On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > On Feb 1, 2012 12:46 PM, "dmccunney" <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Whether this works will depend upon your BIOS. The box I have FreeDOS >> on will boot from a USB floppy drive, but *not* from a USB stick. >> BIOS limitation. I can't see a USB stick from FreeDOS either, because >> no driver is available that can do it. (I've looked at the USB >> drivers for FreeDOS, and they don't handle the method the box uses.) > > Many BIOSes support USB sticks under DOS using "legacy emulation" or "legacy > mode", but it is possible that your BIOS is not one of these.
It's not. > Kind of surprised that your BIOS doesn't support booting from USB, though. I > thought that was something every BIOS supported, and it should be > OS-independent. But maybe yours is an older machine? Yep. It's a Fujitsu p2110, circa 2002, with a Phoenix 4.0 Release 6 BIOS, an 867mhz Transmeta CPU (an early power saving effort), 256MB of RAM (of which the CPU grabs 16MB off the top for code morphing), and a 40GB Fujitsu UDMA4 HD. It has on board ATI Rage Pro Mobility graphics with 8MB RAM, and will do 1280x768 resolution. It was a gift from a friend who had upgraded, and has been a test bed to see what performance I could wring out of it. (It's possible to increase the RAM to 384MB, but doing so would cost more than multiple GB of DDR RAM for a modern machine.) It came to me with a 30GB HD booting Win XP SP2. The giver warned it was "slow slow slow". No surprise, since XP wants 512MB RAM minimum to think about performing. I swapped the original 30GB HD for a 40 from my SO's failed laptop and repartitioned. It quad-boots Win2K Pro SP4, Ubuntu Linux, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS 1.0. Win2K performs more or less acceptably, and I turned off unused services and load only the bare minimum stuff at startup, (The only non-Windows bits are a firewall, since the box travels, and an open source driver that will let Windows see and access the ext4 partitions Linux lives on.) It's there mostly for stuff that requires Windows, though some current Win software wants XP or better and won't install/run. The biggest performance drag is the HD, but UDMA4 is the best the BIOS will support. Small programs are sprightly enough. Large ones take a good approximation of forever to load. Firefox, for instance, takes 45 seconds to load in a bare bones config with next to no extensions. (Browsing is dead slow, too, regardless of what I use, even with a hardwired connection to my router.) Puppy Linux is reasonably sprightly, though quirky. Ubuntu required installing from the Minimal CD to get a CLI installation, then picking and choosing the bits I wanted to get a usable system. I use the Lxde desktop. I originally tried Xubuntu, intended for lower end systems, but it was snail slow. Posters on the Ubunto forums suggested too much Gnome had crept in, and Ubuntu has a steadily advancing idea of what "low end" was that was rather beyond what I had. The Minumal CD install produced a system that us usable, but with the same issues as Win2K - large apps are problematic. > jh ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try before you buy = See our experts in action! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-dev2 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
