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Date: Mon, 03 Feb 1997 10:29:38 -0500
To: opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
From: Takashi Toyooka <ttoyooka AT verisim DOT com>
Subject: [opendos] My installation story
Sender: owner-opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
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Rumoured imminent re-releases notwithstanding, I thought I'd post
my OpenDOS installation story.  

Overall, it's a success story.  I had no major problems, only one
or two small hitches, and it seems to be working fairly smoothly,
although I should say that I haven't exactly pushed it to its
limits.

I have a 386SX-25 with 4M of RAM, a 250M hd, a Trident video card,
and a MS-compatible mouse.  I had to switch the floppy drives so
that I could boot off the 3.5".  I have an AMI BIOS (dated 07/07/91,
BTW - someone with this BIOS was having problems, but I had none).
I backed up all the data on the hard drive and put it away.
Finally, I downloaded DODL701.EXE.  I was set.

(Paragraphs marked with asterisks describe problems, difficulties,
or just contain points that I wanted to make.)

I wanted to know how OpenDOS would handle a virgin computer, so
the first thing I did was pop in an MS-DOS boot disk and delete
all partitions on the hd.  The OD install program nicely started
up fdisk and I created two partitions, one 200M and the other 50M.

 * I found it annoying that fdisk did some kind of surface scan
   without any kind of prompting, and no apparent way of skipping
   it.  I hate to think of the wait that people with 2G drives
   will have to suffer!

I then booted off the hd without any problems.  Changing the name
of the DOS utilities directory (C:\OPENDOS by default - ugh)
caused no headaches.  I found the DIR/W output to be ugly (IMHO)
so I installed 4DOS.  I did some config.sys/autoexec.bat tweaking
to increase conventional memory, and started throwing in all my
favourite utilities.  DJGPP 2.01, and Norton Utilities 7.0, to
name the two major players.

 * As a small note, djgpp out-of-the-box worked with OpenDOS
   out-of-the-box (at least for me).  Didn't have to change any
   DPMS/DPMI settings.

 * When I do a DIR/A in the root directory, I can't see the OD
   system files.  When I do it in 4DOS, I can see everything fine,
   so I assume it's a problem with the OD COMMAND.COM.  Has anyone
   else had this problem?

 * Then, I installed Windows 3.11.  :-P  :-Q  :-I  The install
   program complained that HIMEM.SYS wasn't around, so I installed
   it.  The installation completed without incident, and I deleted
   HIMEM after it was done.  Windows seems to run without any
   problems sans HIMEM.  Go figure.

Did some Windows setups.  Installed a 12M swap file on D drive
(the 50M partition), and enabled 32-bit disk/file accesses, and
installed the video driver, among other trivial setup changes.

 * I've had problems switching TASKMGR tasks with the Ctrl-number
   keystroke.  Anyone else experienced this?  I didn't have time
   to explore it, but I'll give it another go soon.  Ctrl-ESC
   worked fine to bring up the menu, but it'd be great if I could
   switch tasks quickly, like using Alt-Fn to swich consoles in
   Linux, or like Alt-Tab in Windows.

That's about it, so far.  Soon, I'm going to try to get the modem
talking.  Thanks to those who read all the way to the end.  To
those who didn't, PTHPBTHPBBTHPP!  ;-)

Takashi