Miro Kropacek wrote:
mint's unix stuff can't run from hostfs entirely, I'm not sure whos fault it is but I tried to do exactly that some months ago -- i.e. bootstrapped mintara.prg + whole filesystem on hostfs. I came pretty far but then it failed either on some symlinks or unability to create stuff like /pipe/log or so.
I use a minimal setup using a boostraped MiNT on hostfs and bash-only on the BIOS console, it works well.
The RPM database can't live on an hostfs drive because it lacks some locking functions. So you can't use rpm on a fully hostfs system. I struggled a lot to understand that.
ARAnyM use internal hacking with the contents of the symlinks (unlike NFS for example), I gave up trying serious things on hostfs (such as compiling).
When using ls, the number of blocks used by the files is incorrect. It seems there is a misunderstanding between MiNTLib/FreeMiNT/hostfs/ARAnyM. I started investigating that one day, but I didn't finished, since it is a minor issue.
Some people will say things can't work correctly on Windows because of the case-insensitive filesystem, but since things work fine in Cygwin itself, I think it should work as fine in MiNT+hostfs.
And finally, MiKRO, I think this is what you tried: copying a full EasyMiNT setup from FAT16/ext2 partitions to hostfs should work fine, it is a very realistic goal and testcase.
-- Vincent Rivière