Baslinux mailing list

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

On Sat, 8 May 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> This is the one of the three that is working most consistently.  I don't
> want to have to boot from a Win9x floppy disk every time to use linux.   I
> also don't want to use Win9x DOS as the system on this computer because I
> am not running Windows on it and won't be able to defragment DOS with
> Win98 DOS defrag.

Actually, you can still defrag the machine even if you're using win98 DOS
as opposed to dos6 Dos. You just ahve to boot with the older dos boot disk
(I'm assuming that it'd be a win98 without the windows/program files
directories). It sounds as though there's something seriously wrong with
the ssytems though. Have you looked at the possiblity of changeing BIOS
settings to disable PnP OS? I've never heard of problems like you're
reporting, but if it only works when using a PnP OS, and has serious
errors when non-PnP is used, then that may be the problem in a nutshell.

> I will try lilo to bypass this problem.  It is supposed to give me a
> choice of DOS or linux, right?  Once I am in DOS, I would need to reboot
> the computer to get into linux, I think, just like I have to reboot it
> (check RAM, etc.) to get from linux back to DOS.

lilo is a boot manager similar to the manager offered by winnt and
partition magic (and others). It sits on the MBR of your primary HD. When
you turn on your computer or restart is (using Ctrl-Alt-Del, or any other
method that gives BIOS version information), it loads data from the MBR
before anything else is done about OS's. Then the boot manager takes over.
In the case of lilo, it really doesn't provide a menu like choice, just a
command that you can type the "name" (as specified in lilo configuration
when you setup it up to begin with) for what OS it should load. Once it
knows what OS to give control of the computer over to, that OS is
completely in control, and the other OS's that may be installed aren't
available (unless, such as linux mount ability, you have some way of
access the data on that partition type, like Windows allowing you to see
Dos drives, or WinNt allowing access to Win98 drives, etc). So to go from
one OS to the other, you will have to reboot the computer (either
Ctrl-Alt-Del, or cycle the power off and on).

> When will the bl3 with lilo be available?  Or is it fairly simple to just
> install lilo.tgz and if not, could you explain how?  Two of these
> computers are working perfectly apart from linux (which also would not do
> plip correctly on the times when it did boot).

I've heard that lilo is very confusion to setup and ahve operate properly
on a computer. The only times I've ever set it up myself were when I
installed larger distros of linux that have nice GUI installers (and who
invariably dumped twice as much stuff on the HD as I would ever actualyl
want to use). In those cases, the installers were pre-configured for
detecting settings, so I never had much of a problem getting lilo to work,
but for installing lilo from lilo.tgz, I've never tried it, so I don't
know how easy it'd be to setup. I would assume that there is a lilo HOWTO
somewhere in tldp.org that you could peruse.

> I cannot imagine why this sort of problem would be intermittent.

Again, it may have something to do with PnP BIOS settings needing to be
turned off. Other than that, I have no clue as to why the problem exists
at all.

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