Hello Mitch and thanks for the info, which tells me a whole lot of things I needed to know. I guess what I really need to know is whether, if MSDOS (or FreeDOS) were to be loaded onto the (existing) XO, it would then be possible to run an MSDO-based application on that machine? Cheers, Martin
Mitch Bradley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: MARTIN WOODHOUSE wrote: > Hello All > > ( C'est moi, the Ancient Mariner, again .. . ) > > Is it possible to partition a hard drive under LinuxBIOS? I assume > it is, but I need to be sure. If so, can both drives be made bootable? Linux can create partitions on, for example, USB hard drives, and Open Firmware can boot from multiple partitions. We don't encourage it because partitions just make all the procedures more complicated. The documentation can easily become bewildering in the face of different partitions and filesystem types and whatnot. With the current software, it is not possible to partition the internal NAND FLASH, which is the main storage medium that the children will use. The OLPC bootloader is Open Firmware, not LinuxBIOS. The information about LinuxBIOS on the wiki is somewhat out of date. Strictly speaking, LinuxBIOS has never been the bootloader. When we used LinuxBIOS, it was used for low-level hardware initialization. LinuxBIOS depends on a separate "payload" program to do bootloading from disks. In general, that payload can be a dedicated bootloader like GRUB or LILO, a stripped-down Linux system "Linux as Bootloader", or Open Firmware. >From a few months starting in August of last year, OLPC used LinuxBIOS + Linux-as-Bootloader. Towards the end of 2006, we switched to LinuxBIOS+OpenFirmware. The current scheme, beginning with the recently-release C-series firmware, is OpenFirmware with table-driven early initialization. > > Cheers and love, Martin. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Devel mailing list > Devel@laptop.org > http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel >
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