On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 9:54 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have an ancient Fujitsu Lifebook p2110, It came with WinXP SP2, I >> swapped the 30GB HD for a 40GB from my SOs failed laptop, >> repartitioned, and installed Win2K SP4, Ubuntu and Puppy Linux, and >> FreeDOS. Win2K got a 20GB slice, running on NTFS, > > <off-topic> > BTW, I never did understand why Vista on up required so much more than > 2K or XP. I mean, I know XP SP3 added a lot (1 GB? so total is around > 2.5??), but it's still vastly smaller than typical 12-16 GB install of > Vista or 7. I've heard some say, "You can slim it down to 7 GB", but I > still wonder what is wasting all that space. A GB is a lot of room. > (Maybe it's all printer drivers? Language files? Didn't Snow Leopard > or whatever remove a lot of those in lieu of grabbing from network if > needed?) Actually, a quick check of c:\windows\fonts shows that even > that takes 300+ MB these days! Each Windows version wanted more resources than the previous release. The bare minimum RAM I'd want for XP is 512MB. The Lifebook was a pass along from an owner who has upgraded. It apparently came from Fujistu with XP, and SP2 was a user update. SP2 did increase resource requirements. Reviews I turned up about the Lifebook were generally positive when it got released, but I can't imagine why.. > Though I shouldn't be too surprised, even Win95 was like 18 > overformatted floppies. Arguably, you don't need most of those at all. > <off-topic> I no longer waste emotion on the issue. Current OSes assume you have current hardware to run them on, and for the most part that's a correct assumption. >> Ubuntu and Puppy got >> 8GB slices on ext4, and FreeDOS got a 2GB slice formatted FAT32, > > Good, because FAT16 is horrible on anything over 512 MB. Not slow, > just wasteful. Since FAT16 has a hard limit of 65,556 clusters, the larger the partition is, the bigger the cluster will be, up to a 2GB maximum volume size. Since I wanted a 2GB volume for FreeDOS, I want FAT32. Who needs a one-line file taking 32K? >> with a small "raw" partition shared between Ubuntu and Puppy as a swap >> partition. Ubuntu and Puppy mount each other's slices and see each >> other's files. I found an open source driver that lets 2K read/write >> the ext4 slices the Linux installs live on. 2K and Linux can both see >> and read/write the FAT32 slice. FreeDOS can't see anything else, but >> I don't care because it has no need to. > > I consider this a minor flaw in DOS, but I guess most people > (including me!) don't have the time or energy or skills to write a > network redirector driver for another file system. (Paragon had a > shareware one, IIRC.) Back when DOS was the main OS, it wasn't an issue. You were highly unlikely to *have* another file system on a different partition that you would want to see from DOS. I suppose you *could* write drivers to let a DOS installation see NTFS and ext2/3/4 slices, but why bother? You are unlikely to be able to do anything with the files on those slices even if DOS can see them. And drivers you did write would take RAM DOS apps might need. Like I said, I have no need to see the other slices from FreeDOS, and don't care that I can't. > Even LTOOLS and Odi's LFN Tools don't work for me on my system (gotta > love bugs ... NOT!). TestDisk isn't really the same thing, but it > seems to more or less work. I used that a tiny bit fairly recently. I'm quite fond of testdisk. It does a superb job of handling issues where a partition table got trashed. It uses low-level raw disk reads, and doesn't *care* what the file system is because access is below the file system level on raw partitions. >> I *did* have fun getting FreeDOS to actually boot from Grub2, and had >> to fiddle for a while before I got it to do so. (Alas, I no longer >> recall just what fiddle did the trick.) It worked fine till I had to >> reinstall 2K to fix Windows related issues. That broke booting >> FreeDOS from Grub. I could still run all of the DOS stuff on the >> FreeDOS slice in an NTVDM under 2K, so it was an annoyance but not >> crippling. > > GRUB 2? The new version? Ugh. IIRC, it's much more complicated, but I > guess that's debatable. I guess it's unavoidable with UEFI and tons of > quirky OSes that require handholding. Part of the problem is having to > use the MBR to boot a separate program (on its own partition?) just to > boot the real OS! Grub2 was what came with the Linux systems I was installing. I haven't had major issues dealing with it. > As for Windows hosing other OSes, it's probably less inept and > sinister than it sounds. Probably they just don't want to deal with > tons of tech support calls about their OS not booting. (It's implied > here that most people only care about Windows, which is probably > mostly true.) Doing a clean re-install of 2K meant wiping the partition it was on and doing a clean install from scratch. That rewrote the boot sector and wiped out Grub2. I was able to recover Grub2 and get the Linux slices back. It even shows FreeDOS in the boot menu. It just claims it can't find kernel,sys when I try to boot it, even though kernel.sys is where it should be and Grub's config file is correct. > It really shouldn't be hard for someone somewhere to repair this for > you, Dennis. As long as the FreeDOS partition is active, primary FAT > with a working boot sector, it should be possible (and "easy", famous > last words) to chainload something to it. *Should* be. But since FreeDOS is essentially a toy to fiddle with, and I can run the DOS apps on the FreeDOS slice in an NTVDM under 2K, I haven't had much motivation to spend time trying to get FreeDOS going again. > I don't know. Quite honestly, multi-booting (or just booting in > general) is an arcane, very very difficult black box. There are too > many competing OSes, so they just can't (or won't) get along very > easily. The biggest problem is that all most all want to be installed in the primary partition of the boot drive. >> I went with 2K over XP because 2K is less resource hungry. The >> Lifebook has a whopping 256MB of RAM, of which 16MB are grabbed off >> the top by the Transmeta CPU for code morphing. On the 2K reinstall, >> I was able to get what Win2K itself used booted to a desktop to about >> 85MB, and it actually booted with reasonable speed. (The box as I got >> it with XP Pro took 8 minutes to boot, and was frozen snail slow once >> it had.) > > Yuck. Anyways, as mentioned before, XP is still "mostly" lean. I think > you'd have to disable some stuff via "msconfig". Though obviously you > can't run behemoths like Firefox (comfortably) on such "small" RAM > machines. I'm in XP Home at the moment. By stripping stuff out of startup, and disabling unneeded services, I got what XP wants when booted to a desktop down to about 275MB RAM. I could get more in a pinch buy taking the software firewall (SPF) and Google Deskop out of the configuration, but it's not a critical need. The notebook I'm on at the movement has 1.5GB RAM, which is adequate for XP Home. >> 2K was actually more or less usable, as were Ubuntu and >> Puppy. FreeDOS flew. > > I should hope so! ;-) :-) >> I installed FreeDOS on FAT32 and had no problems. I don't see a >> reason to go FAT16. > > No, me either, esp. not for 2 GB. Maybe for 512 or less (to avoid tons > of slack waste). There are some rare, low-level, third-party DOS tools > that won't work on FAT32, but for the most part, you shouldn't have to > worry about that. For the most part, I don't. I have no need to work at that level, and don't have/use those tools. >>> P.S. Actually, some people say that Win2k was pretty similar to XP, >>> and thus it was "mostly" DOS friendly (NTVDM) re: DJGPP stuff. I know >>> it's old and lots of Windows apps (cruelly) don't support it anymore >>> (including MSVC), but some people (e.g. CWS) swear by it (lower >>> footprint, no need to phone home, etc). More accurate to say XP was pretty similar to 2K. Most of what I use under XP runs under 2K. A few things refuses to install, abut they aren't critical to what I do on that box. >> See above. All the DOS apps I use run in a console window under 2K >> with NTVDM. I am *not* a gamer, and don't run DOS games that use >> graphics and write to video memory. All of my stuff is character >> mode. > > It's not true that NTVDM is perfect. There were many bugs, they just > never fixed them. DJGPP had to use some workarounds. So DJGPP stuff > works fairly well by design, but others (e.g. OpenWatcom-based pmode > stuff) not as much. As for gaming, they never intended NT to be a > gaming OS. Everything *I* run has no problem. The stuff that would give problems is stuff that expects to directly access the hardware, because NT won't let you do that. Most DOS stuff that *did* try to directly access the hardware were games, doing so for performance. I don't play those games, so... >> Most of what I run under XP runs in 2K. The biggest issue is that low >> RAM and slow (UDMA 4) HD make running large apps problematic. They >> are slow to load and sluggish once up. I don't even try to run a >> current browser, but since I seldom try to browse from the box, >> that;'s not a pressing concern. > > Like I said before, I used Opera much more comfortably on my low RAM > XP machine than otherwise. But I'm not sure if latest versions are > still as lean or compatible or whatnot. In fact, I hear that Opera is > switching their backend (Presto??) to Webkit (or Blink or whatever). > So who knows. A contact elsewhere runs DOS by preference, and boots Win98SE when he needs a GUI. There's an open source package that adds a subset of Win32 to Win98, and lets you run some Win32 apps under it. He has been able to successfully run Opera under Win98SE. Opera is sort of usable (under Linux, at least) on the Lifebook. Firefox isn't. Chrome is sort of usable. But I seldom try to browse from the box in any case, and for the most part don't care. Opera announced a while back that they were dropping their proprietary rendering engine and moving to Webkit. Google forked Webkit to produce Blink, and Opera followed along. ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) platform delivers complete security visibility with the essential security capabilities. Easily and efficiently configure, manage, and operate all of your security controls from a single console and one unified framework. 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