Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

We just tried out menuet from a floppy disk.  There is a 1.5M exe file
that will install the files to you, or a zip file half the size.

It asked about video, mouse, RAM (we had 8M and it would not finish
installing - had to put in the minimum 32M) and then booted into a gui
that looks like Windows with icons and also a start menu.  

Our NCR ISA non-vesa VGA card left little fragments of color around the
screen the serial mouse stopped working a few times after I hiy Alt-F4
trying to exit a program.  This OS is mouse-only.  No keyboard commands
that I could find.  It looks pretty bad at 256 color 640x480.  

There is tftpc and telnet and a very simple browser and email (including
pop mail) but to get online you need to edit an assembler file by filling
in the ISP phone number, login and passowrd, and reassemble it with fasm,
which is part of the 1.3M set of files on the disk.  We did not try this.  
I don't like mice and guis.  You can edit the icons and their text.

Plays CDs, midi files and MP3 if you have SB16.  Supports Realtek and 
Intel, and the latest beta version also 3com, ethernet.  Add-ons are 
available including Doom.  Comes with tetris and chess and a maze game.  
No help files in the programs but there are lots of .txt file on the disk.  

Text editor, jpeg and bitmap viewers.  Infrared support.  It seems to be
designed for newish hardware (or a 386 with 32M RAM, I suppose).  Lots of
system stuff for determining cpu usage, etc.  Sort of a DOS clone of
linux, but in assembler not C.  It also has a version of Sphinx (a DOS C
type compiler) but not on this disk.  Various Czech, Poles, Finns, and
Russians are writing more programs for it and adding hardware support.

You can also install to hard disk.  There are warnings that this could  
destroy your hard drive (or at least the files on it).  We tried it on a 
computer with no hard drive.

This one is NOT for beginners.  But it might be interesting to look at for 
ideas for basliclinux.

It all goes into RAM.  If you modify what is in RAM you are prompted at 
exit to save the modifications to the floppy disk.

> A friend just steered me to www.menuetos.org, which has developed an 
> operating system that fits on one floppy disk and is FAT32 written in 
> assembler.  Has a GUI for VESa 2.0, or 1.2, or VGA/EGA.  There are also 
> applications such as a ppp dialer, games, screensaver, icons, compilers 
> (it uses Sphinx C-- which I translated the Russian manual for once), a 
> jpeg viewer, and several forums.  Seems to be supported largely by Czechs 
> and Russians but they also do Chinese.  Unfortunately the sourceforge 
> downloads require javascript (they said to use netscape or explorer).  I 
> will try links2 on it.  
> 
> I did not read far enough to find out the memory requirement, but it needs 
> a 386.
> 
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