Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
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Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#2Posts like this showcase how malleable Linux really is without getting overly complicated to follow.
Really a nice quick read.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#3went to youtube to find a better video of the sound of the floppy drive, as the one in the posted video is very quiet. instead, came across this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c52JQHVVqFM
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#4went to youtube to find a better video of the sound of the floppy drive, as the one in the posted video is very quiet. instead, came across this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c52JQHVVqFM
Have you ever heard of the floppotron? https://www.youtube.com/c/PawełZadrożniak/featured
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#5Posts like this showcase how malleable Linux really is without getting overly complicated to follow. Really a nice quick read.
Yeah slightly tangential but I wonder if some of the alternative OSes (looking at you Haiku) could just use Linux as the kernel for portability.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#6Posts like this showcase how malleable Linux really is without getting overly complicated to follow. Really a nice quick read.
But not nearly as malleable as it could be. Hopefully, true 80386 support can be reintroduced to the kernel in a way that keeps it properly self-contained and easy to support. There are also a few kernel-tinification approaches floating around that could make the kernel smaller and easy to fit in a floppy-using scenario.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#7went to youtube to find a better video of the sound of the floppy drive, as the one in the posted video is very quiet. instead, came across this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c52JQHVVqFM
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#8If you want to boot Debian on there you can actually build a complete Debian system from the package archives using either Debootstrap or Multistrap. Debootstrap is useful for building a Debian system inside of another Debian system, while Multistrap is useful for building a root filesystem to copy to another computer. If you can boot an initramfs then you can boot the root filesystem using pivot-root.
The Linux kernel can execute a shell script as PID1 from the initramfs, meaning that you can just execute the minimal commands needed to mount the main root filesystem and then use pivot-root to change from the linuxrc script in your initramfs to the main init process supplied in your main root filesystem.
You might have to get really creative with compression and static linking as the linker/loader clocks in at a few-hundred kilobytes, plus the gcc support library and the glibc for another few megabytes. Alternatively you could find a way to make the system calls directly and bypass the libc. Busybox will also fit on that disk and it ships with a mount command too, so you could get up and running with that pretty easily.
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#9If you want to boot Debian on there you can actually build a complete Debian system from the package archives using either Debootstrap or Multistrap. Debootstrap is useful for building a Debian system inside of another Debian system, while Multistrap is useful for building a root filesystem to copy to another computer. If you can boot an initramfs then you can boot the root filesystem using pivot-root. The Linux kern…
Recent versions of Debian require a 686.
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch02s01.en.html#...
Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
#10went to youtube to find a better video of the sound of the floppy drive, as the one in the posted video is very quiet. instead, came across this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c52JQHVVqFM
At this point "music on machines" is a whole tiny world on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDwMh0pu1iSXeKx7qmqjIQA/pla...