Baslinux mailing list

[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

If you're running a network, you prolly dont wanna use dos. Linux is, by
all accounts the best os for that. But if you have only a single user
desktop, the user & network management info, which is voluminous, is
largely superfluous, and really complicates the RTFM issue.

Like right now, I'd quote the message on this issue, but right now- the
RH ximian mail setup insists on smtp.hypertech.net rather than
mail.hypertech.net, which is what my local, rather inept, ISP is using
for outgoing, as well as incoming mail.

With BL, it seems fairly straightforward to setup autoexec.bat to launch
BL, even by default, to bring up my Linux desktop. No login, no
password, no nuttin. If someone accesses my desktop, I dont have a
password problem on this pc, I have a family problem. I am the only one
who should be using this pc. (there's a win 98 out front for those who
need it.)

It aint hard to set it up with a floppy boot that comes right to the BL
desktop, without me having to be at the pc to choose. Leave the floppy
out, and it'll boot to dos off the HD. All I havta do, is turn it on,
and then go on about the rest of my life, and the desktop I want will be
here when I get around to it. I have not seen a distro install yet that
offered to set it up like that for me. If I wanted root, no biggie, just
use su on the terminal, or ctrl-alt-F1

With older, flakey hardware, dos will often boot when nothing else will,
and when it does, there's lots of diagnostic tools to tell what the
problem is. And, with BL, it aint hard to get to the bash prompt. With
other distros, I've seen a video problem result in a *CLI* that blinks
so fast I cant use it to run xf86config to correct the problem. But
since BL boots from loadlin, I dont expect I'll ever see that, no matter
how bad I screw up the xwin setup.

BTW: I havnt tried it, but does the print screen key still work? With
dos, if there's a problem in the boot process, I can often hit the print
screen, and get hard copy before all the error messages scroll off the
screen. In any case, what appeals to me is this sequential process,
whereby each stage of the BL launch process, no matter how badly it is
screwed up, cannot prevent the earlier stage from being a useful place
to begin to diagnose problems.

I like the idea of it running in a ramdisk as well. I routinely test dos
apps from a ramdrive, and if they dont work, NBD, if I havta reboot, the
crashed app never had a chance to write anything on the hard drive. And,
since BL is so quintissentially a single user desktop, it *never* tells
me I dont have *permission* to access my own drives. Since DRAM is so
cheap right now, it makes perfect sense to run the whole session in the
ram drive, and only save what actually works, rather than having to go
back later to try correct the problems of a bungled install.

The idea of being able to run on a 486 was a noble cause. but nowadays,
there are lots of win 95 machines out there at junk prices, with 233 mhz
32 meg socket 7, that can do a perfectly normal job of surfing or email,
given that the real bottleneck is the 56k modem. (or maybe a 33.6) part
of the BL mandate is provide an OS for the cheapest possible PC. 

But the cheapest thing you can buy online these days is an ATX socket
370 mthbd for 20$, 10 gig IDE for 20$, 4meg PCI video for 10$, 128meg
DRAM for 15-20$, and the same old ATX case, 101 kybd, 1.44 FD, 12x CD,
and mouse. CPU Running at 300-500mhz. Way overbuilt for BL2; but at
these prices, some of it might be buggy.

I got one of these that'll boot FREEDOS, and then BL, but it wont boot
DRDOS and several other distros. Folks trying to recycle a win 9x
machine could go nuts trying to get a regular linux distro installed,
but the incrementalism of BL would be something a newbie could cope
with. I havent seen much in the Linux documentation about hardware
problems, which makes sense, because no sysad is gonna waste his time
(at 25-50$/hour) trying to figure it out when normally working PCs in
the networked organization are so cheap.

I have the original manuals that came with Redhat, Mandrake, and Corel.
>From the standpoint of the newbie win user, Corel is *way* ahead, and
the reason has a lot to do with the fact that Corel has been writing
manuals for newbies for 15 years or so, and provides a user guide as
well as an installation guide. And since they wrote for win users for so
many years, they have a much better idea of what folks already know. The
other distros have been written for sysads, which is certianly useful to
them, but mind boggling to newbies.

For instance, there was the problem mentioned here of the virtual screen
being larger. Maybe that made sense on a 486 VGA; but Corel not only
defaults to the highest res your SVGA has, it also works out
automatically what the video card and monitor can do- without user
input. No questions asked. I Liked Mandrake, but there were video setups
that I could not get right no matter what I did with xf86config.

Corel usta be a problem cause it would churn the hell out of a hard
drive... if you had less then 64megs of DRAM. But that's not a biggie
with DRAM so cheap these days. But- it also ran on the debian 2.2.16
kernel, which is long in the tooth, and what's worse, with Ntscpe 4.7,
which is really buggy. Apt-get is really nice, but it wont getcha with
the debian servers down. 

Redhat's got 'up2date', and a long list of patches for the 2.4 kernel.
We'll see. the ftp was maxed out earlier, but I'll try the http after I
post this message, and go to bed. And check later to see if the *13* meg
download came thru ok on the 56k. Score another point for BL. A download
size that is small enough to see if it worked, rather than having to
sleep on it. Like dos, BL downloads are small enough to try out in a
given session.