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Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

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131–140 of 171 posts

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#131
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about EFI?

there was no EFI. it was BIOS as far as your eyes could see.

Yes but in modern day Linux, EFI can load the kernel without an external bootloader. So it is not the case that modern day Linux requires a bootloader.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#132
post #37

Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.

I've actually had quite a bit of motivation after moving out of my old apartment. I was able to unpack all of my electronics stuff and tools again. Previous place was way too small. Actually unpacking stuff triggered a lot of desire to do stuff with it again. One of the things I found was a tube full of rom-less 8051 microcontrollers and another tube of AM85C30 Dual UARTs I probably picked up at a robotics club swap…

You need some "magic baud" crystals! I'm partial to 11.0592 because it fits nicely under chips rated for 12MHz without wasting much, and a lot of parts rated for 10 will happily overclock there quite stably.

This is an incredibly useful reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator_frequencies

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#133
post #37

Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.

Dealing with garbage tech is what brings me down. Completely broken, unusable garbage software is everywhere, backed by egos, emotions, power plays, and entrenchment. That's the part I don't want to deal with. The only thing worse than having to deal with a bunch of idiots is having to deal with a bunch of things made by them. It pisses me off how broken everything is and how few people seem to take issue with it. Ev…

This is why I save my vacation days up and take a big chunk once or twice a year, instead of frittering away fridays and mondays to have little "long weekends" throughout the year, as I did in the past.

I discovered that, after 4 or 5 days of staycation, I've handled most of the crap that was hanging over my head. I've caught up on laundry, done whatever administrative stuff I had been procrastinating about, and I can finally start to relax. Which is to say, pursue leisure activities without feeling like there's something else I should be doing.

Being able to unplug from the day-job allows me to disconnect from a lot of that garbage tech and its frustration factors, and dedicate long periods of concentration to in-depth tasks that might not yield immediate payback. When I only have a few hours in the evening to put towards a task, I tend towards things with short-term payback, so I don't feel like I wasted the evening. That keeps me from really hacking on stuff in my spare time.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#134
post #37

Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.

Switch domains. I've done software for a living because I liked it for 35 years or so, then coasted for a bit and now have a small specialized consulting company and as much free time as I can manage goes towards music related projects. Much happier now, strongly motivated and every now and then a bit of software gets written around that theme as well.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#135
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I have become freegan, which means I have abandoned the currency system and live largely without touching it.

Is, erm, is this satire? If you are genuinely able to be genuinely self sufficient without interacting with currency while still bieng able to have power to go on a computer with an internet connection, I have to say, props to you. I just hope you do not get hit with a serious medical issue. Or have a fire and then get hit with a fire Marshall tearing you a new one over your unpaid property bieng not up to code.

They may not be US based.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#136
post #49

A long time ago I remember installing gentoo on a 486 33Mhz (Tandy I think). I initially compiled everything on a much faster Athlon XP. I do remember compiling an updated kernel on the 486 and that it took 3 days, but it did finish :D I remember the hard drive was too big to boot from directly, there was some bootloader that could run from the floppy disk then finish booting from the hard drive. It also had this hor…

Haha I've done that also.. Except my 486 was a GEODE like a low-power-sbc of it's day and I compiled Gentoo on that !! Tooks days !!! :) Good Times.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#137
post #33
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the container will OOM right away that doesn't really makes sense in linux-parlance. you should try and see which is the process that is actually triggering the OOM. if you're able to do that then you can try and swap that with another binary. you could try and build an hello world that does while(1) sleep(30); build that with static linking and boot the container with that -- it will probably work. also, i should…

here it is! https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht... i was off by a bit. the binary is 45 bytes and prints the number "42" (plus a newline).

It does not print anything. It returns with exit code 42.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#138
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pi is also notoriously Broadcom-proprietary[1], whereas an x86 PC has been a de-facto standard for decades; everything is well-known or has been reverse-engineered already, especially with a 486-era system. It's somewhat similar to the reason people (like me) restore and drive old cars, also despite the "noise and power consumption" (and some happen to like the former ;-) --- they're relatively simple and well-un…

Hmm. This https://s-matyukevich.github.io/raspberry-pi-os/ made it seem like it's about as open as an x86 PC. The only thing I see that's proprietary is the very initial bootloader that apparently runs on the GPU. But then x86 motherboards come with proprietary BIOSes as well.

We are talking about hardware specifications.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#139
Oh the floppy drive sound. I kind of miss it. Kind of, what I don't miss (besides capacity) is how those floppies were fragile, and this yyyy - yyyy ---- yyyy - yyyy sound when it was trying to re-read the sector, which was most of the times sound of defeat.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#140
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I have become freegan, which means I have abandoned the currency system and live largely without touching it.

Is, erm, is this satire? If you are genuinely able to be genuinely self sufficient without interacting with currency while still bieng able to have power to go on a computer with an internet connection, I have to say, props to you. I just hope you do not get hit with a serious medical issue. Or have a fire and then get hit with a fire Marshall tearing you a new one over your unpaid property bieng not up to code.

Thank you for your well wishes. I do not own any property, up to code or not.

I think overwork, unhappiness, and stress lead to many serious and preventable medical issues in today's world.

Not satire.

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