Hello Steve and others, First I must say that there appears to have developed
some peripheral discussion, under the heading of my original request for help, that I do not understand, and so I cannot respond to. I forgot to mention in my original note that I have 16Mb RAM. I became curious about Unix when I bought a "C/Utilities Toolchest" from MIX
software
many years ago. This contains quite a lot of commands that emulate those found in Unix, such as: cat, chmod, cp, cpio, etc. but run under DOS. A script was included called "Words" that listed, in four columns, alphabetically, all the words that occurred in a text file, and the number
of
occurrences of each. It worked well on relatively small files, but when I tried to apply it to
the
KIng James Bible I ran out of memory. I wondered if an OS that provided multi-threading would solve the problem. Does it? And so I began to look at Unix/Linux. I looked at small distributions because of my hardware limitations, and muLinux seemed the most attractive. It seems to be kept
very
much up-to-date; it uses only from 1-12 1722Kb floppies, ( I do not have a CDROM drive, but I do have a 5 1/4 in. fdd!), and it can be run from my DOS hdd. Its originators describe it thus: 'MuLinux is a full configured minimalistic but mostly complete application- centric Linux distribution fitted on a single 1722 Kb floppy with many pluggable add-ons. Main goals: Linux proselitism, rescue. Using the only SRV additional disk muLinux transforms in a little NT, acting also as a Samba file server, print server and WWW gateway, fax
server,
cd-rom server, mp3 remote player, combust server , and can be configured
and
controlled enterely via browser, using the builtin VGI RCP server the
rustic
("Remote Control Panel").' [All sic] This seemed quite attractive considering that there were 10 more floppy add-ons, all close to a downloadable 1.7 Mb, and that a free distribution
of
"Storm Linux" with LINUX FORMAT required a pentium processor, 32,
preferably
64, Mb RAM, 300 Mb minimum, 1Gb or more recommended, of hdd space, and a CD-ROM. My stumbling block remains as the downloading of the addons to my DOS hdd, and the conversion of the files onto muLinux-acceptable floppies. I
am
up in King's Lynn. Perhaps I should try to get to a meeting! I have read that when sending notes to groups like alug one should be brief and concise. I am sorry if I have not done that. Regards, Norman