Next
Previous
Contents
Explaining how to operate or install a Umsdos system
is not enough. Most people are seeking some advises about
using Umsdos or not.
The goal of Umsdos was to ease the installation of
Linux. An other goal was to ease its UN-installation.
The idea here was to promote the spreading of Linux.
Installing a new OS on a system is always troublesome. OS/2
for one will happily pollute your C: root with a bunch of
new directories. If you are clever like me, it will also erase
your config.sys and autoexec.bat files :-(
The pseudo-root feature of Umsdos avoid this unwanted
invasion. Linux can be UN-install without side effect.
If you have a small hard drive, Umsdos will allow you
to share disk space between DOS and Linux. A disk
below 300 megs is in my opinion a small disk. This opinion
is based on the size of the different package available today.
One popular word processor may eat as much as 70 megabytes
if you select all features.
If you have a larger drive, you may consider having a dedicated
Linux partition running the Ext2 file-system. Ext2
use a smaller cluster size that DOS (1k in fact) so installing
many small files will eat less space than in a Umsdos
partition.
The following point apply to Umsdos compared with Ext2.
- Directory management is faster on Ext2. This come from
the overhead of the double directory structure of
Umsdos.
- File access (reading and writing) is probably faster on
Umsdos than Ext2. This come from the simplicity
of the FAT file-system used by DOS.
Beware that this simplicity come with a cost:
- A maximum of around 65,000 files or clusters
per partitions. This also means that a 500
megabytes partition will use cluster 16k large.
In other word, a file containing a single byte
will use 16k of disk storage.
- Everything is controlled by the
FAT located
at the beginning of the hard drive. The DOS
file-system is probably more fragile because of this.
- No provision to avoid fragmentation of files. A
Umsdos system will generally be used as
a single user workstation. In this case, this does
not matter much. As a multi-user engine, files
will get spread-ed all around the drive, lowering
file access performance.
- Symbolic links are stored in normal file. If you intend
to have a lot of them, you will find that Umsdos
use quite a lot of disk space compared to Ext2.
Next
Previous
Contents
|