I wasn't being clear enough about what I've been trying to do. The XT machine has 2 GB of RAM. It is a 32 bit machine. I thought I could load 32 bit Ubuntu and make it a dual boot machine. There is some hangup in the video card, because beyond the B&W opening screen asking me about doing a trial installation, I never got a screen again other than a few lines of diagnostics. I also have a second XT machine, older still that I plan to give away. Ubuntu (32 bit) opened just fine in the trial mode on it. I kept it around out of nostalgia more than anything else. The C: drive on it is only 15 GB (how old is that?) and clogged.
My "new" machine is a refurbished 64 bit DELL running Win 7 Home Premium (2 GB of RAM). That is the machine that hangs when I try to install FreeDos either through VirtualBox or booting from a USB stick. The evidence, such as it is, suggests that it is the UIDE that is the problem On 12/10/2013 3:53 AM, Eric Auer wrote: > > Hi Robert, > > as far as I remember, XT machines are 16 bit, so Ubuntu > cannot run on that processor and on that amount of RAM. > Regarding FreeDOS, I am not sure whether you tried to > install it from the USB stick to the USB stick or to > the harddisk of the computer: Some BIOSes make sticks > look as if they were harddisks... For older computers, > I would recommend to use boot floppy images to make a > boot floppy. What exactly was the situation in the 3rd > attempt, when Virtual Box was hanging? As far as the > graphics card is concerned, any VGA card should be ok > but I am not sure whether older cards are, as there > might be "graphical" steps during installation. The > floppy way again is more suitable for older hardware. > > Partitioning / formatting are among the steps where > things can go wrong (see USB stick thing above) as > are modern drivers (USB, UIDE, network, graphics and > memory extensions a la EMM386 or HIMEM). For those, > you may have to manually edit autoexec or config to > adjust for very old or very new computers. I assume > working directly from floppy / USB can avoid some of > the driver issues. In particular if you can skip the > driver load step at boot. Of course performance etc > would be better once installed to harddisk, but for > some tasks, it might just not be worth the effort. > > Regards, Eric > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Sponsored by Intel(R) XDK > Develop, test and display web and hybrid apps with a single code base. > Download it for free now! > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=111408631&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sponsored by Intel(R) XDK Develop, test and display web and hybrid apps with a single code base. Download it for free now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=111408631&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
