> > Any thoughts, suggestions- or is dos in fact really DEAD dead in the > > minds of survpc folks? > > One of the reasons i rarely participate here is because this list has turned > into Yet Another Linux List. > > Yes, I still use DOS, on a variety of machines (an 8088, 286 & 486). None of > these have (or ever will have) a Linux distro on it (that's on the "modern" > machine in use here). as far as using Linux on the earlier machines - not > bloody likely! DOS does more & better from the command line on those > machines & I see no pressing reason to change. folks might wanna check out http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Now, I remember lotsa times when dos crashed, or whatever I was trying to do, that the best thing to do at that moment, is turn off the PC an move on with the rest of what passes for a life. But I dont remember seeing that a crash trashed the entire drive unless the drive actually died. So, when BasicLinux crashes, since it is running in a ramdisk, can it still fry the FAT? When I see a message that the kernel failed, if it is after running the BL 'BOOT.BAT', wouldnt I still have the dos kernel booting? would I be totally dead in the water and havta repartition the drive? Thing about Linux is, that it is multitasking, and some of those tasks write on the hard drive when you aint looking. But if you had a distro that was running entirely in a ramdisk, (and with DRAM so cheap nowadays, why not?) wouldnt it run faster and if it crashed, rebooting would solve your problem. Just- like it does with dos. And, when I want to shutdown dos, it takes half a second to dump the diskcache, and the computer turns itself off. (no questions asked) When I want to shut down the distro, I havta click on the logout, when it will stop me again to make me click to ignore the ppp driver or whatever, then make me click again because I dont want to login as root, and make me click again, cause I dont want it to reboot. I can understand, that since Linux is a multitasking os, that sysads really like it for networks, which is fine, but I note that you dont turn off network servers if you can help it, so an inconvenient method is no problem. And there are home users who dont mind leaving the PC on forever. Which offends my sense of frugality and the waste of resources which is ruining the planet. With dos and BL, you have a sequential process in which the CLI is up and running first, and no matter how badly you screw up the video settings, you still have the text mode screen to figure out what the problem is. With xwindows, I have seen the text mode screen blinking so badly you could not work with it. And with windoz, its often completely dead in the water. With windoz, if you change any of the critical parts of the hardware, you havta dig out the instlal disk and re-enter the phucking pirate code before you can update the system. With Linux, well for instance, Redhat just released a new .rpm for the Cyrix VIA CPU, but I dont recall seeing a motherboard cpu combination that dos would not run. Yes you can tweak the os to improve operation, but then you run into these variables. DOS & BL seem to show us a route to take, to get the system booted, then add the BL support for xwindows, and then add the browser & ppp driver to get here. What would the total download be? FREEDOS.ZIP is a few hundred k, or the FREEDOS.IMG for 1.44m, then a couple meg for BL, and then there's mozilla or opera.... seems like the whole setup would be less than 20 meg. That's feasible even with a 56k. And every step of the way, whatever crashes dont wipe out everything you did up to that point. Whatever else, short of a hardware failure, you still got dos, you can still boot, still get online with lynx to download the rest of BL, and still get to the familiar browser gui. It dont look like you havta choose, you can have both dos and linux running on the same drive, with the power of linux when you need it, and the security of the dos file system when you dont. It'd be slick if it gave you your email in text mode while it loaded the gui apps in the background. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
