Baslinux mailing list

[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> > I visited the BasicLinux Home Page a few minutes ago
> > and I found no info there about BL3.
> 
> We've only just started talking about it.  It's still
> several weeks away from anything substantial.  Which
> means:  if you have any strong preferences, one way or
> the other, now is the time to speak before the concrete
> sets.
All right, I'll bite.
How about a single .zip download archive that you can park in a dos
directory of a FAT 32, and have it unzip -d (with directory structure)
that loads into a much larger ramdisk?

When I look around at the surplus gray market, I see that the cheapest
platform you can put togather these days is *at least* a 233mhz that'll
take pc100 dram at 20$/128 megs. 500mhz cpus can be had for 20$ also. I
have a 700mhz with 384megs DRAM on a motherboard I bought to 25$. The
parameters of 'the cheapest platform' you can buy now is not a 4meg 486;
and I'm glad bl-2 is around to keep them out of the land fill. But
nobody is bothering with the warehouse space so that they can sell them.

But a 500mhz with 128 megs is perfectly capable of running a decent web
browser, which is the killer app these days. Anyway, with dram so cheap,
it seems perfectly reasonable to me to park the browser and the OS in a
ramdisk, and not havta worry about internet sabotage software at all.
Because- *DOS* has the file system of the drive you boot from, and its
way too stupid to know what to do with a virus.

So- the question then is, whether that ramdisk can be setup so that you
can shell out or shutdown the Linux session, and then have a simple dos
batch program collect your downloads, bookmarks and email- and store
them as dos files ready for your next session to be accessed by Loadlin
in the BL boot process.

If you left just 4megs of dram, dos could just sit there, and rather
than depending on a 'dosemu', you'd have the real thing, about as bullet
proof as you can get. Could both dos and bl share a ramdisk?