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Re: E/D and Iomega Zip drive



On Fri, 25 Aug 1995, Clifford Thomas Matthews wrote:

>     [excellent description of Zip drives deleted]
>     Jake> Yesterday I installed a regular 230MB Bernoulli drive (SCSI)
>     Jake> at work on our 100MHz Pentium, and although it works fine
>     Jake> with Windows NT and DOS, it does NOT work with Linux. :-(
> 
> Sorry to hear that.  I had hoped the days of SCSI incompatibility were
> behind us (everyone in the computer industry), at least for disk
> drives.

It does seem strange. The Zip drive works fine with Linux, it is little 
more than another SCSI device (id 5 or 6). By default, however, it only 
includes a DOS formatted floppy as the "Utility" disk. If you send away 
for the Mac disk, however, my bet is it will work quite well.

(This experience from installing a minimal Slackware 2.3.x 
 installation onto a single ext2 formatted Zip floppy for a buddy.
 And, yes, it is really darn neat ;)

One the downside, as a Zip drive can only be configured as SCSI device 5 
or 6, you cannot make one bootable (without a LILO boot floppy or 
somesuch redirection).

>     Jake> One other thing (sorry to be so off-topic): Has anyone else
>     Jake> been having problems with the ELF version of Linux? 

Once someone puts out a *good* ELF distribution, most of us will jump in 
a give it a try. I'm content at the moment just to get my job done ;)

>     Jake> I'll have to recopy those libraries from a boot floppy or I
>     Jake> can't even boot :-( In the meantime I'm very disenchanted
>     Jake> with Linux, and I've decided to make the jump to FreeBSD
>     Jake> when the next version is released in September.  There is a
>     Jake> Linux emulation library for FreeBSD which lets you play
>     Jake> Linux DOOM, perhaps with sufficient work one could use
>     Jake> Executor on it.  I'll update this list as I find out more...

iBCS/2 should enable you to run it, methinks.

> People who want to discuss the merits of Linux vs. FreeBSD are welcome
> to contact Jake directly, but are encouraged to avoid starting a
> discussion on this list.  Remember, we have many NEXTSTEP and
> DOS/Windows users who wouldn't be particularly interested in the
> discussion.  I don't mind people piggybacking questions to the
> Executor community (within reason: no "do you need a green card?" type
> questions) on top of useful letters as long as the resulting
> discussion doesn't occur on the list.

Agreed. Every platform serves a particular purpose, IMHO.

> That being said, it is worth pointing out that Steven Wallace has
> already made enough modifications to the Linux emulation library that
> FreeBSD will soon be able to run Executor/Linux with no known FreeBSD
> specific incompatibilities.  I don't know whether that will still be
> the case when we get an SVGAlib version out for Linux, though.

Excellent! Keep up the great work!

- Ian Blenke <ian@blenke.com>



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