2 Oct
2005
2 Oct
'05
2:43 p.m.
On 10/1/05, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
For clarity, isn't UMSDOS the code which let you
run linux from a FAT
filesystem - nothing to do with doing an install to an ext2 Linux
partition and then booting from there.
Ah... right.
Install from a FAT source was added pretty early on
ISTR, with
UMSDOS coming much later (I've never tried the latter)
Installing from a FAT partition did come early, thankfully. Nobody
could afford the $5000+ for a CD burner at the time, so it was FAT
partition install, floppy install, or commercial CD install, which was
a pain if you wanted to keep up on the latest developments.
Partitioning used to be something on an art I recall;
I don't think
there was support for swap files (as opposed to partitions)
There was not... it was swap partition or nothing. I don't recall
things being too difficult, though. It was the same thing that we'd
been doing with UNIX for years - take a multiple-hundred meg disk and
slice it up for the root partition, /usr , maybe /var, and so on.
> I wasn't able to install Linux for about a
year, until Slackware added
> native SCSI support
Heh... Adaptec 1542 or something?
Yep - Adaptec 1542A (then 1542C, and so on).
I went the Redhat route for a couple of years (I got
lazy!)
I did Slackware at home, Yggdrasil at work (1995), then switched to
RedHat purely because it was what US businesses blessed as an
acceptable distro. At work now, we are 100% RedHat for Linux (server
and desktop), plus a bit of Mac and (thankfully) very little Windows
(mostly laptops) for the user community. Ah, Academia!
-ethan