quick basic, maybe silly queston?

Kerry Hoath kerry at gotss.net
Wed Jan 16 22:13:49 EST 2008


fat32 file systems have no way to store Linux special file attributes.
These include character device files, named pipes, fifos, and sockets.
fat32 can also not store permition information; and under a unix-like 
operating system this is a must.
It also can not store owner and group information for a file; and file size 
is limited to 2gb.

You can also not store symbolic links or hard links on the file system; 
these features are almost required with modern Linux distirbutions.

There are horrible cludges to get Linux to run off a fat32 file system such 
as umsdos and similar; however the lack of fault tolerance on fat32 will 
mean if something goes wrong recovering will be that much harder.

You can run a Linux system on as little as a gig of disk space; (smaller if 
you want to cut corners) and the rest of the drive could be for dos.
That said; most dos systems run in aproximately 200-300 megabytes of disk 
with all the stuff you probably want installed.

You can of course have separate hard drives for each system; however this is 
usually overkill; partitioning the drive is usually all that is required.
Watch out however; a bug in real dos 6.22 and earlier won't let you boot a 
dos partition past the first 2.1gb. I found this out the hard way.


In fact it is possible to run dos inside Linux; check out dosemu; it is 
possible to get screen readers working inside here too.
Regards, Kerry.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Karen Lewellen" <klewellen at shellworld.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 11:49 AM
Subject: Re: quick basic, maybe silly queston?


> Care to share why you do not recommend fat 32 for your root?
> The structure I have in mind is two different hard drives, but I had
> intended formating both as  fat 32.Say on as it will impact the DOS 
> edition
> chosen.
> thanks
> Karen
>
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Joseph C. Lininger wrote:
>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA512
>>
>> Yes, they can read fat or fat32 just fine. I don't recommend using fat
>> or fat32 for your root filesystem for a variety of reasons, but if you
>> have a partition for Linux and one for DOS Linux can read the DOS one
>> just fine.
>> Joe
>>
>> Karen Lewellen wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>> I would rather look silly, than make a mistake, especially since at
>>> least the DOS  factor will be one before I get my new machine.
>>> Having one built that will run an edition of DOS as its main os with
>>> Linux on a separate drive.
>>> Here is the silly question.
>>> Can distros like Fedora and ebian read fat 32 partitions?
>>> There are a few advantages to this in DOS, so I am wanting to use one
>>> that supports fat 32 unless this will create a problem for the Linux
>>> distribution.
>>> Answer off list if this is just too newby a question lol.
>>> Karen
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
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>> Joseph C. Lininger, <jbahm at pcdesk.net>
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