On 25 Dec 2003 at 8:07, Day Brown wrote: >Wouldnt it be possible to setup the desktop so that if I leave the >floppy in, it'll boot and find the dos drive, pulling up DW.exe, or >whatever filemanager you wanted. Or- if I leave the disk out, instead of >being on the dos desktop, have it boot loadlin from the /linux directory >on a vfat 16, and then continue on to load the desktop, even the browser >and ppp driver, without ever asking me for a username and password. No >shifting from the qwerty, or the numpad, or the mouse.
It most certainly is possible to do this. In fact, it's fairly easy. Instead of using the boot floppy, though, I'd recommend booting from the hard drive, then using a boot menu (either in DOS, or using one of the Linux boot managers) to choose between continuing in DOS, or booting Linux. I have at least two systems that do this right now. One is configured to wait for "dos" or "lin" to tell it which to boot; the other is configured to wait for 15 seconds, then boot DOS. >BasicLinux says it'll run in 4megs dram. I have lots more, but I was >also impressed with how fast it came up to the bash prompt compared to >the other distros. But what do you all have? I have been given crashed >PCs to fix or upgrade for years, and it dont take long before you >collect a cigar box full of the 1meg 30 pin SIMM, and have saved enough >of the rarer 8 meg SIMM to install that on the few remaining 486 boards >that still work. Currently, the two systems I noted above as being dual-boot are my oldest, and both have BasicLinux installed. One is a IBM ThinkPad 360CS, which is a 386SX25 notebook with 12MB of RAM (ran fine with 4 though, before I found a memory card for it!) and the other is a 486DX100 with 16MB of RAM. Both have <500MB hard drives. >But BL could also do the ext2 drive. Which it treats as data storage, >relying on the fat16 for the copies of its own OS Kernel... which it >copies onto a ramdisk, and runs from there. So it would seem that if it >got infected with sabotage software, wouldnt it be cured every time you >rebooted? And who cares what the sabotage software does to the kernel it >thinks is on the ext2 drive, since it dont boot off it. Sure could do this - BL's ramdisk boot process could be set up to mount a partition every time it loads - and that partition could easily mount as /home/root, for automatic availability as the "home" "data storage" location. There are a number of people who have used BL in configurations similar to this, for setting up firewalls, data loggers, and other similar tasks, on older PC hardware. BasicLinux has been, in my opinion, a boon to those with SurvPCs - because it runs very well on SurvPC class hardware, and can be configured to do so many nifty things! Have a look at the BasicLinux mailing list and archives, and you'll surely find some of those uses described. http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux Anthony Albert =========================================================== Anthony J. Albert [EMAIL PROTECTED] Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle "This is only temporary, unless it works." --- Red Green 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
