3 ms·

This got me into Linux. First I was installing DJGPP on Windows, then I followed the trail back to GCC, then I found out all about all the great free stuff the

• cesarb 3y ago
  The same happened to me (including the download of a stack of Slackware floppies, though I had a faster modem). In my case, it was because of a desire for true multitasking; under DJGPP, telling the IDE to use your Makefile to compile a project produced no output (and blocked the input so you couldn't do anything else) until the compilation finished. Installing Linux (using the UMSDOS pseudo-filesystem which allowed it to install on the DOS partition, plus the loadlin bootloader so it could be loaded from DOS; the choice of Slackware was because it had good support for UMSDOS) allowed me to keep the same compiler (GCC) while being able to do several things at once. After a while, I noticed I wasn't even using MS-DOS or Windows anymore (other than as a bootloader), so I erased one partition and did a native install (ext2 filesystem and booting through LILO).
  • zozbot234 3y ago
    > Installing Linux (using the UMSDOS pseudo-filesystem which allowed it to install on the DOS partition, plus the loadlin bootloader so it could be loaded from DOS This was a great strategy back in the day, no need to fiddle with the partition table or the boot sector, or resize existing filesystems on the device. (Current Linux versions have no UMSDOS support, but some distributions allow for a similar approach using loopback filesystem images. It can work especially well if used with LVM, to seamlessly extend storage as needed.)