Re: Older Equiptment

[Wil Langford <wil@langford.net>]

On Sat, 12 Dec 1998, Roman Suzi wrote:

>I am not deep into dosemu, but I  think  each  student  can  be
>forced to use his own "dos-disk-image-file" and some  read-only
>file with application from the server.

Actually, you can have a bootable, read-only image file with the apps you
want exported from the server, then they can use their linux home
directories to store data.

>So, you will have
>C: for DOS (will FreeDOS do it with Derive?) - readonly
>D: for whatever application                  - readonly
>E: for user own data                         - writable

FreeDOS won't do much at all, unfortunately.  I recommend Caldera OpenDOS,
or if you absolutely have to, dredge up an old MS-DOS license and
diskettes and use that.

>So, we can count DOS apps  as  not  excluded  when  we  install
>Linux! Even without dual-boot!

Windows programs won't be completely excluded.  AFAIK, nothing's ready for
production use yet, but projects like WINE and WABI are reimplementing the
Windows APIs.  I've used them, and nothing's funnier than watching WinZip
install with fvwm in the background, but it crashes quite a bit,
currently.  Hopefully, we'll eventually be able to offer users the ability
to run most Windows programs with reasonable stability.

     . ._. .. _._. _._. ._ ._. _ __ ._ _. .. ... _ .... . __ ._ _.
I'm not schooled in the science of human factors, but I suspect surprise
is not an element of a robust user interface.  - Chip Rosenthal