Mail Archives: djgpp/2000/02/19/14:20:49
Hello.
Chris Jones wrote:
> Thank you - someone else with a not-top-of-the-range computer who
> understands what I'm talking about.
It was one day <sigh>. Actually, it works pretty well for everything I
need. DJGPP, Linux, Windows all run pretty fast =)
> I'm running Win2000 with 64 Mb of RAM and it's a very happy
> bunny. What I don't understand is how when it's idle, with no
> applications running, the task manager reports the memory in use as 46
> Mb - how can it use so much just for its kernel + explorer?
It might have a big disk cache or be caching the swap file. If the
memory's free, why not use it to improve performance?
> > You should find links to all the popular Linuces. Personally I use
> > RedHat, but I tried Debian (briefly, like for a few hours). There
> > are lots of different distributions. Which one you choose is up to
> > you.
>
> What are the differences between all the different versions? What are
> the advantages of each distribution?
Er, that's a tough question for me to answer, since I've only really used
RedHat. When I installed Debian, I found that the location of all the
configuration files was slightly different, which totally confused me. The
range of software you get also varies. AFAIK Debian GNU/Linux is totally
free - no commerical software in it at all (apologies if this is wrong).
I'm sure there are some comparison sites out there.
> Ah. If the install fails is it easy to get the system back, or will it
> trash the boot record?
Actually, reading Andris Pavenis's later post, I realised my details
weren't quite correct. I have installed the Linux boot loader on my Linux
root partition. The computer boots off whichever partition is set to be
the primary one, which in my case is my Linux disk.
Windows installs have a tendancy of overwriting the master boot record.
So, if you install the boot loader, lilo in my case, onto the MBR,
installing Windows will kill it.
If the MBR gets trashed, it's not too bad. I've managed to recover from
that several times. What you do need is a set of boot disks. One for
DOS/Windows '95 is handy and the disk you installed Linux from in the
first place. If Windows trashes the MBR, you can use the Linux install
disk to boot the Linux off your hard drive. Once in Linux, you can then
re-install Linux's control of the boot process (re-run lilo, or set the
primary partition).
If you want to restore Windows's control of the MBR, boot up from your
DOS/Windows boot disk and type 'fdisk /mbr' to make DOS/Windows bootable
again.
> What is UMSDOS? Is it included in the distribution or do I need to get
> it seperately?
The UMSDOS filesystem support is in the kernel. There may be a set of
tools to go along with using it too, which would probably be included in
each distribution. I don't really know. There's a UMSDOS HOWTO - see:
http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/www.linuxdoc.org/
> And the only reason I would want to install to a FAT drive is to be able
> to read the files on the drive from DOS - creating a Linux partition
> would mean the files were only readable under Linux.
If you want to use FAT disks with Linux, I recommend you use kernel
2.2.10, if you're using a 2.2.x kernel. I experience FAT filesystem
corruption with an earlier release.
There are utilities for reading Linux disks from Windows '95, Windows NT,
e.g. Explore2fs:
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/
There was another utility I had for actually mounting ext2 disks
read-only, but that doesn't seem to work with Windows '95 OSR 2.1.
> Same reason I don't use NTFS with Win2000 :-)
You can read NTFS from DOS - see:
http://www.sysinternals.com/
Never tried it myself, but I hear it works.
> I take it you've seen the famous photo of the airport departures screen ;-)
No, I haven't - I'll take a look.
> > It seems that GNU will outlast most OS's ;)
>
> Let's hope it does ;-) Keep it real, keep it free. Respect.
Indeed.
HTH, bye,
--
Richard Dawe
richdawe AT bigfoot DOT com ICQ 47595498 http://www.bigfoot.com/~richdawe/
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