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Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#12This has prompted me to look if floppies are even still available for purchase -they are (as are USB floppy drives). Also pretty expensive, at 1.5 euros apiece.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#13This has already been done. Works fine on older hardware: http://www.toms.net/rb/
Similar for FreeBSD: https://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/old/picobsd.html
These are about twenty years old (Linux 2.2 and FreeBSD 3). While they almost certainly still work on modern hardware thanks to the backwards compatibility of the PC platform, can it be done with newer software?
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar for FreeBSD: https://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/old/picobsd.html
I think there are many niche BSD derivatives that focus on minimal footprint and small machines. The other day I was looking at RetroBSD for example.
yeah, there was also LiteBSD https://github.com/sergev/LiteBSD
but Retro is the more active project https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#15How is dragonflyBSD?
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar for FreeBSD: https://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/old/picobsd.html
These are about twenty years old (Linux 2.2 and FreeBSD 3). While they almost certainly still work on modern hardware thanks to the backwards compatibility of the PC platform, can it be done with newer software?
Alpine is probably the smallest "modern" Linux distro. 5MB, so 4 floppies worth.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#17Sounds like Fuzix [1] - it fits in a 720kb diskette but it's for 8-bit processors.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#18What is a floppy disk?
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are about twenty years old (Linux 2.2 and FreeBSD 3). While they almost certainly still work on modern hardware thanks to the backwards compatibility of the PC platform, can it be done with newer software?
Alpine is probably the smallest "modern" Linux distro. 5MB, so 4 floppies worth.
That 5MB figure doesn't include the kernel. Usually when people refer to Alpine being only 5MB they're talking about running it inside of a container/chroot.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#20"UPDATE: Thanks to the Lobsters commmunity, commenting on my Lobsters post, I have come to the conclusion Nanix is unfeasable. That's too bad! " That thread is here: https://lobste.rs/s/qurwmz
This seems sarcastic to me. You'll compile a lot out, sure, but I don't understand from the discussion why it can't be done. I understand why it's hard, why certain people have no interest in it, and why using a 64-bit address space is important for security defense. But nome of that seems to make it fundamentally impossible.
Depends on how you balance take advantage of modern hardware with be somewhat useful for hobbyist desktop users.
If you think “somewhat useful for hobbyist desktop users” means booting from UEFI, supporting USB-3 including hot-plugging, and doing power management well on generic hardware, I don’t think there’s any chance to stuff everything on a floppy disk.
If you’re willing to remove device enumeration, effectively building a different kernel for each choice of to be supported hardware, work with just a tty over a serial port, and be forgiving a lot on the “Unix-like”, it’s quite doable (example: http://lng.sourceforge.net/, a ‘Unix-like’ OS for the Commodore 64). The “somewhat useful” would suffer, though, and one could argue that isn’t “Unix-like”.
There may be something in-between that adds enough usefulness to make it “somewhat useful”.