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Many moons ago, you were able to not only install Linux in a DOS directory, using probably UMSDOS or perhaps Syslinux—but also take over DOS with Loadlin and la
by aasasd 5y ago
Many moons ago, you were able to not only install Linux in a DOS directory, using probably UMSDOS or perhaps Syslinux—but also take over DOS with Loadlin and launch straight into full-blown Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin
Considering that Windows 95 still was a shell over DOS (until a later update?), you could conceivably just ‘quit to DOS’ and then run Linux. Alas I don't know of a reverse process.
- dehrmann 5y agoBy modern standards, is DOS really an operating system, or is it more of an overgrown bootloader? I remember setting up old games, and having to tune memory settings, specify sound devices, and configure video, almost making them mini OSes.
- marcodiego 5y agoThe 'quit to DOS' option was not enough: it kept some windows bits until running, maybe in TSR mode. To use loadlin, you had to reboot and press f8 during boot and then choose to run DOS.
- pas 5y agoLinux was not able to reset (clean out) those bits?
- marcodiego 5y agoI don't know what linux would actually do in that situation. Actually the loader (loadlin) is what failed. The message was not that informational, somewhat cryptic or non-memorable because I really don't remember anymore. But I think you can see the problem happening again if you try to use one of those distros that booted from a fat filesystem on dosbox.
- gattilorenz 5y agoWould you consider WSL for DOS a good enough approximation of the reverse process? https://github.com/haileys/doslinux https://github.com/haileys/doslinux
- hakfoo 5y agoI recall UMSDOS being a performance nightmare. A 486DX2-80 paired with a much newer circa-1997 3GB IDE hard disc on a VL-Bus controller should have been CPU-bound. UMSDOS made it disk-bound. Its most solid use case was probably "mount a shared prtition and still have some Unix filename support".