Anton Graham wrote:
> Submitted 19-Jul-00 by Seak, Teng-Fong:
> > 1) to mount these vfat partitions with full permissions by defaults,
> > or
> > 2) to provide a check box to mount vfat (well, I mean vfat, fat and
> > dos) partitions with full access during Installation of Linux.
>
> I can see potential for problems here from the same newbies that it
> seeks to help. Imagine if you will:
>
> Joe User is running Linux "just to get his feet wet." He has a
> Win-Printer, and cannot print using Linux. He creates a grocery list
> using his favorite Linux editor, and before leaving for the store
> reboots to print the list.
Win-printer? Win-modem does exist, but I'm not sure if any
win-printer exists. Hard to believe anyway. Can you give me any example
so as to avoid them?
> (1) Notepad will scramble it because it's too dumb to to lf-crlf
> conversion (and it will be his default application to print from).
> (2) If he has conversion set up to avoid problem 1, when he saves an
> ISO (as an example) to his VFAT partition, it will get the same
> conversion and ruin the image.
>
> Both problems would be blamed on Linux.
I see the problem but Linux is not to be blamed, at least not
totally. Notepad as provided in NT4 does recognise Unix files (ie LF only)
and can read them without any problem. I don't understand why _this_
notepad isn't found in Win98 or Win2k (both of which are made after
WinNT4). On the other hand, some Unix text editor can handle Dos file
format without any problem, eg NEdit.
I understand that you just gave that as an example and there're a lot
more. The sad thing about people's viewpoint towards Linux is that they're
just expecting so much that they finally get disappointed. Actually, if
they had thought about it, they should have found that Linux (and all
applications surrounding it) is very generous while Windows is very
egocentric. Linux (as well as the rest) has done its best to get along
with Win. On the other hand, Win is just like a spoiled child which just
doesn't care others. In such case, everyone gives his expectations on
Linux and when Linux can't do it, he only feels disappointed. This
attitude is actually very unfair.
> > By the way, there's also the "exec" option for every vfat
> > partition to indicate that all files in the partition are executable.
> > I don't think this choice really makes sense because Dos/Win binary
> > aren't executable under Linux. Marking them as executable is just
> > misleading.
>
> They are! See the kernel compile option for support for miscellaneous
> binaries.
Do you mean iBCS (or something like that)? If yes, there's nothing to
do with Dos/Win executables. In order to run Dos/Win executable, I don't
think support from kernel is sufficient. To run Dos programs, the kernel
has to emulate Dos system functions and external commands. This is too
much for the kernel. For Win programs, that's even worse: the kernel has
to handle Windows protocols, widget stuffs, etc which are the task of X
server. No, that couldn't be a support for Dos/Win executables.
> Essentially you can set it up to automagically launch
> dosemu, wine, or any other interpreter/wrapper for these binaries.
> (It's a bit involved, but possible, though I personally wouldn't do
> it.)
The last time when I tried DosEmu, I just know it runs in a virtual
image disk and I haven't got enough time to see if it runs in a real
partition. As to Wine, sorry to those Wine fans here in the list, but
personally I would forget about it. This "wrapper" is thicker than the
Earth's crust! It's really a resources consumer. If one really wants to
use Win apps daily, try VMware.
On the other hand, we _can't_ set up anything to automatically launch
Dosemu or whatever. Even if the old Dos programme Edit.com is set as
executable, but when we type "edit.com", it still doesn't run and Dosemu
isn't launched either. Even if winword.exe is set as executable, typing
"winword.exe" wouldn't launch Wine either. In either case, what I would is
to make shell script to launch the emulator/wrapper and run the programme
within it. But in this case, whether edit.com and winword.exe are marked
as executable doesn't matter.
> Also, one *could* keep shell scripts or even linux binaries in a
> vfat partition. When I first made the transition to linux, I had
> several shell scripts in a Windows partition that I used for cygwin.
> Symlinks in ~/bin gave me easy access to them from linux as well.
Well, sure, this is an example, but this isn't an usual case. Primo,
you're talking about shell script; secundo, you put linux binaries in a
vfat partition.
Seak T.F.
