Hans Erik Martino Hansen: . In the building I live in, we have a small network. A fellow . student who usually runs MSD*S on his machine wanted to be able to . run linux without repartitioning and using as little harddiskspace . as neccecary. I tried to hack an installation using UMSDOS and the . Debian installation disks. But all my hackerskills wasn't enough, I . think it is impossible.
Not at all. The missing elements you need are: (1) a kernel with umsdos support compiled in (as opposed to umdos via a loadable module). and (2) the umsdos support utilities -- particularly, the misnamed umssync (which you need to run on your dos directory to start providing umsdos support). There's a bit of futzing around to get around the current installation system's lack of support for umsdos -- you need to shell out to mount the umsdos partition initially. Then, after things are built, you need to shell out again to get /etc/fstab right. Note that fsync is going to be useless on a umsdos partition -- but you don't have to deal with this right away because the only immediate consequence is that you get a spurious error message [you might want to be stringent about making backups]. . The installationdisks requires an ext2 partition for root, and if I . mounted the UMSDOS partition in /root it didn't recognize it. The . end of the story was that I installed on my own dospartion /etc . /bin /sbin /var and some other directories there, entered dos . arj'ed it and extracted it on his machine, and with a little . adjustment it worked fine. I don't know what sort of problem you ran into -- the installation menu just asks you for what path you want as root, if it's already mounted it doesn't care what file system is present. . My question is now: . . wouldn't it be nice if the installation program supported umsdos . partitions I think this would be a good idea. . and supported some sort of server client concept where you . installed packages on the server and they were automatically . installed on the clients (of course only the files that are . resident on that machine) You might want to talk to David Silber ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), he's working on the design concept for a backup system and has some analogous ideas. -- Raul
