Bob Breed wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 RJT> Yep,  been there and done that one.  What other 32-bit OS can fit on a
 RJT> floppy? :-)

 BB> On a floppy?   I see a few distros that run from 45-60 megs, but
 BB> not one on a floppy.  :)  Must really be LEAN.   :)

Yeah.  That's without all the usual tools,  or of course the GUI,  which I
don't consider a part of the OS anyway,  unlike b.g.  But it's handy for
certain specific purposes.

 BB> But as far as 'run out of the box' thing forget it!  Mounting and
 BB> unmounting things is pain in the ass and if Windows had you doing
 BB> that the Lx dudes would be laughing their ass off.

 RJT> Yeah it is,  but you don't need to if you use mtools.  And I do for
 RJT> floppies for the most part.  But anything else excepting tape drives
 RJT> gets plugged into the filesystem,  rather than being treated as a
 RJT> separate entity.  It's a conceptual thing,  and it has its advantages.
 RJT> And the mount command is needed to tell it _where_ in the filesystem
 RJT> you want to put it.

 BB> This is what's maddening!  Mtools?  First time I've seen the term.

That's where I can do things like "mdir a:" or "mcopy a:*.*
/home" and it'll do what it looks like.  :-)  I don't know that it's a
standard to be installed thing,  but I've had it in the mix since I
started.  It's handy.

Yeah,  there's a lot to learn,  the more so if you want to be able to take
advantage of the power of the situation.  And there's always at least
eleventy-seven different ways to do any given thing.  I can still remember
around the time I got into this stuff thinking I wasn't going to have that
much trouble and then later on thinking for a bit that the learning curve
wsa damn near vertical.  But that was only for a while.

 BB> I have  been reading about how all hardware is treated as a file.

All?  No,  stuff that deals in blocks of data yeah,  but some devices are
character-oriented.

 BB> (Isn't that a bit odd, come on now admit it!)  :) 

It sure gives you lots of flexibility,  doesn't it?

 BB> And I understand that most systems use the /mnt/ file/folder to 
 BB> handle the hardware - 

That's a matter of taste.  I have a /cdrom directory for stuff like that, 
there may be a /mnt/cdrom directory too but I don't use it.

 BB> however it doesn't seem to work when I moved Knoppex off the CD 
 BB> onto the HD.  Obviously the mtool thing isn't there, or it didn't 
 BB> work.:)

The "m" stands for msdos-type operations,  and I mostly use it
for floppies.  I doubt that it'd do much with a linux-format cdrom.  :-)

 RJT> Personally,  I'd rather have that choice,  rather have the flexibility
 RJT> that it gives me instead of having to put up with some OS writer's idea
 RJT> of how it should work.  Got dos on this box,  and what with drives
 RJT> getting bigger I have a couple of choices -- make the partitions bigger
 RJT> or use more of them.  Make them bigger and all of a sudden I'm wasting
 RJT> lots of space,  on the average half an allocation unit _per file_,  use
 RJT> more of them and whoops!  We're out of drive letters!  And yeah,  the
 RJT> whole cluster size issue goes away (or at least recedes into the
 RJT> background further) if you go with the newer FAT setup, but at what
 RJT> cost?  And the whole mess is a flat structure,  you can't treat drive
 RJT> letters the same way as you can other stuff,  it's an artificial
 RJT> distinction that from the perspective of a filesystem only gets in your
 RJT> way.

 BB> All valid points, but thanks to willyboy large HD's are now fairly
 BB> cheap and space really isn't that big an issue anymore.  I take it
 BB> you're not using FAT32?

Not at all.  Maybe,  on that one w98 box here -- there is a 1G drive in
that box and I don't remember if I set that one up with it or not.  But
this box here (for the bbs) is the only other one using FAT and it's plain
old dos,  with Desqview on top of it.

 BB> Lx is making a move in the business world, that's for sure - but
 BB> again it fits the above.  Tightly focused machines to do one thing
 BB> well.

There seems to be a fair amount of attention being paid to things like
office suites and similar nonsense,  but I don't use that stuff all that
much,  so I don't pay that much attention to it.  My thinking on the use of
it in business is more along the lines of Red Hat and their strategies to
try and raise their level of credibility among potential buyers,  stuff
like that.

 RJT> That sure doesn't seem to be where m$ wants to take it,  there's
 RJT> neither tight focus,  doing one thing,  or doing it well.  :-)

 RJT> In fact,  they seem to want to do it all!

 BB> Oh, no arguement on that one at all!  He's a shark and will eat ya
 BB> alive given a chance.   However you don't have to fall for all of
 BB> his hype - I run W98SE (Lite).  "Lite" is W98 system that has had
 BB> the embedded IE and OE ripped out of it.  By removing these two 
 BB> weak spots a lot of the W98 problems go away like magic.

I'd like to know what the deal is with the one machine here that keeps on
losing the network stuff.  Every so often I'll have to rip it all out and
re-install it to get it to work at all.

 BB> No way would I upgrade to the XP stuff mainly because of the 
 BB> tracking codes embedded inside it.  That whole concept is just
 BB> unsavory to me. (And I suspect many others as well?)

Oh yeah.  But even with 98 there's more going on than meets the eye.  My
brother took some file on a floppy from home (using 98) to where he was
working at the time,  and all of a sudden his home login info starts
showing up on the machines at work.  _All_ of them!  He wasn't real
happy...

 BB> My only reason to play with it at all was to see if I could do
 BB> something for my son who runs a small plastics company.  His heart
 BB> and soul are tied to "Peachtree' as it does all his inventory,
 BB> books, mailing labels etc.  No app even close out there in Lx
 BB> world.

 RJT> You're looking for _one_ app to do all this stuff?  That's not the
 RJT> right approach,  no wonder you're not finding it...

 BB> Peachtree does it. :)

Been a while since I've even heard of that one.  Are they still supporting
the product he's using?  Which one is it?  I think I remember playing with
something of the sort around 1985 or so...

 BB> Windows 98SE blows it away across the board. Easy to use, tons of
 BB> apps,  tons of drivers, and a few warts that you can stay away from
 BB> by using Mozilla firebird as a browser and Eudora as mail client.

 RJT> Yep.  Tons of bloat,  tons of bugs,  tons of files installed whether
 RJT> you need them or not,  tons of options in there but not where I'd put
 RJT> 'em,  tons of features that I'll never use,  tons of BS to come along
 RJT> with it...

 BB> But as I said above, you can pare it down.  :)

To some extent.  I still haven't been able to get rid of some of the things
in there that there's no use for -- "favorites" and
"channels" to name a couple. They show up in the damn toolbars in
every window,  for one thing.

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