Baslinux mailing list

[Matrix Mole <matrixm AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> How much space does non-gui Win98 occupy and is this something free or
> must it be purchased?

Basically, what I've done is installed Win98 and then edited the MSDOS.SYS
file to not boot the GUI automatically (BootGui=0) and then added boot.bat
into my autoexec.bat file. This way when I boot it automatically goes into
BL unless I plug a monitor in and prevent the autoexec from running. If I
need to go up into Win98 I can just then type "win" at the dos prompt. Of
course, I have yet to need the windows gui on that system, thus the reason
for getting rid of it completely.

> How does one go about using one linux in two or more partitions?  Apart
> from mounting all the partitions (in fstab?) would I have to specify which
> partition files are on, as in DOS?  (c:\bl2\boot.bat versus
> d:\baslin\boot.bat)   Or would I just tell it the directory name without
> the partition name?  /home  rather than /hdb2/home   ?   If the latter is
> the case, I may as well make four primary ext2 partitions.

You have to list the other hard drives in fstab and where they will mount
to. For example the line:

-----
/dev/hdb2   /home   ext2   defaults   1   2
-----

will have hdb2 house everything in the /home directories. When navigating
the linux file system the location of the partitions is seamless. The two
best reasons for doing this method instead of having everything on one
partition are space and protection of data. If the data on the /home
partition is corrupted, then your root file system is safe from the
corruption, also if you need more space in the /home partition you can add
another or larger hard drive.

> Can the same swap partition be used for several linuxes?

I don't see why it can't be done, someone else here on the lst has managed
to get Linux and Windows operating on the same drive and using the windows
swap file for their linux swap space.

> Thanks, I just downloaded that and 13 pages of a primer on how hard drives
> and partitions work.  IDE, CHS, LBA.  I put copies at my website.  So you
> have used this with linux and not lost anything?

Yep, when I first setup my BL machine I didn't install Win98 on it, I did
an old school format c: /s and then fdisk/mbr so that it would boot with
nothing on the drive at all. Unfortunately, win98 fdisk wouldn't let me
create a partition smaller than like 50MB IIRC, so I used partition
manager to shrink the Win partition down to roughly 3MB (just enough room
for the BL needed boot files and a tiny bit of storage if needed), and
then added the free space from hda1 onto hda2 (before I added the second
drive to my BL system).

> Mr. Ranish appears to be Slavic.  The best software for old computers
> comes from the former Soviet Empire.  Arachne, links, a nice DOS viewer
> (all Czech), my favorite DOS spreadsheet (Slovak), a database manager for
> DOS or linux (Ukrainian), a C-- compiler (Russian from Ukraine).  Peanut
> linux?

I had never even noticed this before. Of course I don't use alot of those
programs so I wouldn't have none this either :)

-- 
Matrix Mole
matrixm AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org