[svlug] Debian and UMSDOS?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Scott Jaderholm (daoem at geocities.com):

> I have a few friends that are interested in getting Linux on their 
> systems.  They don't really want to lose all of their data.  They 
> also don't want to use Partition Magic and split the drive, and 
> then find out that Linux isn't for them.  I was thinking they could 
> install Linux using the UMSDOS filesystem.

I would discourage that for several reasons, notably fragility and
(especially) performance.  FAT is a slow filesystem at the best of
times, and having Linux add to it the kludges necessary to store
meaningful file information such as ownership and file rights will
_really_ do a number on disk performance.

I'm not even sure which distributions' installers will still support
UMSDOS.  My own surmise is that it's been largely dropped because
of awful performance and the low cost of additional drive space.

> Will everything work like normal like X and E CVS, Netscape, etc.?

Yes, except very slowly.  That is _not_ the right way to explore Linux,
let alone to show it off to others.

> If this won't work, will Partition Magic split FAT32 drives?

So I hear.  However, FAT32 is a really dreadful idea in the first place.
I'm going to have to create a section for it in linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/.
If I had a FAT32 partition (and needed FAT), the very first thing I'd
do is blow it away and use appropriate-sized FAT16 partitions, instead.

> Once they are split, can you mend them back together?

Partition Magic (or fips) doesn't exactly "split" partitions:  Rather,
it _shrinks_ them, resulting in creation of some unallocated space.
You can then use some operating system's (such as Linux's) partitioning
tool, to allocate that space to new partitions, as desired.

-- 
Cheers,                Linux:  It is now safe to turn on your computer.
Rick Moen
rick (at) hugin.imat.com

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