What is a floppy disk?
They just mean the Save icon.
Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
41–50 of 58 posts
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#42OT: is the thin white text difficult to read on the blue background for anyone else?
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#43Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ever elusive QNX. I remember being given a boot floppy of QNX for PC, it had a graphics environment, a shell and a web browser. On one floppy. Stable like Linux, small, graphical and fast like Amiga (actually smaller!) and could run circles around Windows 95 on off the shelf hardware. Alas, it was not to be.
You can still get it here. http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html Demo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0
i looked around a bit on that site and really enjoyed this:
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#45Earlier 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?
not sure of the image size, but 'nanobsd' is still supported as I understand it, similar projects exist elswhere
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?nanobsd%288%29
see also:
https://openwrt.org/ https://www.nmedia.net/flashrd/
etc.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#46How is dragonflyBSD?
dragonfly is a full system. 'light' by modern (read: ubuntu, windows 10) standards (e.g. GUI, other things are addons), but a base install will run you about 800MBish
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#47This 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.
There may not be many computers with them still in use, but there is test equipment and, I assume, other industrial equipment.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#48Not exactly Unix-like, but there's this: http://menuetos.net/ ...which seems to imply that you're going to need a more efficient language than "traditional" C/C++ if you want to fit more functionality on a single floppy, although given that early UNIX was written in C/Asm, I wonder how much of it is due to bloat/unnecessary/extra abstraction than the choice of language itself.
QNX 4 was mostly written in C and the demo disk fit on a single floppy and included the whole system including a TCP/IP stack, drivers for a few common network adapters, a GUI, a web browser (with javascript), and various demo applications.
Granted, I think it's probably easier to limit size (and more importantly, complexity) by using assembly language, it's by no means necessary. Lately I've been exploring minimizing complexity by using less-capable text editors like ed and notepad.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#49Earlier 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?
You could just get the source and recompile it, but I don't see the point. If it works, it works.
Re: Nanix: An idea for a modern, small, Unix-like operating system
#50First, I think this is a great idea, and I second your idea! But, there's sort of a larger problem at stake here with operating systems, and that is the "archaeological WHY". You see, the way Operating Systems classes are typically taught at university is that you are given an already working, already functional Operating System, which might be as "simple" (a term I use loosely, because it's relative) as Minix. (Mini…
I think a great perspective on the "WHY" is one of the recollections by Dijkstra: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1303.PDF