Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

Having determined that I cannot defrag with Win98 DOS unless I have Win98 
DOS on my computer, that defragging a Win98 drive with FreeDOS can cause 
serious problems (possibly less so if you first boot into FreeDOS) and 
that my 'new' ASUS motherboard will not boot any form of linux, as of 
yesterday, without WIn9X DOS, I gave up and switched drives between my 
Win-DOS-linux and my DOS-linux computers.  I also switched video cards and 
modems.  It went very smoothly.  For some reason Win98 told me I had a new 
PCI video card.  It also found two unknown devices with no names, one of 
which needed no drivers and was working, and offered to update the drivers 
for me on request.

I am astonished at Windows.  It is behaving properly except for exiting 
Dialup Networking when I ask for properties of my dialup connection.

I am also astonished that our 9" greyscale VGA monitor, an IBM, displayed 
at 1024 resolution in WIndows (a bit skewed to the left but that may be 
adjustable).

The new ASUS booted ext2 BL3 on the first try.  Whatever broke, has been 
fixed/patched by Win98.  For once they did something better than FreeDOS.

The mcddrv.sys driver for the 4x4 NEC 1993 CD-ROM drive refuses to install 
on this computer - maybe symptomatic of something, but it only seems to 
affect the mcdtray software for open/close, and there are buttons for 
that.

So I suggest to anyone with a 'not an image file' problem while booting to 
try it with Win98 (or Win95, which can be put into 60MB or less - and I 
think someone has set up a really small version of it which might only be 
the DOS parts).

The ASUS was said to be a 'crummy board'.  No USB header to be seen.  Only 
3 PCI and 2 ISA slots.  The 3rd PCI uses the same opening as one ISA. 
Still better than the newer boards with 1 or 0 ISA slots.

If I want to add a scanner card, I can give up the internal modem, or  the
SB16 ISA sound card.  To put in a PCI sound card I could switch to 
AGP video.  Adding another slot would have required a bigger case.

(By the way, I have compiled SANE 0.57 (with support for qcam, mustek, 
net, and hp) to try with HP scanjet 3P.  About 550K relevant files.  Said 
to work with Scanjet 4C.  Has anyone tried SANE with a 3P?  If it works, 
should I post it?  The SW81 package is huge and SW71 has no SANE package. 
Compiling required adding to the CFLAGS and CPFLAGS lines of all the 
Makefiles -I/path-to-include because the Configuration program was 1997 
(predates BL), and I had to mkdir /usr/local/share to install.)

But the board worked well with Windows 98, takes a standard AT power 
supply (or ATX, your choice), works with linux on top of Win98, and fits 
into a very small case.  For $19 it can be upgraded to 450MHz.

Has anyone added USB support to BL2 and if so, how?  bare.i kernel and 
what else?  Someone gave us a working 'dead' USB Logitech optical mouse.

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org