Day Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [...] > 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.
With FAT, USUALLY, whatever files you have open can be corrupted, usually in the form of "lost clusters", while the rest are fine. If this happens several times, there can be cases where "cross linked" files result, where more than one file is using a particular cluster. This problem can get worse over time, and a larger disk is at more risk unless well maintained. > But I dont remember > seeing that a crash trashed the entire drive unless the drive actually > died. It IS possible that the FAT itself can be damaged, but there are two copies maintained, so this isn't a common situation unless, as you mention, there's physical problems (or an unfortunate head crash.) > So, when BasicLinux crashes, since it is running in a ramdisk, > can it still fry the FAT? Everything I've seen indicates that yes, the same problems still exist using FAT under Linux. It's a limit of the filesystem. So opened files might be damaged in some way. > 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? Not sure exactly what you mean here. Is the kernel dying BEFORE Linux is up? If so, it sounds to me like no, only anything in RAM disk might be lost. Not 100% sure of the details of BasicLinux (is Stephen on list?) but until the kernel is running, it won't be writing to any non-root partitions. > Thing about Linux is, that it is multitasking, and some of those tasks > write on the hard drive when you aint looking. Hehe, it may seem mysterious, but there are some basic rules at play. > 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. Oh definitely. There are several distributions that don't write to disk at all. Some run entirely from RAM disk, others read from read-only media (i.e. CDROM). Of course, if you want to keep persistent data, you need to write it somewhere. Compact Flash in various formats offers more interesting potential, plus read-write (though still subject to the filesystem limitations). > 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) As long as it can flush cache, yes. No problems then. > 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. Some distributions do make you go through several steps. But keep in mind, that's not LINUX per se, just the distribution -- or configuration -- you're using. For example, I'm currently testing out Mandrake 9.2. I can run a number of X window desktops, including KDE and Gnome. Gnome (at least) will let me do a "one step shutdown", powering off while logged in as a normal user. Other desktops do not though. If it's a feature important to you, you just need to shop around for one that matches your need. Pretty much the same with the rest of what you describe: There are tradeoffs, but at least you have the OPTION of making these tradeoffs. The more stuff you load, but more time it'll take, the more hardware (faster) you'll want for reasonable speeds etc. The vast majority of distributions these days ARE targeting higher-end systems... or at least hardware that is beyond SurvPC-class (even at the high-end definition we've tossed around here). There are some other "smallish" distributions that aren't as bare-bones as BL, but still lightweight. Interestingly, some of the firewall distributions are very light, and not GUI-centric. > [...] 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. Ditto. If it's not doing something, I'd prefer to shut it off. > [...] > And every step of the way, whatever crashes dont wipe out everything > you did up to that point. Well, careful there! Hopefully it won't be a disaster, but I wouldn't go so far as to say nothing can be lost! > [... ] > It'd be slick if it gave you your email in text mode while it loaded > the gui apps in the background. Does BL let you do CTL-ALT-F1 while X apps load, then let you return with CTL-ALT-F7 (or whatever)? The actual USEFULNESS will depend on your specific hardware naturally. - Bob 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
