I tried Mepis Antix twice, the second time there was no sound. I also tried
Linux Mint XFCE Community Edition and there was no sound. Bad luck. I tried
Mepis and crashed twice, the last line at bootup was rp-pppoe.so loaded. But it
makes two separate partitions on the hard disk automatically and I repaired the
broken system with the install CD (reinstalled in fact, because it deletes the
old system) but that can be done quite fast.
I used FreeDOS dual booted with OpenSUSE (OpenSUSE recognizes it as
"Windows"). For installation it gave the option to "Shrink the Windows partition
to 45 GB" or something like this. It is OK.
After installing and configuring it I used it maybe 3-4 times, then it broke.
Black screen with a prompter in the upper left part and nothing could be booted.
I installed Windows 7 so as to test some software on it and left some 6 GB
empty space for Ubuntu. Windows 7 was unable to boot FreeDOS also, but I could
access the FreeDOS partition. Then I installed Ubuntu and it recognized FreeDOS
and the "Windows Vista (Loader)" used by Windows 7 right from the start. Now I
can triple boot FreeDOS, Windows 7 and Ubuntu.
I will also try a triple boot scheme with Windows XP, 2000 and 7 either with
or without deleting the "Windows Vista (Loader)" and a quadruple boot with
these and Ubuntu for experimental reasons. This "Windows Vista (Loader)" is
something strange, it is seen as a green partition on the hard disk and it
really occupies some space.
Now some surprises with Windows 7 were that it eats 33 % of my 1.5 GB RAM
when not doing anything, some programs can be installed and used with no problem
(Skype, Messenger, Pidgin, Office 2000, Open Office), others cannot (Toshiba
Disc Creator, VB6.0), it seems to have a nice firewall. Some DOS programs can be
run; when I tried to exit Acidwarp it crashed my PC.
Now I am writing under Windows 7.