MARTIN WOODHOUSE wrote: > Hello Mitch and thanks for the info, which tells me a whole lot of > things I needed to know. > > I guess what I really need to know is whether, if MSDOS (or FreeDOS) > were to be loaded onto the (existing) XO, it would then be possible to > run an MSDO-based application on that machine?
DOS won't work very well because we don't support conventional EGA-style display access. The stuff that is in the "DOS hole" (addresses 0xa0000..0xfffff) is just not present. There is only memory there. > > Cheers, Martin > > */Mitch Bradley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>/* wrote: > > > > MARTIN WOODHOUSE wrote: > > Hello All > > > > ( C'est moi, the Ancient Mariner, again .. . ) > > > > Is it possible to partition a hard drive under LinuxBIOS? I assume > > it is, but I need to be sure. If so, can both drives be made > bootable? > > Linux can create partitions on, for example, USB hard drives, and > Open > Firmware can boot from multiple partitions. We don't encourage it > because partitions just make all the procedures more complicated. The > documentation can easily become bewildering in the face of different > partitions and filesystem types and whatnot. > > With the current software, it is not possible to partition the > internal > NAND FLASH, which is the main storage medium that the children > will use. > > The OLPC bootloader is Open Firmware, not LinuxBIOS. The information > about LinuxBIOS on the wiki is somewhat out of date. Strictly > speaking, > LinuxBIOS has never been the bootloader. When we used LinuxBIOS, > it was > used for low-level hardware initialization. LinuxBIOS depends on a > separate "payload" program to do bootloading from disks. In general, > that payload can be a dedicated bootloader like GRUB or LILO, a > stripped-down Linux system "Linux as Bootloader", or Open Firmware. > From a few months starting in August of last year, OLPC used > LinuxBIOS > + Linux-as-Bootloader. Towards the end of 2006, we switched to > LinuxBIOS+OpenFirmware. The current scheme, beginning with the > recently-release C-series firmware, is OpenFirmware with table-driven > early initialization. > > > > > > > Cheers and love, Martin. > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Devel mailing list > > Devel@laptop.org > > http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel > > > > _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@laptop.org http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
