From: Richard Dawe Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: Win 2000 & Djgpp Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2000 12:38:16 +0000 Organization: Customer of Planet Online Lines: 105 Message-ID: <38AE8EB8.31B068E1@bigfoot.com> References: <88h09d$9of$1 AT spruce DOT ukc DOT ac DOT uk> <38AC4F1B DOT 3A1D2870 AT bigfoot DOT com> <88k9kj$4s2$1 AT spruce DOT ukc DOT ac DOT uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: modem-117.neon.dialup.pol.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: newsg2.svr.pol.co.uk 950970554 16754 62.136.9.117 (19 Feb 2000 14:29:14 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: 19 Feb 2000 14:29:14 GMT X-Complaints-To: abuse AT theplanet DOT net X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.14 i586) X-Accept-Language: de,fr To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com 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 . 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/