Baslinux mailing list

[Christof Lange <cce.zizkov AT volny.cz>]

On 14 Jan 07 at 5:27, keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org wrote:

>>    USBTOOLS GZ      3 416 648 (my 8 MB RAM disk)
>Are the required modules all in here?

Those required for USB and a few more. But even the 8 MB RAM disk
was quickly filled with mc, zgv and their libraries. 

First I installed the very small mc-small.tgz that Steven compiled
years ago and that is still at the BL2 repository. But this is 
not enough because it does not allow to look into tgz archives. 
Then I tried to compile an older version in one of my Slackware 7.1
systems. I wanted to leave out mouse support and use the ncurses
library instead of slang library, but did not succeed. So I had 
to take the huge mc packet from Slackware distribution. It is similar
with zgv. I took David's compile, because it was slightly smaller 
than the Slackware version. 

>> Although today even for DOS there are USB drivers, USB devices
>> cannot be changed without rebooting. For Windows9x it is not always
>> easy to find the correct drivers. The Linux 2.2.x kernels which form
>
>nusb23e.exe - the English langauge version of 'native usb storage' drivers
>for Win98, which works perfectly and lets you plug things in and out.

I downloaded four or five versions. None of them was ready to work 
with my W98 SE. I think, however, more generic and less 
generic Windows drivers can be found on the net, so that hotplugging 
will work under Windows. But it is time consuming and is it 
reasonable to install Windows just for that? 

>> the basis of the BasicLinux distribution entirely lack USB support.
>
>They lack USB-storage support but have support for other USB devices such as
>mouse and keyboard.

Yes, I forgot. I will correct this in my readme.txt

>> Also CD-burning is very restricted in DOS, so that even on a
>> computer with DOS and BasicLinux it is a quite complicated procedure
>> to backup flash memory devices to CD- ROM.
>
>I found two DOS cd burning programs.

Even cdrtools - as many recent Linux programs - has been ported to 
DOS. But when I tried it, I could not create neither a self-booting 
nor a multi-session data CD. And the resulting CDs seemed to have 
problems to be read by other systems. This is why I decided to keep 
Linux on some of my computers ;-)

>To move large amounts (PLURAL).
>
>Your English here has been perfect so far except for this typo.

Thanks for correcting the English text! 

>Another excellent package from the author of sound and mutt packages for BL.
> Thanks for sharing your work.  I am glad I could help a little.

Probably I will not forget how this one works, as I forgot in 
the case of those you mention. I believe that I will actually 
use this one very often. 

>This package is suitable only for 'modern' computers.  We are currently
>trying to help another list member transfer files to a laptop computer
>without USB drive or CD-ROM drive and we dragged out the old external IBM
>Backpack CD-ROM drive and loaded the DOS driver.  There is also a linux
>module for parport CD-ROM drives that I have not used.

This comes close to the next thing I am going to do. There are still 
a couple of laptops and desktops in our office without USB. I used to 
transfer data only in DOS through interlnk/intersvr connection. 
As I never got to work any real network connection between our 
computers, I will return to BasicLinux 1 and make an other attempt
to create a tool for file sharing tool through parallel port 
connection. But Steven in those days warned that plip will work only
on some few machines. 

Christof

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