Baslinux mailing list

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

> 7.10 works on ALL our computers so far.  If you have Win98 on already, it 
> assigns the drive letters correctly when you boot from 7.10 floppy disk. If 
> you have DR-DOS on there and boot from 7.10 floppy, it moves over all the 
> drive letters by one and uses C: for autoexec.bat and config.sys (the 
> original C: becomes D:, etc.) but linux will boot (on a computer where it 
> would not boot with loadlin after a DR-DOS boot- which by now is three DFIs, 
> one ASUS but the other is okay, and one Gateway but the other two are okay).
>
> We have not yet tried sys'ing the DFIs with DR-DOS to 7.10 to see if it finds 
> drives correctly but we have high hopes for it.


We are running into problems with 7.10 even booted from floppy disk.

There are two versions of bootdisk:  msdos71b.zip and mdos71db.zip.
The latter is Chinese and so is the readme.txt.  It comes with a text 
editor (the latter one displays in Chinese) which works.  The CHinese 
version has a lot of extras such as USB drivers.  Neither of the 
*hciaspi.sys files would install on our computer (which works with a USB 
mouse).  But we don't understand USB.

We cannot get the second version to install to HD or even get the copy 
command to copy to hard disk.  It will copy to floppy disk.

The Chinese version (maybe also the other one) sets up a 4MB RAMdisk and 
copies its files to that.

The first (original) version does not work correctly with my partner's 
text editor.  He can save a file to disk, but if he makes changes and 
tries to save it again it will not save to the same name file.
He has not checked the second version with his editor.  The editor works 
fine with FreeDOS, DRDOS, MS-DOS 6.22 and earlier, and Win9X DOS.
But it does let me boot linux with loadlin from a computer that won't boot 
from anything else but Win9X DOS.

How much longer does it take to go from DOS to linux via a reboot and lilo 
than directly using loadlin?

I may just set up with lilo and choose between DOS (FreeDOS or DR-DOS), 
BL3 and BL2.  With DOS as default OS and 3 sec to select.  Can someone 
point me at a list discussion of how to add lilo to BL2 ext2?