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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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