Gisle Vanem wrote:

"Martin" <ml_news@ddnospamddml1dd.co.uk.dd> wrote:

[...]

By heck! An awful lot has happened since 10 years ago!!!

I said "First time ~10 years ago". Last time was 1 year ago
when RH8 nearly wiped my NTFS partition.

Sorry, but that sounds like operator error... There are multiple warnings given at various levels to warn you that NTFS write support is 'experimental' (due to obvious MS unhelpfulness). Ahhhh... "nearly wiped"... So you did leave it at the default read-only then?

Hardly cause for deep rooted prejudice.

Or is it more a problem of unfamiliarity?

So why would that be a problem? You should not need to explicitly use it. In any case, the MS ways of filelocking are *far* *more* *troublesome* and quirkyly restrictive.

DOS is single-tasking. So no filelocking is needed, no?

I can think of examples where file locking would still useful. Note that you still have interrupts to service, as well as clever (or silly) tricks that can be done with the one running program.

Also note that even in multitasking systems, if your program is well behaved and runs in its own environment, then you shouldn't encounter any file locking anywhere!

Sounds like you have a very easy existing solution using Linux.

If someone could make a boot-floppy with Linux and SETI@home
in the startup, I would be all for it. Maybe it aready exists?

They do.

Try looking on the ArsTechnica(sp?) site and elsewhere. There may even be a note in the s@h add-ons links.

You could also run the machines diskless over a LAN.

Good luck,
Martin