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Mail Archives: opendos/2002/05/31/10:23:16

Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 07:56:11 -0500
From: Rob McGee <i812 AT softhome DOT net>
To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: DOS/Linux coexistence (was: [Club Dr-DOS]) #2
Message-ID: <20020531125611.GE27335@hal>
References: <20020531 DOT 021540 DOT -277703 DOT 2 DOT domanspc AT juno DOT com>
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BTW Bob, if you don't mind, could you turn off the HTML for list mail?
Thank you.

On Fri, May 31, 2002 at 02:15:35AM -0700, domanspc AT juno DOT com wrote:
> I just installed Caldera Open Linux 2.3 and it gives you a choice of 
> putting the linux loader in the MBR (if you are sure you will never,
> never, ever want to use another OS on your computer) or in the 
> Linux partition if you want to use another OS at some time or another.

I think you may be misunderstanding the issues. LILO can quite easily
manage booting multiple OS's, whether in the MBR or not. Possibly the
issue is that DOS-based OS's will claim the MBR for themselves when
installed. But this can be fixed easily too.

WinNT and successors are more multi-boot-friendly. They do not overwrite
a LILO MBR. In fact they don't even have a tool to overwrite a MBR. The
MS Knowledge Base tells you to use fdisk for DOS if you need to do this.

> Of course a lot of the people on this list are just naturally gluttons
> for punishment 
> and masochistic after years of using the old dinosaur DOS and making it
> do all 
> of the things dear old uncle Bill and IBM said it couldn't do.  You know
> the type. 
> Most of us probably are one anyway.

I'm like that, although my dinosaurism is more about hardware than
software. :) Maybe. UNIX is quite a bit older than DOS, and most of what
I do in it is with old-fashioned console user interfaces. The GUI is an
afterthought, just a quick way to switch among xterms. :)

> Those people should probably just go out on the net and find the various
> pieces 
> of the GNU-Linux OS and download them to their old 486's with 8 MB of ram

As a great way of getting into it from such a machine, I recommend the
ZipSlack subdistribution of Slackware. That's how I started (although I
used a 386. :) If hard drive space is limited, look for ZipSlack version
4.0, which was much more complete than later versions.

> Hope you all have fun with your DOS/Linux computers.  

Of course! :)

    Rob - /dev/rob0

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