[BL] zipslack (UMSDOS), pkunzip, and 'Not a kernel image'

sindi keesan keesan at sdf.lonestar.org
Sun Oct 31 21:11:12 EST 2004


On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 3aoo-cvfd at dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> sindi keesan wrote:
>>
>> I tried pkunzip -d zipslack.zip
>> Insufficient memory for pkunzip.
>> Can the extracted file be larger than 64MB for DOS pkunzip?
>
> I had the same problem with the old (standard) DOS
> version of pkunzip.  I believe there is a more recent
> DOS version that is able to handle very large files.

Is that new version freeware?  I think we ran into a for-pay version.


>
>> Does UMSDOS overheat things more than regular linuxes?
>
> UMSDOS certainly carries more overhead than ext2.
> Each Linux file is stored individually on the DOS
> filesystem, so even a tiny file takes up a whole
> cluster.  Linux has *lots* of tiny files.  Add to
> that the complications of maintaining a permission
> structure on a filesystem which doesn't do permissions
> and of doing symbolic links on a filesystem which
> doesn't do those either.  And then there's the DOS
> fragmentation problem.

> So yes, Linux has to work harder on UMSDOS.
> And it's slower, and bigger, and less stable.

Took about a minute to load.  I did not manage to crash it but I have not 
yet figured out how to use it.  I can copy files over from the rest of the 
partition (from DOS) so I copied kermit.  No elm or mutt, no links.
No eznet.   I tried to load the sb sound modules but it said the device 
was already busy.  Won't play sound.  It has a lot of stuff for other 
hardware and locales and also all the compiler files and perl and loads of 
doc files and groff and all the man pages.

  >
> Note:  the loop filesystem (used by BL3) is not
> subject to those issues.  Although the image file
> (fs.img) does sit on a DOS filesystem, the actual
> filesystem is ext2.  Permissions, links, clusters
> are no problem.  And the fragmentation issue relates
> to only one file (the image file), not to the zillions
> of Linux files.

Is there some way to defragment the loop file or is this not necessary?
Mulinux had about 3000 linux files.  How many is a zillion?  Mulinux was 
about a 2MB download and this was a 37MB zip file so 20x3000=60,000 files? 
It may have been ten times that.  Too many for DOS to defragment.  Is 
there some limit as to how many files can be in a DOS partition?

> Cheers,
> Steven
>
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keesan at sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org



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