Re WinLinux 2000

["George Samuel" <george_samuel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

      I tried out winlinux 2000 Beta from Chip December 1999 CD.You have to uncompress the setup files into a temporary directory(It is self extracting) and then run setup.The setup sets up Linux in a directory named Linux in the root directory i.e C:\Linux  or D:\Linux(I don't know if D: works , I have only  a single windows partition , but I see no reason why it shouldn't work , it uses loadlin to load the kernel image) -- it can't setup up any where else and the setup expects this directory to be empty -- I had a particular problem , I unzipped the setup files into c:\Linux and tried to run setup and it asked me to choose the directory to set up Linux and I chose c:\Linux\WinLinux and it kept telling me that the directory is not empty and the setup quits --     I feel the setup should ask which drive you want to setup Linux in rather than asking you to choose the directory.
        The install was very simple - it autodetected 
everything except my video card  - I have Trident 3dImage
9750 AGP with 4MB VRAM.My card is supported from XFree86 3.3.3 onwards.The setup has an option to force settings for device configurations. I forced the setting for
32bit 640x480.
    Here's my system configuration

     Pentium II 300 Mhz on 440LX motherboard
     128 MB ram
     8.6  GB Seagate hard disk
     Intex 10/100 Fast Ethernet network card
              (It uses RealTeck 8139 chip )
     Trident 3dImage 9750 which I spoke of earlier 
 
     
     

      After the setup was over I pressed the Boot WinLinux2000 button and it took me to Linux , the booting was slow  (Compared to a regular Linux boot),
one interesting message while booting was
     FAT 32 support is alpha , I think UMSDOS on FAT32 is alpha(FAT32 is supported from 2.0.34 onwards)
     Because WinLinux uses UMS Dos partition ,file system access is a bit slow.(I found it very slow
- I use reiserfs 3.5.12  which supports journalling and is a balanced tree based file system and it is faster than ext2.It also supports dynamic resizing of partitions -- Suse 6.3 ships with reiserfs ).
     The install of Win Linux took about 450MB of hard disk space ( I chose full install) , I have FAT32 (Win 98) with 4K cluster size.Overall I'd say it is ok for newbies who want to try out Linux.An option to setup up 
a separate Linux partition would be nice.

     WinLinux 2000 which chip gave ships with linux-2.2.6
To my horror I found that only 64 MB of my RAM was detected.I had to edit winlinux.bat in c:\Linux\winlinux and pass argument to the kernel to fix it.While booting up it boots directly into GUI and KDE is the default.
You can access your windows partition from the directory
named DOS.
      
George

 
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