Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 07:56:11 -0500 From: Rob McGee 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> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20020531.021540.-277703.2.domanspc@juno.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.27i Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: opendos AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk 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