Linux
At home I run Redhat 10 Linux with good success. I have a dual boot setup with 2 harddrives. The original 8G drive is the DOS C: and 114G of the other drive is DOS D:. Linux resides on a partition in the remaining space of the D: drive. From Linux I have access to the DOS partitions so this works out nice. I have a swap area setup on D: to swap items between the 2 OS's.
Things that have been learned the hard way are. Linux does not like the Winmodem, luckily I had a spare serial modem around. Linux connects with this fine and surfs the net better that Windows, smoother fast and more secure. I have a special account on Linux just for the net, with restricted rights and high security.
Flash drives mount as a SCSI device. This was tricky but I finally got my flash drive with DOS FAT16 to play by mounting it as /dev/USB as sda1. One of my logins automounts DOS D: drive as well.
DOSEmu, has been interesting to use. Emulating DOS under Linux. Also FreeDOS is a great substitute for the real DOS under both Linux and Windows. Look for it on the web.
Wine for Linux allows running Windows apps under Linux. Once compiled and installed, just pull over a winapp such as mspaint into a directory connected to Wine. Run wine mspaint, it will run or complain about missing DLL's. Just grab the DLL's and stuff them into the directory where the winapp is and it will run. Seems like Wine needs some work to truly replace Win on a PC under Linux,but it has potential. It is a great learning tool, you will learn more about how Windows using Wine that you would ever do using Windows itself. Not to mention learning how to compile a large program under Linux and all things related to the process.
I have had good luck compiling C code I have written under Linux, GNU/GCC tools work good. I have successfully ported simple code from DOS Boland C to GCC compiled C under Linux.
Once again Linux is good to get practice with, runs smooth and has lots of good apps that come in the Redhat package. It makes for a good winter project to play with.
Original Build Date:07-18-2005
Last updated 12-23-2005