Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, David Lane wrote:

> There is a file,but you should NOT delete it.The names of files that display
> your 98 "splash" screens are as follows; logo.sys,logos.sys,and
> logow.sys.Don't let the .sys file extension fool you,they are BMP files pure
> and simple.Windows is written to show these files and deleting them can
> cause it to crash.But,the good news here is,you don't have to settle for
> what they want you to see.In DOS mode,run the ATTRIB command for the three
> files mentioned (ATTRIB -r -a -s -h filename) then boot into Windows.Open

That sounds like what we did to msdos.sys to set bootgui=0 (to boot into 
DOS instead).  Why would they name a bmp file sys?  This logo looks 
animated to me - not the usual bmp file.

Just turned on the Windows 98 computer and I found logos.sys and logow.sys
but no logo.sys.  They differ by 2 bytes (129,080 or 078).  Win.com has
'logos.sys' in it but not logow.sys.  

Without unhiding logos.sys and logow.sys I found them in c:\windows using
Windows itself.  Looked at logos.sys and it says 'It's now safe to turn
off your computer.' (logo - safe?) And logow.sys (logo-windows?) is the
one with the Windows logo.  I will play with that one.  Perhaps I can find 
a nice penguin in 640x480.   Exiting Windows gave me a logo with the 
colored stuff and 'windows is shutting down'.   Is this a variant of 
logow.sys?  

> the paint program then open these files one at a time to find what their
> attributes are (size,640x480 e.g.).You can then take ANY BMP file you want
> to use for these functions and size them to match the ones being used.You
> simply rename then to match what Windows uses and move them to the root
> replacing the others in the process.You can get some interesting effects
> this way.......lol.

>      As for the cable select feature,Anthony explained it better than I.The
> other part of that is this,certain BIOS have the feature (unintentional I
> would suppose) that when you install your hardrives this way it adds their
> drive letter to the boot order.If,ergo,all your drives are bootable,then all
> you do is specify the one you want after a:\.It's a poorman's substitute for
> a boot manager but it works if the BIOS supports it.I used it once when a
> drive I wanted to use had Win NT on it.Yes,NT has it's own boot loader,but
> it wants to be the boss and stubbornly refuses to boot anything but another
> Microsoft product (at least I couldn't get it too) and while I mostly used
> NT at the time,I was playing with Oberon OS as well.While there was still
> DOS on the drive,NT would boot it but when I finally got the drive pure
> Oberon,that stopped working.I was told,and found by accident that my
> motherboard and BIOS supported this and set it up.A poor solution to be sure
> but it worked.It was just a thought.Sorry so long winded,just my way I
> guess........lol.

Our BIOS's, as far as I recall, had nothing in them about cable select, 
tho some of them will let us boot from CDROM.  (Others offer a: c: or 
scsi).  I will probably just stick to loadlin.  But this was very 
interesting.  For years I have been wondering what cable select meant.

What is Oberon?

Not a lot of progress on the next Linux computer.  We just noticed that
the super-duper Pentium I motherboard with FOUR (4) ISA slots (in the 286
case with a nice big red switch that cooperates with a power strip unlike
the new ones), that was supposed to be my best computer, and that is
designed to identify the speed and voltage of the CPU, has identified the
Intel 233MHz MMX as an Intel 150MHz MMX.  We had set it to 233 a while ago
but it reset itself.  It came from a friend's computer (in a huge 386
tower) which identified her AMD K6 233 cpu as a 33MHz 486 and we thought
the cpu was the problem.  Guess not.  THis is the second such motherboard
which is running oddly like this.  The last one was running cpus at a
multiple of 50 instead of 66MHz (we would put in a 233 and it ran at not
3.5 x 66 but 3.5 x 50 = 175, and a 166 would run at 2.5 x 50 = 125).  
This one seems to be even more confused.  Luckily we have another board
with real jumpers (for which I found the motherboard manual before they
took it offline) that will take 233MHz cpus.  What causes this sort of
motherboard problem and is it easily/cheaply fixable?  


> David Lane
> _______________________________________________