Mail Archives: opendos/2002/05/30/10:33:54
On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 07:01:46PM +1000, da Silva, Joe wrote:
> Loadlin.exe sounds like a great idea - I'll certainly look into this option.
I've never understood why it gets so little attention, even among former
DOS users. I did eventually switch to LILO myself, but only because I
wanted one esoteric LILO feature. Most users wouldn't care about that
feature, and they could happily use DOS to manage their booting.
> 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
Hmmm, if it's a DOS TSR, loadlin will eliminate it. I'm not sure about
how it will work.
> This Linux stuff is sure confusing!
Yes, it seemed that way at first.
> It's hard to determine all the stuff that goes on during boot-up.
Depending on what distribution you have, the messages shouldn't be
hidden from you. I don't know, I guess; maybe I'm just spoilt by
Slackware (which I think would tend to appeal to those coming to Linux
from a DOS, as opposed to a Windows, heritage.)
> The documentation for everything is
> chaotic - sometimes there's a "help xxxxx" (if it's an internal command
> [snip]
> probably some other possibilities that I can't recall at the moment.
Yes yes yes. But almost ALL of it is documented at least somewhat. :)
That is a refreshing change from Windows. MS's FUD notwithstanding, the
fact is that GNU/Linux operating systems are the best supported in
existence.
Again, how the documentation is given varies by distribution. Look in
/usr/doc and/or /usr/share/doc for the documentation that each package
provides. There is usually much documentation accompanying source code,
so if you got the source for your distribution you can look there too.
The Linux kernel itself has a "Documentation" directory in the source
package, and there is a wealth of information there.
> 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
:) "man bash" is indeed very evil. There are some shell tutorials you
might find online which help get you started with bash. Then there's the
_Advanced Bash Scripting Guide_, an online book at http://ldp.org/ ,
which although "advanced" is much more approachable than "man bash".
Speaking of LDP, that's a great place for finding information, although
caution is sometimes warranted. You really should consult documentation
for your distribution first, because they often make tools to help you
with various tasks. Sounds like you're using Red Hat, so poke around a
bit at http://www.redhat.com/ . They may have Web forums for helping
beginners. And of course there's Usenet: the excellent search engine at
http://groups.google.com/ has all the questions and most of the answers
thereto. Don't forget to do a Web search there as well.
There are also various distro-neutral newbie resources other than LDP.
I've heard many speak well of linuxnewbie.org. There's a pretty good
general Linux sysadmin book at http://rute.sourceforge.net.
> out where the documentation for 'linuxconf' is hiding! Arghh!!!
> (I'd better shut up now!;-)
I don't care for linuxconf. I prefer to manage my own configuration by
directly editing files. You can do that with any distro. (Slackware
doesn't even have anything like linuxconf; just a few scripts which may
automate some configurations. I don't always use those, either. :)
> 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"
An "image file" is usually mountable via the loop driver. If you're
talking about the "DOSEMU HDIMAGE" on the download page, that's exactly
what it is. You can mount it, probably with commands like this:
mkdir /mnt/drdos
mount -o loop [/path-to/]hdimage.drdos703.eval /mnt/drdos
The filesystem can be found under your /mnt/drdos directory, but you
won't find anything new in there. It's just an installation of DR-DOS,
the same as you probably already have on your hard drive.
Your answer is in the dosemu documentation. You edit /etc/dosemu.conf
(IIRC) to tell dosemu to boot that image as "drive C:". There are
examples in that file which show you how to do it.
Do you have dosemu installed? Try "which dos" to find out. Many distros
provide a binary dosemu package; if yours didn't you can get the source
from http://www.dosemu.org/ and compile it yourself.
Some distros don't always install everything you need to compile. I'm
glad I started with Slackware in that regard, because such errors, while
being very simple to fix, are very difficult for beginners to diagnose.
Slackware defaults to install a broad selection of development packages.
BTW, I think I've included enough of value in these two posts to also
toss in a bit of spam. :) I do consulting on a rather low-cost basis,
even barter. If it's worth it for you to spend a little money or mail me
some goodies (I'm in the USA so that might be a problem) I'd be glad to
give you whatever personal assistance and tutelage you might need. Make
an offer, I'd probably take it.
Rob - /dev/rob0
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