Text 5419, 85 rader
Skriven 2005-03-20 09:52:00 av Jeff Guerdat (1:106/2000.0)
     Kommentar till en text av Alan Zisman
Ärende: Re: Linux in Windows
============================
On 03-19-05, Alan Zisman said to Charles Scaglione:

CS> Downloading as I'm replying.   Even with this fast connection
CS> (currently downloading at 525 KB/sec) it's going to take awhile.  The
CS> download ISO is 695mb.  Thanks, will let you know if I can run it from
CS> within XP.

AZ>I used the BitTorrent link given in the Slashdot article
AZ>that I referenced-- while BitTorrent is supposed to be very
AZ>fast, I started this mid-evening, it was finished when I
AZ>came home from work the following day.

Once the high speed download kicked in, it was fine.  Probably took 45 minutes
or so to grab the whole 700MB.

So, here begins my tale of Knoppix.  It has a whole section of chapters, each
with various nuances.  I hope I get 'em straight.

On my laptop, I used the MS virtual CD driver to access the ISO file.  While I
could open the file, the Windows loader wouldn't work.  Looking further, the
second batch file tries to determine what drive it started from bu only codes
to k: while the VCD software starts assigning drives at z:.  So, I added a
whole slew of drives and deleted all but one - e:.  Then the software would
locate itself and load.  On this poor li'l ol' 650MHz. laptop with 512MB RAM,
it took something like 30 minutes (or more!) to get to the final GUI.  Things
just crawled like I had a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem with no sealing
cuffs in a woodshop.

So, off to the desktop.  Same test, but much faster although not particularly
usable.  I did have on problem - the desktop has dual 2.8Ghz. Nacona Xeons and
QEMU would blow up early in the boot sequence under XP.  Luckily, the boot
process pauses, waiting for you to enter option or hit Return - at that point
I could use Task Manager to set the affinity to only one CPU.  But which one?
Since these CPUs have hyper-threading, Task Manager shows 4 CPUs.  With some
trial and error, I found I could set CPUs 1 and 3 but not 1 and 2.  It would
seem that the first two are the real CPUs while the second two are the "ghost"
CPUs caused by the hyper-threading.  In any event, booting went smoothly -
probably more like 5 minutes to become fully functional.  Since Konquerer
starts up by default, a test by simply minimizing that window shows that it
takes a couple of seconds where you can watch the title bar slowly move down.
Snappy it ain't.  Use of the dual CPUs may help but until QEMU can take
advantage of them they help not.  At least the 1.5GB of RAM allowed the whole
thing to fit in memory this time.  BTW, testing using the CD drive vs. the VCD
driver showed no useful gain in speed by a gut feel.  While it's likeley
measurable, the lack of disk access at amny points shows that you're
CPU-limited rather than I/O-limited.  Task Manager shows the same thing by
railing the CPU at 100% much of the time.

Now was the time for fresh boots direct from the CD.  On the laptop things
went much better - the boot went very quickly.  The only catch was that it
didn't recognize the D-Link wireless card.  There seemed to be some reference
in the NDIS setup utility to using WIndows drivers so I copy the .inf and
driver to /tmp and pointed the utility to those files but no luck.  I didn't
really care so I stopped.  It's worth noting that even with the modest CPU and
RAM on this machine it worked reasonably well.

Same thing one the desktop.  It now recognized all 4 HT CPUs, loaded quickly
and was fully functional quickly.  Speaking of CPUs, while under XP the CPU
identification was for Pentium Pro CPUs at various clock speeds - there's
obviously no way to correctly interrogate the CPUs directly without more code.
I also tried copying files to the hard drive.  The first time I put them in a
folder and shared that folder as e:.  Went fine for a while but the Linux boot
failed with an event viewer system log entry of a problem with the redirector.
So, I copied all files/folders directly to the root directory.  Now the boot
process went further but bombed with an error about not being able to find the
Knoppix file system.  I sorta expect that this is due tot my use of NTFS but I
don't have a FAT partition to try so I can't prove it.  One reason I think
it's FAT vs. NTFS is that when  I tried to make a swap file for Knoppix using
mkdosswapfile or the utility via the menu, it gave errors that seemed to imply
that NTFS writability wasn't supported.

So, that's the basic results of my testing.  Using the virtual CD driver
worked well but the QEMU translation was very slow even on a well-equipped
machine.  While it was usable on the desktop machine I wouldn't use it much
due to the lack of speed which directly traceable to the CPU and not the CD or
ISO image.

Whew!


___
*Durango b211 * DurangoMail for Windows NT/9x

--- Maximus/2 3.01
 * Origin: COMM Port OS/2 juge.com 204.89.247.1 (281) 980-9671 (1:106/2000)