OpenEuphoria

Re: Upgrading from XP to Linux

• Posted by Ed Davis <ed_davis2 at yahoo.com> Jun 11, 2004
• 485 views

Al Getz wrote:

>Yeah i didnt remember you had said that  I got it booted from
>98's dos and it appears to work, but i noted that it's mainly a
>dos like shell, not a desktop or anything  I was looking for
>a desktop type interface with perhaps dos capabilities too, and
>of course GUI.

As I tried to say, ZipSlack is a minimal Linux.  I was under the
impression that you wanted to see if your system would run Linux
at all, and I was thinking ZipSlack would be a good way to find
out.  And now you know :)

If you want a GUI shell, read the FAQ about downloading
x-windows.  But, at this point, it sounds like ZipSlack might be
a little more than you'd like to fiddle with, so you would
probably be better off with another more user friendly
distribution.

>I was a little disappointed to find out it would only run in
>real mode too, which i dont really care for  but if i can
>find another version of ux that doesnt it'll be fine.

No, it does not run in real mode.  But Windows runs in protected
mode, and so Linux can't (easily?) run in protected mode while
Windows is at the same time.

So, you boot to real-mode DOS, run Linux, and Linux takes over,
and runs in protected mode.

Does that make sense?

You can get a glimpse of protected mode by switching consoles
(ctrl-alt f1 through f5 or f6).  You can start running processes
in each one, switch consoles, and they'll continue to run, and,
they are protected from each other.  Additionally, from the
command line you can spawn off background processes too.