lpsantil
commented
2 years ago This is because some DOS Memory Managers are not able to be uninstalled or set the processor into V86 and this would conflict with the memory management provided by the Linux kernel. Some other distros were able to work around it.
There are other UMSDOS Linux distros too that were semi-popular 20+ years ago: My favorite: https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/ http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/booting.php https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/monkey-6.0/docs/english.htm http://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/
I've tried both one I compiled and a pre-compiled one I found. A side note: both don't work without the memory manager being disabled, I'm surprised nobody mentioned this but it would be very nice to have HIMEM support. But it doesn't matter as of now because both of those versions report that the bzImage could not be found. I've tried on both DOSBOX-X and my real 98 machine, it works on neither. I've admittedly never built a Linux distro before so if there's any files that I should provide please let me know. Otherwise, I have nothing to provide.