quick basic, maybe silly queston?

[Kerry Hoath]

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-----
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>> 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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>>
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>> Joseph C. Lininger, <jbahm at pcdesk.net>
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>
>


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