MiniSport Laptop Hacker (TM) - Vol #26. December 1994 To discourage pecuniary interests, Copyright (c) 1994 Brian Mork >>> ADMIN Index issue follows! Compendiums of all issues are available from ftp.cs.buffalo.edu as \pub\ham-radio\mlhackXX.zip, or on SimTel archives (eg. oak.oakland.edu) as \SimTel\msdos\packet\mlhackXX.zip. The XX in the filename indicates the last issue number, and replaces the previous convention of using mlhacker.zip for all compendiums. The 1995 astronaut class has been selected. My previous aircraft commander made the cut. Nineteen people out of thousands. I'm extremely happy for him, but the announcement finalizes the fact that I wasn't selected this round. The next round starts (for active duty military) in April '95, with potential final announcement November-ish. Wish me the best this time around. I have a Linux 1.0.9 kernel up and running on my main system's boot drive. I used the Slackware 2.0.0 distribution from Internet. Any other Linux users out there? It's been a *long* time since I've messed around with Unix. I kind of feel like I have the bases covered: 486DX/66MHz Unix (better than the college computer I learned on), a 1MHz 64K RAM, CP/M computer, and Minisports in between. >>> MORE DISK SPACE I've received confirmation from the field that Stacker works great on the Minisport. Jim Harvey has done some extensive testing on a 2MB Minisport. I managed to get the whole deal onto my 1MB Minisport. Results on the 2MB were two RAM drives: 150K and 2.5M. On the 1MB, you'll get one 560K drive rather than one 349K drive. Jim's notes follow. ----- cut here ----- Adventures with Stacker. I bought a closeout copy of Stacker 1.12 for five bucks at a computer show this past weekend and thought I would share the results of my experiments on the Minisport ZL-2 ram disk. Stacker creates a big hidden file on your hard drive which contains the compressed data. It loads a driver in the CONFIG.SYS file which intercepts disk I/O and routes it to the compressed pseudo drive. The conventional (under 640k) memory overhead for the driver is about 40k. I decided to swap the D: (uncompressed) and E: (compressed) drives as described in the Stacker documentation. I backed up my ram disk and tried the standard Stacker install program. It worked, but then had trouble booting because of a problem in a special AUTOEXEC file it created. I had to delete most of the files on the ram disk anyway to make working room for Stacker. The compression in place (Incremental method) worked but was less than satisfactory, as most of my data had to be saved and restored anyway, the Stacker files ate up most of the space gained, and the standard install program only takes space in whole megabyte increments which left a large part of the D: drive uncompressed. On the Minisport, the choices are one meg or none. I decided to try installing the program manually to tweak the compression. A couple of hours of experimentation later, I arrived at the following procedure for a minium Stacker installation (aren't all Minisport owners Minimalists?) 1. FWL the Stacker files to a Minisport floppy. 2. Back up everything on your ram disk to floppys or via FWL to a PC. 3. Format your D: ram drive. Reboot to flush any TSRs out of memory that could interfere with Stacker. 4. Insert the Stacker floppy into the Minisport drive. Log on to the A: drive. 5. Enter the command: SCREATE D:STACVOL.000 /S=1.2 /M 6. When the compressed drive file has been created, copy the stacker drivers to your D: drive with the following commands: COPY A:STACKER.COM D: COPY A:SSWAP.COM D: 7. Now you must create a CONFIG.SYS to install the Stacker drivers. The following entries will do this... COPY CON: D:\CONFIG.SYS DEVICE=D:\STACKER.COM D:\STACVOL.000 DEVICE=D:\SSWAP.COM D: E: ^Z That last line is a Control-Z character. If you previouly had other setup commands in a D:CONFIG.SYS file, you can add them now or edit them in later. These two device commands are the minimum to get Stacker going with the compressed drive swapped to D: 8. Reboot. You should see Stacker installing, then the E: and D: drives swapping places. You will be asked if you want to set time and date, this is because there is no AUTOEXC.BAT file on the compressed drive yet. Just hit the return key for now. 9. CHKDSK will show you a D: drive with about 2.5 megs available, and an E: with about 150k available. Restore all your backed up files including any AUTOEXEC.BAT. Reboot and all should be normal. There are several Stacker utilities that you may want to keep on the D: drive besides the two drivers. I'd recommend SCHECK at least, it gives compression statistics on the new pseudo drive. If you put these or other utilities on the E: drive, you should add E:\ to the PATH statement in your AUTOEXEC.BAT on D:. Remember that the E: drive is the uncompressed one after SSWAP.COM flops the letters. The above is based on Stacker 1.12, not exactly the latest version, it dates from early DOS 5.0 days. But this should encourage other Minisport owners to try compression programs and report the results. My experiment yielded about a 1.1 meg increase in available ram disk with, to me at least, an acceptable overhead in loading time and low memory usage. I have obtained five copies of Stacker Version 1 as described in the article. I will sell these for $8.00 including shipping. Jim Harvey, 18538 Inkster, Redford, Mich 48240 ----- cut here ----- Jim's steps worked great for me. On the 1MB Minisport, I used /S=0.3 on the command line to SCREATE. That leaves just enough room for the STACKER.COM file, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and a CONFIG.SYS. There will be literally 0 bytes left, so there's no room for the SSWAP.COM. My AUTOEXEC.BAT file moves over to E:, and makes the path search E: and C:. D: is left pretty much out of the picture, because there is simply no room for anything. Even, for example, if you edit your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, you'll probably have trouble because with the old file left as a .BAK file, there will be no room to save the new file! Please provide feedback! * Direct data 1-509-244-9260 * ARO Net KA9SNF@ka7fvv.#ewa.wa.usa * Internet bmork@opus-ovh.spk.wa.us 73, Brian * 6006-B Eaker, Fairchild, WA 99011