcord BETA 7 Hot 03 ("SPEARS") DISTRIBUTION RELEASE NOTES Jim Hall Jeremy Davis 01 March 2001 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to the Ripcord Beta7 distribution! Problems/updates with the official Beta7 may be found on the FreeDOS web site at http://www.freedos.org/. Please read the errata. Updated versions of the the semi-official "Hot" releases 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 are 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: * The version of format included requires FreeDOS kernel 2024f or higher (or MS/PC/DR DOS). It now has bad sector checking, although it is only partially tested for hard drives. It does not yet support FAT32 partitions. * The MINI and FULL distribution now use the same boot disk image. The choice of Mini or Full is presented at boot time. MINI consists of just the BASE install set and boot disk; whereas FULL includes the BASE install set, boot disk, and optionally the remaining install sets (EDIT, GUI, LANG, NET, UTIL, and the source sets). Other than the BASE set (which is required), you only need to download those sets you wish to install. * This distribution is provided in a variety of forms. The standard release is based on 3.5inch 1.44MB floppies, and uses the standard (Fat12/Fat16 only) kernel. Additionally, other floppy formats {3.5inch 720KB, and 5.25inch 1.2MB & 360KB} are provided [install disk images are provided for each type, and install sets split into 360KB chunks that can be used for all floppy sizes]. For some formats a Fat32 enabled kernel may be optionally installed instead of the standard kernel; this kernel is optimized for 386+ machines (ie may be compiled to use 80386 instruction set), is less tested than the standard kernel, and 'Format' does not yet support formatting Fat32 partitions. Other FreeDOS distributions (based upon this one) are also available: a bootable [for running or installing] CD ISO image, a .tar.gz file containing FreeDOS programs for use with DOSEMU, and a variant that installs the FreeDOS utilites under Windows. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. Windows and MS-DOS are registered trademarks of the Microsoft Corp. PC-DOS is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Inc.