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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

#141

Post by forgotmypw17 »

marmshallow wrote: post #120
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This takes the cake for unexpected comment of the night. Could you explain where you live (location and housing situation) and how you feed yourself? I'm genuinely curious.

I do not live in one place, I travel around.

Sometimes I live outdoors, which I find comfortable with practice.

I consider NYC my project's headquarters and it is where I stay majority of the time.

I am sometimes housed by friends, family, and supporters of my software projects.

For food, I primarily dumpster-dive.

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

#142

Post by cerberusss »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #113
sitzkrieg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds great, how do you sustain yourself, still working?

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

Can you point to a good intro on freeganism? Podcasts, YouTube channels, books, blogs?

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

#143

Post by wiz21c »

lokedhs wrote: post #111
locao wrote: 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.

In my mid-40's I still get this urge to play around with "useless" things. In most cases, I don't actually act on it, and instead spend an hour or two watching videos of or reading blogs by people who actually did it. That doesn't mean I don't spend some time on these things. I've been doing some Atari 2600 programming, and have been playing around with an emulated IBM mainframe (TK4 on Hercules). I have also been wo…

Hey ! I'm just doing that on Apple 2 :-)

Coding with modern tool sis fun because you can go much faster to handle the technical challenges of demos. Meaning, in my case, I can reach the algorithmic (the most interesting to me) aspect much faster.

For example, I've made a "bad apple" demo and I was able to quickly prototype a running version thanks to emulator, assembler, etc. Then I spend the remaining 80% of the project of figuring out the compression scheme.

Today, I'm working on some 3D stuff. Spent some time on basics (line drawing, assembler, etc) and again, I've reached the point where compression is the issue ! Back in the old days, this would've taken so much longer...

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

#144

Post by datenwolf »

The author twice mentioned looking for a suitably tiny initrd / initramfs.

FYI: You don't need an initrd / initramfs. Just link the drivers required for mounting the rootfs from IDE statically into the kernel image and you're done.

Initrd used to be a kludge to work around bootloaders not supporting multiboot. And then we normalized that deviation in the form of initramfs.

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

#145

Post by randomdude402 »

boothby wrote: post #123
person_of_color wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no ROI on doing this stuff besides the intangibles. This is a startup news website, and you’re on here because you want, or were interested in, getting rich during the ages of 18-35. Could just be me though.

It's not just you, but personally, I've never been interested in getting rich. For me, HN is a replacement for slashdot, after every second comment there was racial slur copypasta. I'm here for the technical articles and wacky projects like this. For myself, opportunities to hack on fun side-projects are rare but I cherish them. Geeking out brings me satisfaction and joy. I've put a couple of fun projects on github a…

Similar here. I have no interest in contemporary startup culture, just visit for the occasional interesting technical nugget and discussion.

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

#146

Post by jabl »

twoodfin wrote: post #54
znpy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, this video features a 486 cpu because linux dropped 386 support a while ago. https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-sup...

Anyone know what in particular the 486SX had that the 386 didn’t to make keeping only the former alive practical? Unfortunately the kernel mailing list link in the zdnet article appears to be rotted away.

Here's a working link: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1212.1/01152.html

From that link:

  x86, 386 removal: Remove CONFIG_CMPXCHG
  x86, 386 removal: Remove CONFIG_XADD
  x86, 386 removal: Remove CONFIG_BSWAP
  x86, 386 removal: Remove CONFIG_INVLPG
  x86, 386 removal: Remove CONFIG_X86_WP_WORKS_OK
  x86, 386 removal: Remove CONFIG_X86_POPAD_OK

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

#147

Post by MayeulC »

> Normally I would bypass a floppy install entirely and just boot an older computer via PXE and then install over the network. I thought I could put iPXE on a floppy and stick in an ISA NIC but iPXE just hangs without any error messages right after it's loaded from floppy.

How about the plop boot manager? It has helped me a lot back in the days. Or any other pxe implementation.

Or veven installing everything on that drive from another computer, which is likely the easiest way.

I recently came across IDE/SD card adapters. Perfect for that kind of project, as it is much easier, cheaper and energy efficient to find, swap and use SD cards nowadays. My use-case is an Xbox console for nxdk dev work, but I haven't tried yet.

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

#148

Post by MayeulC »

dbolgheroni wrote: post #79

Wish I had this flexibility with other kinds of hardware, like a phone. Having to throw out a much newer and completely functional hardware 2 years after being released, because there is almost nothing you can do with it is not good. (And for those who want to instruct me about PC being a defined architecture, where there no such thing with smartphones, etc, etc, etc, I know all this, but the point is still valid.)

Have you looked at postmarketos? https://postmarketos.org

Lots of fun to be had, if only to play with a battery-backed raspberrypi-like headless server in the worst, less-supported cases.

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

#149

Post by cesarb »

fierarul wrote: post #125
cesarb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of days ago, I went looking for when this code was removed. It was removed in 2003: https://lwn.net/Articles/21512/

Nice link! The code is so tiny they could have kept it... But, oh well, progress. I like the message: - .ascii "Loading" +bugger_off_msg: + .ascii "Direct booting from floppy is no longer supported.\r\n" + .ascii "Please use a boot loader program instead.\r\n" + .ascii "\n" + .ascii "Remove disk and press any key to reboot . . .\r\n" + .byte 0

> The code is so tiny they could have kept it...

Not for long; the EFI headers later used the same space, which even required severely shortening that "no longer supported" message (the first two lines of the message were replaced by just "Use a boot loader.\r\n")

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

#150

Post by bluedino »

bargle0 wrote: post #81
locao wrote: 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 lost interest in this stuff when I got my first sysadmin job.

Ironically, that's when I gained an interest in it. There's often time to play around when everything is running smoothly, and experimenting with Linux on old (and new) hardware looks like you're working to others.
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