Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

BL3 really has no installation routine: you just unzip it and copy it to
your DOS partition (or unzip it *on* your DOS partition).  Therefore, I'm
not sure if my suggestion is feasible.  Whether it's adviseable is yet
another question.  But since the question of the size of fs.img has been
posed but not really answered, let me offer the following suggestion: how
about letting the user choose, somehow, what size he/she'd like fs.img to
be?  Of course there's a minimum size limit, so a range between xMB and
xxMB would have to be presented.  Then, there should be some suggested
guidelines - e.g., "if you plan to use this machine as an xterminal, 5MB
may suffice: but if you plan on using it as a standalone Linux machine,
you should make it at least 15MB."  Would this sort of choice be
feasible/adviseable?

At the risk of sidetracking that discussion, I've also been mulling over
the role of DOS in BL3.  I can think of some good reasons to use DOS
alongside Linux - as has been discussed here before.  But are there some
drawbacks as well?  For example, the FAT16 filesystem is supposed to be
not very efficient at storing data.  So, perhaps HD space cannot be as
efficiently used as if BL3 were using a native ext2 filesystem.  Also, are
there any performance hits in using this loop device method on top of
FAT16?  I'm not trying to be critical - just to get some bearings on the
concepts behind BL3.  It's really an interesting idea to run a Linux
system like this, but it's sort of "out in left field" (never seen or
heard of it before) and therefore difficult to assimilate (at least for
me).

Feedback appreciated.

Thanks, James