--- Mark Goldstein
On 6/17/07, G T Smith
wrote: The concept of having a Linux on the same File System as Windows is not new (it used to be an option with some distros). However where you start hitting issues is with fundamental incompatibilities in how the two OSs describe files and some basic file formats. For instance in Open Office and Eclipse one needs two distinct environments to work on documents or projects and NTFS has a very different security mechanism to Linux, I think in attempting to create simplicity one well may be in fact creating much unneeded complexity.
Yes, I remember it was part of Slackware distribution long ago (back in 1996). You could install Slackware in FAT partition (it was called UMSDOS FS). The issue was, you paid performance penalty. Unix principles of file system with i-nodes, pointing to actual file and directory data, is very important. Not sure how NTFS works, but I doubt it uses Unix concept. Also, currently you will normally have no write access from Windows to Linux. If you install Linux on Windows FS, Linux will probably become vulnerable to Windows SW glitches, viruses and other nice things. (Of course, if some virus uses low level access, it could harm Linux FS in separate partitions as well). -- Mark Goldstein
Corel also supported UMSDOS. That was my introduction to Linux, way back in 1998 (I believe). From there, I went on to using LoadLin -- the only way to get Linux to run in a logical partition at that time, as I recall. With UMSDOS, all of the Linux files were stored inside a single M$windles FAT file! Why couldn't we do the same thing, using a single NTFS file? According to Wikipedia, support for UMSDOS was dropped in the 2.6 kernel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMSDOS ____________________________________________________________________________________ Get the Yahoo! toolbar and be alerted to new email wherever you're surfing. http://new.toolbar.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/index.php -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org