Hi Leke Lapinkangas (interesting name...), > Is it possible to install Linux on FreeDos or vice versa? > More importantly could I do it on my machine? (Which is a 486dx25 with 12MB RAM and plain VGA)
A small / old Linux will run in acceptable ways on that kind of PC, I assume. I myself had it running on a Pentium 100-something class machine with 15 MB RAM and 1 MB onboard VGA, for example. However, it will definitely be no big fun. In my case, it was a kernel 2.2 based Linux with fvwm2 GUI. If you start a browser or LaTeX or any office-ish thing in there, even 32 MB RAM are not enough for pleasant speed. As Fox wrote, there are special Linux versions with "light" kernel and libc, which are optimized for low-memory situations and may even run on 8 MB systems (although you may have to plug the disk to a bigger system for the initial install and for more complex compile runs). If you open a DOSEMU window on Linux, it will usually take 1-2 nonswappable MB and 10-15 MB of further RAM (or space on your swapfile). Any EMS or XMS allocation inside the window will cause DOSEMU to consume more RAM. It will probably not work at all on your 486dx25 system. However, your 486dx has a cache and hardware floating point support, and DOSEMU does not simulate the whole CPU, only hardware like a VGA card and sound card. The latter would be VERY slow on your system, but text mode programs would probably run okay as long as DOSEMU can start at all. You cannot run a Linux session in DOS at all. Actually in PTS-DOS (as far as I remember), you "can", because PTS-DOS can store the whole state of DOS somewhere, boot Linux, and then restore the state of DOS when you leave Linux again. In FreeDOS, you can only boot Linux from DOS and later reboot to start DOS again. The best install for YOUR computer, if you have enough harddisk space, is to have Linux and DOS on separate partitions and have a boot menu like Lilo which lets you select either Linux or DOS each time when you boot. Even on 12 MB, Linux can do some interesting things which DOS cannot, but booting pure DOS on that system will give quite good performance for most DOS programs and even some grahpical user interfaces like OpenGEM, Desktop2 or SEAL (check the freedos.org link page). If you own a copy of it, you can even run Windows 3 (but not Windows for Workgroups yet) in standard mode on FreeDOS. Many newer Win programs will insist on 386 mode or Win32s, which do not work in FreeDOS yet, so your Win3 experience will be somewhat limited. Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: 2005 Windows Mobile Application Contest Submit applications for Windows Mobile(tm)-based Pocket PCs or Smartphones for the chance to win $25,000 and application distribution. Enter today at http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6882&alloc_id=15148&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
