This page is about modifying the installation ISO, not creating one from scratch.

Under Windows, mkisofs is provided on the CD, so no installation of secondary packages is required.

Other systems have their own thing.

Setting up

Download the base ISO, and copy the files from it to a local directory. (%FREEDOS% refers to this directory) This can be accomplished by burning it or using Daemon Tools.

That's it. You modify the files in the local directory, and then create an ISO from that.

Generating the ISO

On Windows, this is simple. Run %FREEDOS%\makeiso.bat.

Option files

Many of the files take the same format (in this page called the file inclusion format), which works as follows.

 # This is a comment
 Include   : Y
 noInclude : N
 mayInclude: ?

The first line is a comment. The second line tells the installer to include Include in the installation unconditionally. The third line tells it to never include noInclude. The fourth line tells it to possibly include mayInclude.

Adding a Package

1. Decide which diskset your package belongs to, or create a new diskset (see below)
2. Copy your package into the directory of the diskset, and create an LSM to go along with the package
3. In the diskset.1 file, add the package as described in the next section
4. Create the ISO

Note: The package should be in a zip format, and ideally should follow the standard FreeDOS package format.

Adding a Diskset

The simplest of all additions is to add a diskset. For the sake of this example, we'll call it mydiskset.

1. Create the directory %FREEDOS%\freedos\packages\mydiskset
2. Copy another .end file to %FREEDOS%\freedos\packages\mydiskset.end
3. Create %FREEDOS%\freedos\packages\mydiskset.1, according to the file inclusion format, where the items are the packages, like so:

 mydiskset\package1 : Y
 mydiskset\package2 : N
 mydiskset\package3 : ?

1. In %FREEDOS%\freedos\setup\install\%LANG%\mydiskset.txt, add a description of your diskset. (%LANG% is the 2-letter code for you language. English is "en".)
2. In %FREEDOS%\freedos\setup\install\install.dat, add if your diskset should be added by default
3. In %FREEDOS%\freedos\setup\install\install.min, add if your diskset should be added in a minimal installation.
4. In %FREEDOS%\freedos\setup\install\install.dat, add if your diskset should be added in a full installtation.