7 ms·

Back in my day we had UMSDOS and loved^Whated it! It let you have Linux file semantics (owners, permissions, etc) on top of the MS-DOS FAT filesystem, and so yo

Back in my day we had UMSDOS and loved^Whated it! It let you have Linux file semantics (owners, permissions, etc) on top of the MS-DOS FAT filesystem, and so you could install Linux without its own partition right beside DOS. Then you'd use loadlin which would load the kernel into memory and run it, basically shoving DOS out of memory.

stuaxo 2y ago
Ah, memories of buggering up Linux from DOS.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Some of us here might remember the joys of using MS-DOS, Windows, Linux, and OS/2 Warp (with extended attributes) all from the same FAT16 filesystem. (And actually, that usually worked OK. They didn't fight. The filesystem shims, where necessary, weren't always the most reliable, but the operating systems themselves and the applications associated with them were generally pretty chill together.)
ssl-3 2y ago
Running loadlin from MS-DOS was peak Linux usability, IMHO: There was a whole entire (simple, limited) operating system to work with (MS-DOS) to use for sorting out any issues with booting the "real" operating system, and that bootloader-OS worked well with the hardware, and was familiar to the people using it -- at that time. I used it for a long time (longer than most, I'm afraid). The method provided for systems that would [hopefully, and almost-alwaus] successfully boot MS-DOS, whereafter the boot environment was easy to manage and sort out so that a real operating system (Linux) could be loaded and run. Back then, given any working PC, it was trivial to make an MS-DOS boot floppy, and therefore it was also trivial to make a Linux system boot up with loadlin. After that, I used LILO for a time: LILO worked great if everything was in order, but it tended to fall down hard if things weren't just-so. And then: GRUB. I still hate GRUB. (I will probably always hate GRUB: It still has too much interdependence between boot and system environments. It has done an OK job at autocnfiguring itself for a couple of decades, but that interdependence remains, and things can get hairy on reboot when the autoconfig doesn't do the right thing for whatever reason. It all feels like it is too limited, and also too far-reaching -- concurrently.) tl;dr, I dearly miss the seemingly-simple concept of using a "real," common, minimal-ish operating system as a bootloader. I've been told that UEFI provides something similar to what MS-DOS and loadlin provided, but I haven't found a single utterance as to how that's actually supposed to work. Working within UEFI seems to be mostly a dark black box in common use, and the boot environment should never be a black box.)
- arghwhat 2y ago
  Well, if MS-DOS is something you'd be comfortable debugging issues within, then I imagine you'd be even happier using live images to debug issues. For smaller ISOs, you can even just stuff it on your boot partition and have e.g. the arch install ISO as a permanent boot option should you ever need to debug. I have the Arch ISO there, in the off-chance that I massively screw up and have no spare computer to prepare an image/aid in debugging. > And then: GRUB. I still hate GRUB. I'm not a huge systemd fan, but systemd-boot just works. Configuration is trivial and does not require rebuilding, so you can change settings from anything that can mount your EFI system partition. It does have one annoying quirk, and that is that if your forget to fill in your loader.conf (needs a default entry and timeout which is commented out by default in e.g. Arch), then it silently fails. > I've been told that UEFI provides something similar to what MS-DOS and loadlin provided, To some extend - if you drop to the EFI shell (assuming your firmware includes one, otherwise you can bring your own), you can navigate supported filesystems and load ramdisks and kernels and such. It can host fancier apps too, but I haven't done more than just read files and load OS's. Useful when you effed your system and your bootloader.
  - franga2000 2y ago
    I second the "have a recovery distro installed permanently on your computer" thing, it has saved me countless times. My choice is Puppy Linux, since it's impressively tiny and has a good selection of recovery tools preinstalled, but is also totally usable as a desktop OS in case I really need to get some things done before I have time to recover my system.
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Since the advent of bootable ISOs on disc and then large USB flash drives, I haven't bothered with any kind of recovery options on my computer, and now actively remove them. See recovery partitions, recovery kernel (on fedora) etc, etc. Feels redundant, and I enjoy having the disk space back. An external flash boot drive has saved me countless times, and is useful for other stuff. On it I now use Ventoy, which I heartily recommend. So much better than imaging the whole drive.
WillAdams 2y ago
There was also lubuntu which allowed installing into a file/directory on NTFS --- really wish it was still around (and that there was better driver support for odd hardware such as Wacom's current generation of Wacom EMR).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cesarb 2y ago
> and so you could install Linux without its own partition right beside DOS. Then you'd use loadlin which would load the kernel into memory and run it, basically shoving DOS out of memory. It was more than just "install Linux without its own partition". It was "install Linux in a directory like C:\LINUX like a normal DOS application and start it from MS-DOS like a normal DOS application". It's hard to overstate how important that was at the time. If you had a system running MS-DOS (like most people), with or without Windows 3.x (which also started from MS-DOS like a normal DOS application), you could install Linux without changing anything on your system, and if you didn't like it, you could simply delete the corresponding directory and everything would be gone. That (together with small Linux distributions which ran from a pair of floppies) made it much easier and low-risk to try Linux, and IMHO was one of the things which helped it gain enough marketshare and mindshare to later stand on its own. (That was my own path with Linux: I started running it as a "normal DOS application" with UMSDOS and LOADLIN, then I moved to a dedicated partition with ext2 and LILO, and finally I discarded MS-DOS completely and gave the whole disk to Linux.)
- woodrowbarlow 2y ago
  huh, sounds like WSL...
  - asveikau 2y ago
    It wasn't anything like WSL. WSL runs Linux programs under a different kernel by replicating the syscall interface. This was basically a bootloader (loadlin) and a filesystem driver (umsdos). This was a very different world because DOS was hardly an operating system at all, it was just this tiny thing that installed itself into some interrupt handlers right after BIOS. Loadlin could take over and load a full linux kernel, no different from how grub works today (or LILO before that).
    - bri3d 2y ago
      To nitpick a bit > WSL runs Linux programs under a different kernel by replicating the syscall interface Only WSLv1 did this. WSL 2 is very boring architecturally, it just runs a full Linux machine in a HyperV VM domain.
guestbest 2y ago
Zipslack was such a good distribution. In fact there were a number of gnome 1.4 based environments that ran quickly on tailored environments for what you mentioned like early Vector Linux. It was a fun time

stuaxo 2y ago

Ah, memories of buggering up Linux from DOS.

ssl-3 2y ago
Some of us here might remember the joys of using MS-DOS, Windows, Linux, and OS/2 Warp (with extended attributes) all from the same FAT16 filesystem. (And actually, that usually worked OK. They didn't fight. The filesystem shims, where necessary, weren't always the most reliable, but the operating systems themselves and the applications associated with them were generally pretty chill together.)

ssl-3 2y ago

Running loadlin from MS-DOS was peak Linux usability, IMHO: There was a whole entire (simple, limited) operating system to work with (MS-DOS) to use for sorting out any issues with booting the "real" operating system, and that bootloader-OS worked well with the hardware, and was familiar to the people using it -- at that time. I used it for a long time (longer than most, I'm afraid). The method provided for systems that would [hopefully, and almost-alwaus] successfully boot MS-DOS, whereafter the boot environment was easy to manage and sort out so that a real operating system (Linux) could be loaded and run. Back then, given any working PC, it was trivial to make an MS-DOS boot floppy, and therefore it was also trivial to make a Linux system boot up with loadlin. After that, I used LILO for a time: LILO worked great if everything was in order, but it tended to fall down hard if things weren't just-so. And then: GRUB. I still hate GRUB. (I will probably always hate GRUB: It still has too much interdependence between boot and system environments. It has done an OK job at autocnfiguring itself for a couple of decades, but that interdependence remains, and things can get hairy on reboot when the autoconfig doesn't do the right thing for whatever reason. It all feels like it is too limited, and also too far-reaching -- concurrently.) tl;dr, I dearly miss the seemingly-simple concept of using a "real," common, minimal-ish operating system as a bootloader. I've been told that UEFI provides something similar to what MS-DOS and loadlin provided, but I haven't found a single utterance as to how that's actually supposed to work. Working within UEFI seems to be mostly a dark black box in common use, and the boot environment should never be a black box.)

arghwhat 2y ago
Well, if MS-DOS is something you'd be comfortable debugging issues within, then I imagine you'd be even happier using live images to debug issues. For smaller ISOs, you can even just stuff it on your boot partition and have e.g. the arch install ISO as a permanent boot option should you ever need to debug. I have the Arch ISO there, in the off-chance that I massively screw up and have no spare computer to prepare an image/aid in debugging. > And then: GRUB. I still hate GRUB. I'm not a huge systemd fan, but systemd-boot just works. Configuration is trivial and does not require rebuilding, so you can change settings from anything that can mount your EFI system partition. It does have one annoying quirk, and that is that if your forget to fill in your loader.conf (needs a default entry and timeout which is commented out by default in e.g. Arch), then it silently fails. > I've been told that UEFI provides something similar to what MS-DOS and loadlin provided, To some extend - if you drop to the EFI shell (assuming your firmware includes one, otherwise you can bring your own), you can navigate supported filesystems and load ramdisks and kernels and such. It can host fancier apps too, but I haven't done more than just read files and load OS's. Useful when you effed your system and your bootloader.
- franga2000 2y ago
  I second the "have a recovery distro installed permanently on your computer" thing, it has saved me countless times. My choice is Puppy Linux, since it's impressively tiny and has a good selection of recovery tools preinstalled, but is also totally usable as a desktop OS in case I really need to get some things done before I have time to recover my system.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Since the advent of bootable ISOs on disc and then large USB flash drives, I haven't bothered with any kind of recovery options on my computer, and now actively remove them. See recovery partitions, recovery kernel (on fedora) etc, etc. Feels redundant, and I enjoy having the disk space back. An external flash boot drive has saved me countless times, and is useful for other stuff. On it I now use Ventoy, which I heartily recommend. So much better than imaging the whole drive.

WillAdams 2y ago

There was also lubuntu which allowed installing into a file/directory on NTFS --- really wish it was still around (and that there was better driver support for odd hardware such as Wacom's current generation of Wacom EMR).

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

cesarb 2y ago

> and so you could install Linux without its own partition right beside DOS. Then you'd use loadlin which would load the kernel into memory and run it, basically shoving DOS out of memory. It was more than just "install Linux without its own partition". It was "install Linux in a directory like C:\LINUX like a normal DOS application and start it from MS-DOS like a normal DOS application". It's hard to overstate how important that was at the time. If you had a system running MS-DOS (like most people), with or without Windows 3.x (which also started from MS-DOS like a normal DOS application), you could install Linux without changing anything on your system, and if you didn't like it, you could simply delete the corresponding directory and everything would be gone. That (together with small Linux distributions which ran from a pair of floppies) made it much easier and low-risk to try Linux, and IMHO was one of the things which helped it gain enough marketshare and mindshare to later stand on its own. (That was my own path with Linux: I started running it as a "normal DOS application" with UMSDOS and LOADLIN, then I moved to a dedicated partition with ext2 and LILO, and finally I discarded MS-DOS completely and gave the whole disk to Linux.)

woodrowbarlow 2y ago
huh, sounds like WSL...
- asveikau 2y ago
  It wasn't anything like WSL. WSL runs Linux programs under a different kernel by replicating the syscall interface. This was basically a bootloader (loadlin) and a filesystem driver (umsdos). This was a very different world because DOS was hardly an operating system at all, it was just this tiny thing that installed itself into some interrupt handlers right after BIOS. Loadlin could take over and load a full linux kernel, no different from how grub works today (or LILO before that).
  - bri3d 2y ago
    To nitpick a bit > WSL runs Linux programs under a different kernel by replicating the syscall interface Only WSLv1 did this. WSL 2 is very boring architecturally, it just runs a full Linux machine in a HyperV VM domain.

guestbest 2y ago

Zipslack was such a good distribution. In fact there were a number of gnome 1.4 based environments that ran quickly on tailored environments for what you mentioned like early Vector Linux. It was a fun time