Dual Booting with VERY minimal installs

[Calum]

sorry? i think i misunderstood the question?


are you saying that apple's system 7 is free? if so then, you are right (i think) but what relevance does it have to this thread?



[ November 22, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[Kintaro]

quote:Originally posted by Calum:
because i do not endorse illegal software. I no longer have any illegal software installed and i am not about to start again, thank you. I got it second hand, and microsoft isn't getting any money for it, however as i understand it, it's legal to buy an original copy of a pre-95 version of windows from anybody who owns it.

I actually already have it, as i got a download from another forum member earlier in the year, however as i said, i do not in any way endorse illegal software. if you want free software, don't use windows is what i have to say, and i stand by it. i can afford

[Calum]

no. as void main and several other forum members have pointed out many, many times before, pirating microsoft windows only helps to spread windows further faster.

i bought a copy of windows off of somebody, he no longer has it. if i had copied one, he would still have windows, so would i, and microsoft windows would have ONE more user. how many times does this happen in a day? it is part of microsoft's marketing strategy. by advocating software piracy, you help large companies get exposure and you hinder smaller companies from getting any revenue. everybody loses, most obviously the user, who loses both ways.

i cannot be arsed explaining this all again, and i already have mandrake linux 9.0, thank you very much.

[Kintaro]

pirateing windows will do fuck all, its alrady everywhere.... and your not gonna help that... the person who will stop that will be a group of totally fucked up people like me breaking into Microsoft and releaseing there sourcecode and other things, send M$ into ruin.

[voidmain]

Another bad thing about Windows is even though you are paying money for your copy you may still be pirating. I don't remember what the EULA said in the 3.1 days (500 revisions ago). I am fairly certain that you need make sure you get the manuals with the covers still on them. I think that was the thing they used for the proof of purchase (for upgrade proof, etc). Also I think they already started using the holograms on the boxes.

If you only get the disks then you might as well be pirating. I believe it's better just to stay away from Microsoft software altogether. It's the only way to know for sure that you aren't breaking the law. Might want to ask an MCSE from the 3.1 days. Making money for Microsoft is their sole purpose in life so licensing should be their number one area of expertise.

[Calum]

well i agree that staying away from microsoft would be the ideal solution, but you know, i am curious about 3.11. It's not like i'll ever upgrade it or anything!  

and as for the manuals et c, yes i get the manual too. the guy offered to send only the disks to save on postage but i said i wanted the lot. Also, apparently it's still shrinkwrapped and has never been used, so that's about as good as it gets with windows 3.11 these days (i say apparently as it has not yet arrived, presumably the guy is still waiting for my cheque to clear).

[Kintaro]

The MCSE wouldnt have changed from the MCSE days because I have not seen any changes in Minesweeper or solitare games.  

Actually that reminds me, I told the RHCE guy that MCSE stands from "Minesweeper Counsoultant, Solitare Expert". He laughed, and laughed... and laughed some more. Actually that was about the only time I got a real talk to him.

[Calum]

well, i heard that with older versions of windows, you used to get reversi (othello) as well as the 'big two' so maybe the MCSE was harder then! (reversi is harder than solitaire or minesweeper in my opinion, i prefer bubble bobble)

[Kintaro]

I never seen Reversi in 3.11, And Microsoft dont care about it spreading illegally (along with many old things, like QBASIC).

I could have emailed you DOS 6.22 disk images

And you still have Windows ME.

I have no Windows on my PC except for X-Windows.

[Calum]

yes thank you!

maybe i heard reversi was from windows 2 then. as for WinME, yes it's on the current laptop, not the new (old) one. if putting windows on the pentium, it must be windows 3. As for who has less windows, who cares?

also, i think i was telling you that microsoft like piracy. I would rather not pirate microsoft's stuff, since it will make them stronger. You windows pirates (lazygamer and so on) really like to fill microsoft's coffers and you don't even know it.

this thread's a bit off topic now though.

Haven't got the laptop yet, expecting it in a few days, will post when.

[Kintaro]

I have seen Windows 2, but not much, i know Windows XP has all sorts of games that have been in Linux for years (Reversi, and other crap).

[mobrien_12]

I remember reversi from windows 1.

[Calum]

rightyho.

the laptop has arrived. it has no CD drive, which isn't a surprise, but it does make me wonder how i'm going to get stuff on and off the hard drive! it has no internal modem, although it has two PCMCIA slots and i can use a Xircom credit card modem (which i happen to have kicking about) if i can get an operating system to recognise it, there is (of course) no USB or firewire port, so i cannot use my USB cdwriter as a CD drive, i don't think (unless there's some weird way of converting it) what the laptop does have is a serial port, a parralel port, something which might well be another differently shaped parallel port (haven't seen one like that before, with three rows of pins) and a 'docking' port, which has me totally baffled, as it is a big long port with four rows of pins (for want of a better word), all very small.

so, i used linux fdisk to create the following partition table:

1. 180MB - MSDOS 6.2 (soon to be windows 3.11 for workgroups once i get the dual boot happening)
2. 303MB - Linux (ext2)
3. 32MB - Linux swap (still appears to be ext2, not sure how that works yet)

Interesting problems ensue. the lilo that i downloaded from the basiclinux site appears to only want to boot to basiclinux, today i will be investigating if i can download GRUB onto a floppy (as floppies are the only way i have right now to get data onto the machine) and use it instead. seems the bios can only support 4 primary partitions but that's no problem since i only need the three i mention above.

One concern for me is that part of the install process of putting basiclinux on the hard drive is that you physically copy the kernel to /boot, but when i do this and try to boot from it, it hangs pretty early in the booting process (during the kernel stage, before any processes are initiated), so i don't know what's going on there. maybe i will have to find another floppy distro of linux to put on, but i really wanted basiclinux. i have read all the available basiclinux documentation about a half dozen times and this isn't covered. the documentation is quite terse about most things in fact, which is good in its way...

anyway, i might have to buy an external cdrom drive on eBay, but i am reluctant to buy an external modem and i am worried that i might have to recompile the kernel if i want to use the Xircom PCMCIA card, and last week when i recompiled on the mandrake machine i followed all the instructions in the other thread, and i still got a shitload of problems and had to reinstall, i think it's just me. also, of course, basiclinux does not come with source code, which i will need for kernel recompilation... i suppose i can download it from many sites elsewhere...
maybe not onto a floppy though...

anyway - thoughts anyone?    

edit - also, anybody know of a tool that i can install either in basiclinux or DOS that will allow me to split files across more than one floppy? one of the XFree install files is too big for a floppy, and i think some of the stuff i need to install for a C compiler is as well.
preferably this tool will allow me to create multiple disks on a windows 2000 computer, and then stick them together again in basiclinux, but that's a long shot and if i need to i'll settle for one that i can create the disks in mandrake 9.0 and then put them back together again using basiclinux or DOS.

thanks of course in advance...  

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[voidmain]

I have an old Dell Latitude (the boner burner) that has no CD-ROM drive. I have a PCMCIA Linksys 10/100 Ethernet adapter that I used to do a network install of RedHat 6.2. It worked very well. I tried to upgrade it to RedHat 8.0 but the network boot disk didn't like my older PCMCIA hardware so I couldn't. It's ok though because I think RedHat 6.2 runs great on this old machine and there probably wouldn't have been enough room on the drive to upgrade to 8.0 anyway. In fact now that I think about it I am sure there wouldn't have been enough room. It's only a 500MB drive. But RedHat 6.2 and KDE run great on it at 100Mhz with 72MB of RAM.

[Calum]

well, i don't think i want to put any big distro on there, i am happy with something the size of basiclinux (three floppies worth) also, i have no idea how to do a network install! not only that, but i am sure the PC card network card would need software to be recognised by the computer, so how would i install through it before i had installed the software?!?!?

    of course there's a lot that i don't know yet, but i'll find out!

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]