On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 1:42 AM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 8:40 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I've had worse pains. I normally prefer to have each OS on its own >> drive, but that wasn't an option here. > > VirtualBox would be easier, but your cpu may not support VT-X, sadly. > Without that, some stuff doesn't work, and it can be quite slow. (This > laptop lacks it.)
The box has an 867mhz Transmeta CPU, a 40GB IDE4 HD, and a whole 256MB of RAM, of which the CPU takes 16MB off the top for code morphing. The max RAM is will take is 384MB, and a daughtercard to add the additional 128MB would cost more than 8GB or DDR2 RAM for a current box. Low RAM and slow HD = limited performance. A faster HD isn't an option, because IDE4 is a BIOS limitation. I use ext4 file systems to get the best I/O I can, Smaller apps are better, as load times can be significant. Firefox, for example, takes about 45 seconds to load/initialize, with a minimal config. (it takes a tenth of that on my desktop.) Something like VirtualBox is right out. The machine simply doesn't have the horsepower to run it effectively. >> The old box this was done on was a gift from a friend who had >> upgraded, and it's basically a testbed to see what performance I can >> wring out of ancient hardware *without* spending money on it. > > Nothing wrong with using old hardware. It doesn't magically stop being > useful. But some people didn't get the memo! The trick is seeing what it will usefully do. >>> On this Lenovo cpu, I'm triple-booting Win7 64-bit Home Premium, Lucid >>> PuppyLinux 5.2.8, and FreeDOS 1.1 (ish). >> >> I have full installs for both Ubuntu and Puppy. Both are on ext4 file >> systems (to take advantage of extents,) and each mounts the other's >> slice. I spent some time playing because I wanted to have *one* copy >> of major apps shared between both Linuxs, some some things live on one >> side, and some on the other. I have an open source Windows driver >> that will let me see and access the Linux slices from 2K. > > I'm not sure I see the point of having Ubuntu and Puppy, esp. since > some Puppy variants are "mostly" Ubuntu-compatible (like mine). The first one I installed was Puppy, which I found when I sent looking for a distro suitable for older hardware. (I have 4.31 at the moment.) It works well enough, but it's quirky, and the "always run as root" model gives me hives. Puppy gets away with it because it's an explicitly singe-user system, where many of the inherent problems don't bite, but I still don't care for it, and don't understand why that design decision was made in the first place. A Puppy user laboriously put multi-user support back in, but it's specific to an older Puppy version. I tried Xubuntu, but it was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums suggested too much Gnome had crept in, and thet Ubuntu had a steadily increasing idea of what "low end" was. They suggested I install from the Minimal CD to get a CLI install, then use apt-get to install the parts I wanted. I wanted to redo Puppy, too, so I wiped both partitions, redid them as ext4, and installed Puppy 4.31 and Ubuntu with XFCE as window manager. Ubuntu installed that way wasn't as sprightly as Puppy, but was usable. Ubuntu has package management Puppy only dreams of, and I don't spend time chasing dependencies. Since each mounts the other's slice, I can access a lot of the stuff installed on th Ubuntu side from Puppy, and vice-versa. One other quirk is that XFCE no longer runs. Something in a Ubuntu upgrade broke it. I also have LXDE and can boot into it, so it's not critical. > FAT32 is natively supported by FreeDOS, Windows, and Linux. Most > people consider it a good middle-ground. But yeah, there are other > options. I put in a 2GB FAT slice in the first place to have a file system accessable from everything, and figured I might as well put DOS on it and boot that native, too. Linux sees the NTFS and FAT slices. 2K sees the ext4 and FAT slices. FreeDOS only sees it's own slice, but I don't care. >> Like I said, this *used* to work. All were booting fine from Grub2 >> before I did the clean re-install of Win2K and had to redo Grub in >> consequence. I do vaguely recall having to do some fiddling to get >> FreeDOS to boot the first time around. Unfortunately, I don't recall >> just which fiddle did the trick. > > Does GRUB 2 use menu.lst? I don't know, not interested in learning > that (yet?). Ugh. Maybe it needs chainloading or something weird. Try > searching for the GRUB4DOS [sic] wiki or such. Grub2 uses /boot/grib/grub.cfg, which is generated from /etc/default/grub by update grub. You're not supposed to edit it, but I do, as the discovery process always adds *two* entries for Puppy as "unknown Linux distribution", and video is hosed when booting. The box has an ATI Rage Pro Mobility chipset that does 1280x768 in graphics mode, which Ubuntu supports, but console mode is whacked, and I can't to Ctrl-Alt-Fx to switch to a different pty. A gfx-payload entry set to text in grub.cfg fixes that. It does indeed chainload. > Or use FDISK, TestDisk, GParted, BOOTMGR to see your MBR and partition > table. If FreeDOS won't boot, it means your partition isn't marked > active, isn't primary, isn't FAT, doesn't have a bootable boot sector, > or something weird along those lines. Can you access DOS at all (via > floppy)? Perhaps you could use wDE or similar low-level tool to view > raw sectors to see if there's a boot sector or not. I've used GPartEd to examine the partition, and all looks well. It's FAT32, with the boot and LBA flagd set. The file system is fine, and I can see it/run stuff from in from 2K. I made a FreeDOS floppy I can boot from. That sees the FAT32 slice as C:, and I used he latest SYS to put the latest (2040) FAT32 kernel in place. >>> P.S. Don't forget Rufus: >> >> Noted, but I'm not quite up to throwing out the baby with the >> bathwater just yet, which is about what completely redoing my setup >> with a different boot manager would come down to. > > Presumably it's some tricky setting in GRUB as MBRs and partitions are > very arcane. But who knows, maybe you'll get lucky. I suspect that's what it will come to. As mentioned, I had to fiddle to get FreeDOS to boot the first time. I just don't remember what fiddle made it work. > Worst case scenario: you could burn a backup CD / DVD with all your > files and start from scratch. Better than nothing. Sorry if I can't > help more, it's complicated. :-/ I'd just copy the stuff I wanted to preserve to the Win2K slice from Win2K. B ut I'm not quite frustrated enough to do that yet. ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. 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