Mail Archives: opendos/2002/05/30/04:55:07
I think (as I think you also do) that Ben's posting gives a clue about how
Ontrack's DDO and LILO can coexist. I won't elaborate on that here, so
as not to effectively duplicate the other message.
Loadlin.exe sounds like a great idea - I'll certainly look into this option.
It will be nice not to lose the safety provided by good ol' DDO (sure, it
uses up a wee bit of conventional memory but, as I commented on
originally, it certainly doesn't degrade disk performance). This option
is also ONE way of solving that messy boot selection prompt that LILO
currently displays ...
As for that problem, I'll have another attempt to figure out what's
what ... I thought alphanumeric characters in ANSI were the same
as ASCII (or perhaps, like Unicode, at least still recognisable)?
Nothing I've looked at, has had anything recognisable in it at all. :-/
Loadlin.exe is sounding better all the time! <g>
This Linux stuff is sure confusing! It's hard to determine all the stuff
that goes on during boot-up. The documentation for everything is
chaotic - sometimes there's a "help xxxxx" (if it's an internal command
I think), sometimes there's a "--help" command line option, sometimes
there's a "man page", sometimes there's an "info page", sometimes
there's a HTML page, in any number of possible places, and there's
probably some other possibilities that I can't recall at the moment.
Much of this documentation assumes the reader is already familiar
with all this Linux stuff. And you have to realize that all the
documentation for the internal commands is within the 'bash' man
pages (which are many thousand lines long!) I still haven't figured
out where the documentation for 'linuxconf' is hiding! Arghh!!!
(I'd better shut up now!;-)
Speaking of 'dosemu', I downloaded the "DR-DOS emulator" image
file from "www.drdos.com" ... does anybody know what I'm supposed
to do with it? There are certainly no instructions at "www.drdos.com"
and it's not a recognisable archive format, so I can't see how to
extract any documentation from it either.
Joe.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rob McGee [SMTP:i812 AT softhome DOT net]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 11:23 PM
> To: 'opendos AT delorie DOT com'
> Subject: Re: DOS/Linux coexistence (was: [Club Dr-DOS])
>
> On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 02:46:23PM +1000, da Silva, Joe wrote:
> > Firstly, I seem to recall someone here mentioning that LILO could be
> > installed in
> > either the MBR or the DOS boot sector. The LILO documentation also seems
> to
>
> Yes, but we'd say MBR or the superblock of a Linux partition. I don't
> think you can install LILO to a FAT partition. I did something similar
> once (although it may have been NTFS; I don't remember) and it trashed
> the filesystem.
>
> > suggest this and that recent versions of LILO and Ontrack's DM were
> > compatible.
>
> Perhaps. I think it should work as Ben suggests. However, as long as you
> plan to have DOS available, loadlin.exe is much easier to work with. It
> has the considerable advantage of being configurable (such as it is ...
> you don't need to configure it at all if you just run it from the DOS
> command line) under absolutely any OS imaginable.
>
> There's a new version of loadlin just released, 1.6c. This finally fixed
> the long-time limitation of kernel size. It's too new to be included in
> any distro, so you'd have to look up the site at freshmeat.net. I know
> that Slackware's pending release has a .tgz of loadlin. You can get it
> here: (watch for word wrap if your mail client does it)
>
> ftp://ftp.eunet.be/pub/slackware/slackware-current/slackware/a/loadlin-1.6
> c-i386-1.tgz
>
> I used to have loadlin configured in a config.sys multi-boot menu (with
> MS-DOS, but I know DR-DOS can do that too.) Here's how the Linux boot
> looked:
> shell=[drive:][\path-to\]loadlin.exe [drive:][\path-to\]kernel.img
> [Linux_boot_parameters]
> You want to load this with no memory management, as clean a DOS
> environment as you can possibly get. YMMV -- I've heard that some have
> had to use memory management in the past, but that was before the new
> loadlin release.
>
> In case you didn't figure it out, "kernel.img" would be the filename of
> your Linux kernel image file. Most distros AFAIK install theirs as
> /vmlinuz or /boot/vmlinuz. You need to copy that onto your DOS
> filesystem. Put it anywhere you like.
>
> If you edit your DOS config.sys under Linux, you have to watch for the
> DOS vs. UNIX text format. There are numerous ways to take care of this
> little problem.
>
> > Back to the topic of LILO, one thing that annoys me is that when it
> writes
> > it's boot menu (which looks OK), it then writes a garbled boot selection
> > prompt, awaiting selection of the menu choice. I can't figure out why
> the
> > boot selection prompt message is garbled. I'm not 100% sure where it
> gets
>
> I don't know either. I think it's ANSI. What distribution is this? I use
> a text LILO prompt, myself, but IIRC I had to substitute some parameter
> in /etc/lilo.conf, or make /boot/boot.b a symlink to boot-text.b.
>
> > format that I can view. Any idea how to fix this annoying little
> problem?
>
> Again I'd recommend loadlin. It's just as fast as LILO and *far* more
> convenient.
>
> > Finally, while I can access the DOS partitions from Linux, what should
> > I use to access the Linux partition from DOS?
>
> I don't know if there's a DOS equivalent, but there's "explore2fs" for
> Windows.
>
> What I'd suggest is that you set up dosemu to make your life easier. You
> can do quite a bit of DOS through dosemu. What I liked about it was
> having a DOS console with other than standard VGA 80x25 text mode. Try
> out your "xtree" in a 128x48 framebuffer console -- it would be almost
> as good as "mc" under Linux. ;) :)
>
> HTH, let me know if you need more information.
>
> Rob - /dev/rob0
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