VOGONS


Retro OSes for retro computers

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Reply 120 of 262, by appiah4

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There's absolutely no valid reason (or way) to run Linux on a shitty filesystem like FAT; if you want to access FAT from Linux then that's been there since.. I don't know, forever?

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 121 of 262, by gdjacobs

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Again, for distros with a correctly configured initfs, you can load Linux on a loopback file within any supported file system format. I find this particularly useful for multi boot flash drives.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 122 of 262, by appiah4

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gdjacobs wrote:

Again, for distros with a correctly configured initfs, you can load Linux on a loopback file within any supported file system format. I find this particularly useful for multi boot flash drives.

Linux does not technically run on that drive, though.

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 123 of 262, by gdjacobs

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The "drive" is a file on that drive. It can be loaded into RAM or used as a normal disk depending on the setup.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 124 of 262, by mrau

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i believe he means that the fat should be the physical root of the fstree; im not sure how hard that is, filename length constrains may be an issue, respecting letter size should not be, presence of attributes should not be an issue either - or so believe

Reply 125 of 262, by gdjacobs

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As I've said, UMSDOS was a thing, but it's long gone. You could boot from a loop back file bind mount the FAT partition to a sub directory of your choosing.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 126 of 262, by Caluser2000

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Well I insalled Debian Jessie,released in 2015, on the P166MMX rig and it seems performence is on par with Xandros 3 from 2005 on the same hardware wrt using Window Maker or XFCE4. MATE, the replacement for Gnome 2 runs fairly well too.

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It would appear some OSs don't get bloated with age like Apple and MS offerings.

Last edited by Caluser2000 on 2019-09-23, 20:34. Edited 1 time in total.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 128 of 262, by Caluser2000

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The internet has absolutely no relationship with the construction of the core operating system. I'm doing on 256megs what Windows 10 needs gigabytes to do.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 129 of 262, by gdjacobs

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Oh, I'm not denying Windows 10 being a massive heaping pile of shit. However, the 30 layers of Javascript which modern web design seems to be in love with these days invariably drives the majority of RAM consumption on my Linux machines.

My understanding is that Windows 10 made some improvements on kernel efficiency over Windows 7, but of course they added a few more layers of frameworks, hairballs, and bad ideas. I would actually like to see micro benchmark results comparing the performance of the major releases of NT kernel. Running NT 3.51 and NT 4 on my dual P3 rig with 1 gig of RAM on board generally results in instant response. It would be great to know what's flushing the usable resource fraction down the toilet.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 130 of 262, by Caluser2000

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Yeah it would be interesting to see what the real differences are. I've been using my wifes Windows 10 for about a year and a half now. I find in a lot of cases explorer gets in the way of itself. An example, I take a screen shot hunt down the folder I need to save it to and save. Next time I do it explorer does this stupid scanning takes me to the original folder I started off last and go through the whole hunting process again. Sometimes it may show in the frequently visited list if I'm lucky. Do the same in any linux gui and I'm taken to the directory I saved to last time. Also explorer seems to want to refresh at least 20 times a day for no rhyme or reason. They say Qt or Gtk can cause widgets to look different. XFCE4 handles it quite nicely. It has nothing on XP/Win7/Vista widgets that pop from various programs included in the default OS. And there's updates...but we wont go there. I mean it hasn't improved since W2k. I'm actually quite greatful I avoided the whole Vista though 8.1 thing. XP got me through that wreckage.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 131 of 262, by keenmaster486

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Well, the moral of the story with Windows 10 is that they will leave just enough computer resources free so that the average consumer can do their average tasks without the computer crashing, but no more. It doesn't matter what the OS is doing with the resources it takes up; it could be just sitting there twiddling its thumbs. But why should MS bother improving it, if the only people who notice and complain are sysadmins and programming geeks who care, and make up maybe 5% of their user base?

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 133 of 262, by keenmaster486

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kolderman wrote:

It's called a virtual monopoly.

Not for me it isn't! The only Windows I run is Windows 95.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 134 of 262, by Caluser2000

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Some old Dos disks I found today searching through my 5.25" floppy stash.

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There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 135 of 262, by krcroft

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Caluser2000 wrote:

Some old Dos disks I found today searching through my 5.25" floppy stash.

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Thanks for the great pictures! Back in the day I only hand Microsoft's DOS floppies and Falcon 4's floppies in person; first time I've glimpsed Doctor DOS and Falcon 3.1.
Also.. I can tell that sleeve on the Falcon floppy is of the un-rippable, super-smooth and satisfying variety! That sure brings back memories.

Reply 136 of 262, by Caluser2000

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krcroft wrote:
Caluser2000 wrote:

Some old Dos disks I found today searching through my 5.25" floppy stash.

20190928_122114[1].jpg

Thanks for the great pictures! Back in the day I only hand Microsoft's DOS floppies and Falcon 4's floppies in person; first time I've glimpsed Doctor DOS and Falcon 3.1. Also.. I can tell that sleeve on the Falcon floppy is of the un-rippable, super-smooth and satisfying variety! That sure brings back memories.

I'm glad the pic bought back fond memories. That Falcon disk was in a rather rough tatty envelope when it was given to me but found something better. I used DRDos 6.0 on my original 286/16 along with GeoWorks Pro 1.2, which supported the DrDos 6 task manager. So have a bit of fondness for them. A great combination at the time.

Never really used computers until about 1988 when I had to use them at work. Combination of Suns for drafting/technical stuff, Apple for document creation and PCs(mainly compaq) with WordStar on them doing most of the text work to pass on to the Macs. A lot of cut an pasting involved back then still though and I don't the computer kind. Wasn't introduced to MS Windows until I was posted to an outfit that had Windows 3.0 on a Novel Netware set up using 10Base2. Yes folks no Windows for Workgroups then. They were mainly Compaq 386s, see a trend? I remember a chap saying if I bought a computer the first thing you do is put in as much memory as you can. At that time a meg of ram was $NZ100. It's a joy when you get a machine of that era, early-mid '90s you have the ability to do that for almost nothing. IBM and MS were having a tiff. MS was having to deal with Digital Research to clean up there act with Dos features. Then Windows 3.x and OS/2 were all the rage. Ram doublers, hdd caches and things like DoubleSpace ads in every mag. Advice getting that last bit of conventional memory to play the latest game. Fun times.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 138 of 262, by Caluser2000

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Tried DESCQview/X for while. I wasn't really that stable and you were better with just plain Dos and Win3.x or OS/2 The X windows thing was an interesting concept. Not too many folk ran *nix with X windows back then so really aimed at a niche market.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉