h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Not if you carefully remove useless apendages from XPs directory, with Win98 or Linux, Very usefull little thing is that.

-- DoctorMO --

I doubt that would help me much. I have an enormous amount of raw data, and no amount of tweaking of Windows is going to change that. Not to mention over 4GB of source packages for Gentoo Linux, although they're only there so that I can install stuff without having to download too much of it, and I'll probably be deleting them when I'm on a cable modem next year.

yes but the said word is an obsene refrence but I am not really offended I just wanted to tell him he broke a rule not yikes him
no-one so helpful and nice

I couldn't help but overhear the small electical discharge you get when someone goes a bit over the top in the 'goodie' department. I'm sorry to anyone that is offended by the word I said, but personaly I don't like people saying gum drops if they use it as an expleative.

4GB of source, hmmm didn't it come on CDs? or a DVD like SuSE?

-- DoctorMO --

Nope, Gentoo's not designed to do that. It would be ideal on a DVD, but the distribution is designed to download all required source packages (which is much less than that 4GB, by the way) over a broadband internet connection during the installation. Since I was on a 56K modem and some of those packages hit 15MB or more (I reckon a base install might need something like 200MB of source, certainly more to get the kind of system I use, plus the 70MB boot CD image to start the whole thing off with), I thought it wiser to download them onto CD. Unfortunately, I couldn't know in advance what I'd need down to the last package, so I just got them all on someone else's cable modem and put them on several CDs.

But since Gentoo doesn't (yet) know about installing source from multiple CDs, I saved myself a lot of hassle and CD-swapping guesswork by just copying the lot into /usr/portage/distfiles so Gentoo could find them instantly. Most of them are unnecessary of course, when I'm on a cable modem, as I said, I'll delete most of them, then I might force the installer to fetch the source for all currently installed packages, just to be safe...

Of course as you are running linux, there is nothing to stop you writing a script to copy them off the cd's when you need them, thereby giving you back 4GB of drive space

nope, although, I've been very buisy recently, because I got sick of using the LILO for Linux and the NT Boot manager for Win98/DOS and WinXP and then the Win98 Boot Configure for DOS, So I've just got rid of the lot, found a neat program called XOSL and now I have True DOS with Windows 3.11 and Win98 and WinXP with Linux on the side, and the best part is, that WinXP can't see the boot files for Win98 and Win98 can't see the boot files for DOS ect. realy cool.

-- DoctorMO --

xyroth, yes, I could, but it'd be just as easy to modify Portage so it can cope with that kind of thing automatically - and much more useful as well, I think. Not that I will - I don't have time to learn Python right now.

DoctorMO, I use GRUB, handles everything very nicely indeed, although with only one kind of Windows it's kind of going to be...

A friend of mine uses a rather extreme method to keep win98 under control.

he triple boots win95, linux, and dos/win3.11, and then has a second power supply on his pc, which when he turns it off leaves only the win98 drive visible.

so win98 only sees win98, and all of the rest see all of the operating systems, but with win98 not bootable.

A triffle o.t.t. but it does work.

And it stops his win98 from screwing up his other 90GB of drives.

but if i was ott in the goodie department i would of yikesed you on the spot


just saying that you should be a teeny bit more careful

friends?

hmmm, GRUB didn't find that, but this XOSL boot loader, come with a partion editor and a method of booting from disks and CD as well as lovly fading effects for the main GUI (which is running as 1024x768) look neat because it loads up instently.

Alex... I don't know how to link your post, you have put nothing in to link with this multi threaded post.

-- DoctorMO --

That sounds great... GRUB surprised me enough with its ability to load a .xpm.gz image to use as its background... how does a bootloader manage all that? I always thought they were size limited, evidenly either I'm wrong or that kind of stuff takes less code than I thought.

The four OSs I have are: windos 95 (/dev/hda1), Red Hat 5.2 (/dev/hda5) (I have that for configuration for another machine), Red Hat 7.0/7.1/7.2 (/dev/hda7) (kind of a hybrid between the versions) and Debian (/dev/hda8) (can't remember the version offhand). /dev/hda6 is the linux swap space and /dev/hda2 and /dev/hda3 are shared partitions (FAT16 and ext2 respectively)

Tell me has there ever been a limit to the amount of swap space you can have for Linux (SuSE) because I have 1GB and only 256MB RAM,

the thing about this, is source included, and all the setup is in the boot manager (rather than a seperate program, which to setup) all you need is about 15MB free on some DOS/Windows Partition

-- DoctorMO --

at one point the swap space limits were 128 Mb per partition, and a maximum of 8 partitions. having said that, I would be surprised if that hadn't gone up a lot since then.

but it's on it's own partition....

-- DoctorMO --

I've got 1GB of swap... as far as I'm aware, there's no limit, although there probably is one based on the structure of the swap partition's file system, just as there's a theoretical limit for FAT32 and ext3, which is of course to do with the size of the data structures used to store information about where things are on disk.

hehehe, thats probly why the makers of alpha chips are laughing at the rest of us, 32bit indexing, what a laugh. you just can't get up to more than 2GB unless you cluster.

-- DoctorMO --

Yeah, well, that's what things like Itanium and Hammer are supposed to help to solve on the desktop...

Itanium? isn't that intel 4 chips? I thought they were still 32bit, (people seem to think that 64bit chips would be a bad thing)

-- DoctorMO --