############################################################################### FreeDOS 1.3-RC3 Installation media. ############################################################################### ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some general system requirements. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A FreeDOS FULL install with sources requires 450 MiB of free HD space. Without sources, 250 MiB of free space will be needed. A FreeDOS PLAIN install with sources requires 50 MiB of free HD space. Without sources, 20 MiB of free space will be needed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What's in all those release ZIP files? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- readme.txt The simple "before you choose and install" document. (All zip archives contain a copy of this README file.) verify.txt Contains MD5, SHA256 and SHA512 hashes for all of the different release files. FD13-Floppy.zip * FD13FLOP.IMG - Basic FreeDOS installation boot floppy image for systems that support a CD-ROM. But, the system cannot boot from either of CD-ROM release media. FD13-LiteUSB.zip * FD13LITE.IMG - Plain DOS system only! This USB stick image does not contain all of the packages that are available in a FULL install. It only contains the basic plain DOS set of packages. * FD13LITE.VMDK - An Virtual Machine Disk description file to simplify attaching the LiteUSB image to a virtual machine (like VirtualBox and vmWare) as a hard drive. FD13-FullUSB.zip *FD13FULL.IMG - Plain DOS system and Full install USB stick image. (Also, includes may extra packages that are not installed in the "Plain DOS" or even the "Full Install". These extras can be installed later using FDIMPLES or another package manager) * FD13FULL.VMDK - An Virtual Machine Disk description file to simplify attaching the FullUSB image to a virtual machine (like VirtualBox and vmWare) as a hard drive. FD13-LegacyCD.zip * FD13LGCY.ISO - Contains all the packages as FD13-FullUSB. However, it is a bootable CD image designed for older hardware. It uses the classic El Torito Boot CD-ROM format. Some modern computers and virtual machines are known to have issues booting CDs that use this ancient specification. Unless you have a computer that requires this type of bootable CD, we recommend using the LiveCD media. FD13-LiveCD.zip * FD13LIVE.ISO - This media is similar to the LegacyCD. However instead of relying on the BIOS floppy disk emulation, it uses SYSLINUX and MEMDISK to boot an emulated floppy disk. Along side support to perform a Plain and Full installation of FreeDOS, this media is also able to run FreeDOS live from RAM or CD (depending on computer system and hardware) without installation to an internal hard disk drive. FD13-x86.ZIP New with FreeDOS 1.3-RC3 is the Floppy Diskette Edition of FreeDOS. Compared to the other media, this edition uses a completely different installer and process. It is designed to be compatible with any hardware that can run FreeDOS that has EGA or better graphics. Comprised of only a limited FreeDOS set of core programs, it installs those packages based on hardware support. Only have a 286, then no need to install the CD-Drivers that require a 386. Just got one hard drive and no CD or Floppy? No problem. Just copy the contents of the floppies to some directory and run it from there. Want to perform a headless install to a different DOS directory, piece of cake with the command line options. The best way to sum-up FD13-x86 is to say -- It is the power user installer. * x86-BOOT.img - A 720 Kib 3.5" floppy boot disk with the x86 installer. * x86-DSK?.img - Some 1.44 Mib 3.5" floppy diskette images that contain the archived OS files. Please note that to conserve space, the Floppy Diskette Edition does not contain the sources for the included packages. You can obtain those sources through the FreeDOS website (http://www.freedos.org) or from the other release media, like USB or CD-ROM. The Floppy Diskette Edition does not require any of those other media to perform an installation and will not use them during installation.