(Forgive me if this is not in the right forum -- deals with MS-Dos)

Some of you might know about it, but there is this kewl technology that only Linux understands called Transparent Decompression. The company Rock Ridge made it. This technology allows you to cram like 2Gb worth of software onto 1 700mb disk.

I am trying to create this cd with lots of Dos utilities (like Norton Ghost, fdisk, Norton Antivirus, Partition Magic, etc.) and stuff (also with games like Doom 1&2, Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior, and Redalert).

Now for my question (somewhat complicated):

Is it possible to create a live Linux os that can run these DOS utilities while using transparent decompression?

I have this package called DosEmu to emulate Dos, but I don't know how compatible it will be with these utilities. I also have the Rock Ridge package to install it onto any Linux distributions that don't support the Trans. Decomp.

Basically, I just want to run these utilities, but I want to utilize Transparent Decompression...

Can anyone help me with this? Any suggestions? Will this even work?

P.S. --> I originally use bootscriptor to load a 300mb image which has all of my Dos utilities (and boots to an MS-Dos 7.10 environment, and acts like a 300Mb floppy A-drive...). Perhaps i could use ISOLINUX to load such an image. All I care about is cramming as much stuff in there as possible

Also, Linux is kinda new to me, so this is why I have come here

Anyone now?

IMO it probably is possible but wether all your desired apps will work reliably if at all under dosemu is doubtfull and besides I wouldn't want to run anything like PM or fdisk.

Ya, I kinda like the Acronis disk utilities better myself (their bootdisks use Linux -- and range from 1mb to 5mb in size -- so I use bootscriptor to choose between them all...).

However, I would like to know how to integrade all of this stuff so I can utilkize this Transparent Compression and Decompression to save a TON of disk space

Theoretically, they have a program out there for dos that does the decompression, but I wonder if that will be feasible...I could use a bootdisk off the cd to run that program, and then it could access the cd. However, I wouldn't be able to run any of the other images as floppies if they are in the compression thingy...

BTW (My memory isn't as good as it used to be so excuse me if not all the facts are correct) Rock Ridge is an extension to the ISO9660 standard and is not a name of a company. I've read where the name came from the movie Blazing Saddles. Your correct it was developed for unix OS's. Some of the new stuff added with Rock Ridge are long filenames, unix permissions, symbolic links and additional subdirectories. The Joliet extension added similar capabilities for windows machines. Rock Ridge CD's are still readable in DOS or non-unix PC's but the names will be mangled.

About the only thing I know about transparent Decompression is that it decompresses on-the-fly. And that you can create such a CD using mkisofs with the z option.

I'm interested in the program you found for decompressing. I don't know about the company Rock Ridge.

Whoops...hehe -- thought it was the name of a company (Rock Ridge)...

I only read a little bit about the dos program for the decompression...will have to dig up some more info on it...

I don't think Dos can natively read it...

More info is needed :P -- looks like I will be hiting the search engines again



Edit:

I have cygwin1.dll and mkisofs.exe and I tried using the Rock Ridge extentions...I have a directory which takes up approximately 111mb...

Now, I used "mkisofs -o stuff.iso -z -R -path-list crap.txt" (the "-path-list crap.txt" uses the pathname inside the crap.txt file to add to the iso image) and it created an iso image...but the image is 111mb...


After the percents thing, it came up with this:

Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 2896
Total directory bytes: 9042
Path Table size(bytes): 54
Max brk space used 7000
57025 extents written (111Mb)

Am I using this correctly? Cause the filesizes are the exact same from the directory and iso image...

Also, I was able to view the iso file in UltraISO (windows) and I was able to read each file (the Knoppix ISO and Dynebolic ISO both have one file that takes up several hundred megs, and I definately know that those use the rockridge extentions...