[flagged]
So, you poop everywhere you go. Interesting.
Please don't do this here.
Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
71–80 of 112 posts
Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
#72Am I crazy or are the "photos" generated? I did have T1800 and it never looked like this. It had a very early very bad grayscale LCD wiht fiddly contrast control, not a perfect crisp vibrant OLED like this page shows. example how one looks like irl https://allegrolokalnie.pl/oferta/laptop-toshiba-t1800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxIc_UVKxvc
Perhaps a new panel was retrofitted into it?
Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, even though the 386SX-25 is 32bit in my PS/1? Will try it eventually.
Yes, the CPU is full 32-bits, but the bus in a 386 SX is only 16 bit. Those PS/1's are such a cool piece of computing history! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I386#80386SX
The data bus was only 16 bits wide, but that doesn't really have much impact on OS compatibility; it just means that transferring a 32-bit value to or from memory takes two bus clock cycles instead of one. The address bus is only 24 bits wide, but that only affects physical memory address space; it still uses 32-bit pointers and a 32-bit virtual address space.
Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
#74A pre-build floppy disk image would be great, so I could run it on my IBM PS/1 from a floppy.
I'm curious what model of PS/1? My first PC was a PS/1 model 2011, with a 286@10Mhz.
Also, there's an emulator for PS/1 machines at https://www.ibmulator.org/
Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
#75This is great, thanks for releasing your work. Very impressive. You may get some interest from others in the retrocomputing/permacomputing sphere if you implement an Uxn emulator; it is extremely simple and can run on very limited hardware. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html Vintage hardware would be a great host for Uxn programs, so I suspect this would generate some excitement.
Thank you so much! Somehow I haven't heard about Uxn before, but it seems very cool and I'll definitely look into it.
Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
#76Am I crazy or are the "photos" generated? I did have T1800 and it never looked like this. It had a very early very bad grayscale LCD wiht fiddly contrast control, not a perfect crisp vibrant OLED like this page shows. example how one looks like irl https://allegrolokalnie.pl/oferta/laptop-toshiba-t1800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxIc_UVKxvc
Perhaps a new panel was retrofitted into it?
OLED panel? that would be a bigger hack than this OS :)
Either all pictures are AI generated using QEMU templates that were there previously https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32/commit/d40576226b7020... or those are real pictured beautified by AI. YT loves doing that to thumbnails, example https://hackaday.com/2026/06/03/hydraulic-drive-for-your-law...
Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
The code is cleaner that what I was expecting from a C repo. Also, it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386.
> it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386. I had 2 different Librex 386SX laptops, with 4MB of RAM, on long-term loan from work around 1992. One was quite chunky, the 2nd was a slimline thing with an off-centre hinge. I ran OS/2 2.0 on them both. So I could run multiple DOS apps, and a WinOS2 VM containing Windows 3.0, meaning I could run Win16 apps as well. And native OS/2 apps, although I didn't have many.…
My first Linux box was a 386SX with 3 megs of RAM (1 meg on the motherboard plus a 2 meg expansion.) It was a tight fit (SLS Linux, I think?) This would've been around 1992 or 93.
Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The code is cleaner that what I was expecting from a C repo. Also, it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386.
> it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386. I had 2 different Librex 386SX laptops, with 4MB of RAM, on long-term loan from work around 1992. One was quite chunky, the 2nd was a slimline thing with an off-centre hinge. I ran OS/2 2.0 on them both. So I could run multiple DOS apps, and a WinOS2 VM containing Windows 3.0, meaning I could run Win16 apps as well. And native OS/2 apps, although I didn't have many.…
I had a 386SX-16 running OS/2 from 2.1 to 3.0. It was usually fine, you could multitask several OS/2 and DOS applications or a WinOS2 session. It was very easy to get it swapping, though, and when it was swapping, it ground to a halt. It helped a lot putting 8MB on it, though 4 of those were on an ISA card and very slow.
Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
#79A pre-build floppy disk image would be great, so I could run it on my IBM PS/1 from a floppy.
Ok, I built the floppy image now. dd'ed it on a floppy and powered my IBM PS/1 up. Despite some nasty sounds of the HDD bearings that went away after 30 seconds, the floppy does not boot on this machine. Just a black screen. 386SX-25 2MB RAM. Maybe 2MB RAM too less, but I thought at least something will happen. :-)
Even on 2MB, you should be able to at least see GRUB, which would tell you that it can't load the kernel. Does it go blank before that? This could mean an issue with either GRUB or the floppy.
Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
For PS/1 you'll need the 16-bit version from https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos . A floppy image is provided in releases. Note you only need to copy the first 64KB, the rest is just padding for emulators.
Ah, even though the 386SX-25 is 32bit in my PS/1? Will try it eventually.
Oh sorry, a quick google check told me PS/1 had 286. 386SX itself should be supported, the monochrome Toshiba on the photo has 386SX/20 with 10MB RAM.