On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 11:41 AM, vega_yaa at hotmail.com <mail at belenix.org> wrote: > Just going through old posts and found this. > Yes I am digging :-) >
The world has turned a full circle it seems ... That is precisely, how I started my maiden voyage into Linux in the mid 90s. The first versions of Slackware included support for installing on FAT filesystems (using UMSDOS). The loadlin boot loader allowed users to boot Linux from DOS itself. I had a 386 with a half gig HDD at that time, and I used about 100 mb of my DOS (16 bit) partition to install Linux and dual boot through MS-DOS config.sys. I had to type "win" to get into Windows-3.1 GUI (there was no Win95 those days) ! Since then it has been a long journey. It made a lot of sense then, because our hardware commonly available then could not really be gainfully re-partitioned. It makes little sense now. WUBI would be similar I suppose, but the concept remains the same. The UMSDOS support was removed from the Linux kernel from 2.26.11 onwards. Jacques Gelinas stopped maintenance. If you use an older kernel, you can install any distro on a 32-bit DOS partiton. Slackware sill supports "zipslack" which is unzipped into a Windows 32 bit partition, and you have linux running ! This is less than a 100 mb download. WUBI possibly does just that, and possibly somebody extended it for an NTFS partition support. I have not tried and cannot confirm. You can get a relatively good idea from here: http://www.howtoforge.com/wubi_ubuntu_on_windows I have not tried WUBI, but with huge HDDs available today, you can have all OSs running on native partitions. There is no significant advantages of running linux or any other OS from a Windows partition, except to play around. This post is perhaps a bit [OT] since it is not related to OpenSolaris or Belenix, but of common interest, all the same. Theoretically, if you port UMSDOS into the Solaris kernel, even Belenix can run that way, but considering speed and performance, it would be a retro step. I find OpenSolaris and Linux distros much easier to install than any current Windows !!! Why bother ? Bish
