From: Joel Hardy <_deeng AT inficad DOT com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: LInux vs. DOS
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 15:51:44 -0700
Organization: Inficad Computing and Design - Phoenix, AZ
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Mark T Logan wrote:
> 
>  I have been contemplating downloading LInux,
> and I have a few questions.
> 
> 1. I know Linux has a DOS emulator available.
>     Will the emulator allow me to do _anything_
>     that DOS would. i.e. lauch windows
Well, DOSemu isn't exactly that stable yet.  You can run plenty of
programs (e.g. djgpp :), but there are a lot that just won't work (but
my experience is kinda crappy because I haven't bothered configuring it
correctly yet).

> 2.  Can I configure my system so that I can decide
>      during the boot sequence whether to run Linux,
>      or NT, or DOS, etc. ?
Yep!  There's a bootloader that comes with it called LILO.  I use it to
chose between DOS6.22/Win3.11 and Linux (defaulting to Linux, of
course).

> 3.  How much hard drive space does Linux need?
Well, it really depends.  You can actually run it off of a floppy, but
you can't do anything useful except boot up and run sh (basically the
equivalent of COMMAND.COM for Unix).  If you want to do anything useful,
you'll need somewhere between 50 and 200 megs.  If you wanna go all out
and make a web/ftp/etc. server, put Netscape on it, download 3d
rendering tools, etc., you'll need at least 300 megs.

> 4.  Is there a lot of software available for Linux?
Decide for yourself.  Somewhere in http://www.linux.org, there's this
thing called the Linux Software Map (I think you can get to it from the
"Linux Resources" thingy), which has a big list of freeware/shareware
for Linux.  You can find lots of this stuff on
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux.  There's plenty of commercial software
for Linux, too (there are even commercial Linux distributions, e.g. I'm
running RedHat Linux, from http://www.redhat.com).  What is it you
want?  Word processors?  Rendering software?  Server stuff?  Music
(.mid, .mod, .xm, .s3m, etc.) playing software?  Internet stuff (this is
where Linux REALLY shines)?  Software development (C++, Java, whatever,
it's ALL on Linux)?  Games (well, this one isn't that great)?  I've
found several of each of these, and most were better than the software
that I used to run on DOS/Win (well, you can't beat Descent2 with Kali
or Cool Edit on Linux, but those are the only three reasons why I still
have DOS/Win taking up my hd space (well, there's DJGPP and MASM, too),
and I might sometime soon delete MS-DOS and go with OpenDOS).  I was
really surprized how much stuff there is out there once you start
looking for it.

-- 
-Joel Hardy (deeng AT inficad DOT com, not _deeng AT inficad DOT com)
(formerly deeng AT fiestanet DOT com)
"...Windows For Repeat Offenders..." -- Dave Barry In Cyberspace