On 26 Dec 2003 at 8:25, Day Brown wrote:
[SNIP]
>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?
If you've got the DOS drive mounted, I suppose it could. I would think
this very unlikely, though it could happen. If the drive is not
mounted - I think it would be near impossible.
>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?
When "BOOT.BAT" starts, it starts loading the Linux kernel, which
overwrites the DOS kernel. If the Linux kernel fails to load, then you
would simply need to reboot the computer, and it should boot DOS with
no trouble. "BOOT.BAT" is simply a DOS batch file with the sequence
of tasks to start BasicLinux.
>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.
Yep. Trouble is, just like running DOS in a ramdisk... changes that
you've made to the configuration of Linux would be lost. However,
writing to the hard drive when you're not looking isn't necessarily a
*bad* thing... that's what swap space, and temporary files, and
configuration files are all about. Many DOS programs use all three of
those techniques, when they are run.
>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.
It depends on your Linux distribution. You can, if you are logged in
as root, issue the command "shutdown -h now" at the command prompt, and
the system will shut down.
Or, if you prefer, most distributions will start shutting down if you
press CTRL-ALT-Del, and shut down in a just a half-minute or so.
>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.
You _can_ configure a Linux system to start X immediately, so that you
never see a CLI. Sometimes, that's what the user wants. You can
often drop out of the GUI to the CLI with CTRL-ALT-Backspace.
As for the RPM for the Cyrix CPU, I'm not sure what you're referring
to, but a quick bit of research shows two possibilities: 1) updated
video drivers for Cyrix graphic chipsets or 2) a Cyrix APM (automatic
power management) conflict with some of the standard, "out of the box"
kernels.
I'm guessing that 2) is the one you're referring to, and it's because
the default kernel for RedHat and other distributions is likely to be
"tweeked" to provided best performance on a 686 class processor - and
this causes conflicts with the Cyrix CPU. It's not so much a case of
"fixing what's broken" as "providing an alternate for hardware that
doesn't match our assumptions". No worse than not being able to run MS-
DOS on some computers - IBM, Toshiba, and Zenith computers were
especially bad that way. You had to use the manufacturer's "tweeked"
version of MS-DOS.
>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.
BL X packages are about 5MB of downloads, as I recall. Then Dillo or
Links to graphically browse would be about another 3-5MB... Yes, you
could easily get it all running in under 20MB.
>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.
You can do this - Linux uses a separate "virtual console" for the GUI,
so just last weekend, I had X running on console #4, and three text
mode consoles running in virtual consoles #1, 2, and 3.
DOS does have its place, but being able to switch between multiple CLI
applications (ALT-Fx) really has its attractions. Especially once GPM
(mouse support) is loaded, and you can copy-and-paste between the CLI
consoles.
Anthony Albert
===========================================================
Anthony J. Albert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
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