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Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

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Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#71

Post by wizzwizz4 »

marcodiego wrote: post #64
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways. I could probably hit the comment limit listing them. Yet it remains my favourite operating system of all time, because everything else (yes, even precious Debian!) is just worse . Worse UI, worse memory use, worse hackability… In Windows 98 SE, there was a button next to “minimise” that would give every widget a tooltip explaining what it did and how to use it; most…

Would you mind if I break it in parts? > Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways. I could probably hit the comment limit listing them. Strong evidence it was not that good. > Yet it remains my favourite operating system of all time, because everything else (yes, even precious Debian!) is just worse. Worse UI, worse memory use, worse hackability… In terms of UI, yes, very clean UI by default. You can reach…

> Now, there's no way win9x comes even close to debian in terms of hackability.

True… though not for the reasons you've listed. It's hackable because half the programs are written in Python or Perl, and because it has man pages; your average 6 year old mucking about with the system will eventually stumble across them. Also, environments like LXDE are fairly customisable, providing insight into how the system works.

The ability to download sources with `apt-source` (or whatever the command is) isn't useful if the guts aren't exposed for you to play with; you'll never want to do something if you don't know it's possible in the first place. (A bad thing about Windows: I could never make .EXE files. A good thing about Windows: I learnt what .EXE and .DLL files were, and that they could contain icon resources, just by mucking around with the GUI interface.)

But yes, had I grown up with Debian, I probably would've had more fun. :-P

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#72

Post by billyjobob »

azalemeth wrote: post #24

In the days when Windows was easier to crack, it was not uncommon to find very small, specialised ISOs of "miniature windows" designed specifically for running a certain task -- typically some form of data-recovery app, system repair/maintenance or similar -- and they would fit on a single CD-R, have almost no system requirements, and, if I recall successfully, be bloody useful to my school's computer administrators…

There were legal Linux distros that had similiar repair tools (e.g. Damn Small Linux) and fit on a 50mb business card sized CD-R. Useful to keep in your wallet before the days of USB sticks.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#73

Post by jrururufuf666 »

nkotov wrote: post #61
azalemeth wrote: post #24

In the days when Windows was easier to crack, it was not uncommon to find very small, specialised ISOs of "miniature windows" designed specifically for running a certain task -- typically some form of data-recovery app, system repair/maintenance or similar -- and they would fit on a single CD-R, have almost no system requirements, and, if I recall successfully, be bloody useful to my school's computer administrators…

I remember some (pirated) Windows XP versions that were minimized as well - with some being under 300 MB.

https://archive.org/details/MicroXP0.82

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#74

Post by exikyut »

IntelMiner wrote: post #46
exikyut wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows AME ( https://ameliorated.info/ ) is a bit extreme, but technically does do this

Holy shit they remove Windows Update? That sounds like a great way to slide into madness as software breaks or malware rears its head

Yeah that was kinda the part where I went "....ooookay I don't know how practical this is for me, but... uhh... bookmarks anyway"

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#75

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

IntelMiner wrote: post #65
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, honestly I usually have Windows Update disabled anyway because it causes much more headache than it is worth. Occasionally, once a year at most, I re-enable and update and it has about a 50/50 chance of not making me wish I'd just reinstalled instead.

That sounds decidedly self-inflicted. Windows 10 (minus its LTSC variants) are designed for a much quicker update cycle. "jumping" from versions literally a year apart sounds like a great way to break things

From experience, updating constantly is a pretty great way to break things anyway. This way at least I am able to keep my system stable and working the way I want it to for longer, until I'm ready to deal with it potentially breaking.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#76

Post by ulzeraj »

xav_authentique wrote: post #51
cies wrote: post #34

> I have only tested this with Windows 98se. Win98SE the last windows i actually enjoyed using and believed it was an improvement over the its predecessor. Nowadays im afraid to run modern windows without a VM and a firewall.

No love for Windows 2000? NT kernel with the classic Windows interface. It ran pretty well on Windows 98 machines and was extremely stable.

I tried once. Kinda liked it but it was heavy on my built-for-98-se machine and lacked some things a teenager wanted in a computer - like DirectX.

But I've tried anyway. Then I got owned so hard by Nimda that it is still the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Windows 2000.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#77

Post by Tijdreiziger »

exikyut wrote: post #20
m1el wrote: post #8

I wish this was possible today. But I won't get a small Windows 10 distribution no matter how hard I try or how much I'm willing to pay.

You can, however, get Windows AME, which is kinda interesting. https://ameliorated.info/

> To assure that our changes are permanent, we need to remove Windows Update and its self-healing ability.

Yikes...

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#78

Post by marcodiego »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #71
marcodiego wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind if I break it in parts? > Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways. I could probably hit the comment limit listing them. Strong evidence it was not that good. > Yet it remains my favourite operating system of all time, because everything else (yes, even precious Debian!) is just worse. Worse UI, worse memory use, worse hackability… In terms of UI, yes, very clean UI by default. You can reach…

> Now, there's no way win9x comes even close to debian in terms of hackability. True… though not for the reasons you've listed. It's hackable because half the programs are written in Python or Perl, and because it has man pages; your average 6 year old mucking about with the system will eventually stumble across them. Also, environments like LXDE are fairly customisable, providing insight into how the system works. T…

I had grown up on win9x and had lots of fun! I had contact with other computers/architectures/OSes before, during and after it; so I always wanted to get free of wintel, but that didn't prevented me from having lots of fun.

I tried linux on my first computer. Minilinux was very limited, mostly a toy on that machine. Debian didn't had support for my keyboard at the time, so I never installed it. I tried a RedHat based distro later just to discover it had no support for my soundcard and winmodem, so I had to go back to windows.

Since the machine was somewhat limited for a late 90's early 2000's, I had to take some care when using it. I discovered that regedit could be run from DOS and that it could backup and recover the register without needing to boot windows. I simply stopped uninstalling programs: just deleted them and recovered a previous register state. With a bit of care I could use the same machine from 1998 to 2001 without ever reinstalling windows. Friends were impressed because of that.

I could use that machine to run video game emulators, abandonware, delphi and c++ builder 5, turboc, IRC, p2p, browsing the web, listened to mp3 and watched webstreams with realplayer. When the matrix movie arrived I could watch it using xvid/divx with some special configurations to make it run fast enough on my machine. The software was well optimized to do so much with a 200mhz mmx processor with 32MB RAM.

Later, the soundcard gained support in 2007 and I replaced the modem with a network card, got 2 floppy drives units, 2 HDDs a cdrom drive and a cdrw-recorder. It became a capable linux box, but it was too late and I already had a new machine which had better compatibility with linux than with windows. But I still have some fond memories of that machine, I repent throwing it away.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#79

Post by scruffyherder »

drittich wrote: post #53
azalemeth wrote: post #24

In the days when Windows was easier to crack, it was not uncommon to find very small, specialised ISOs of "miniature windows" designed specifically for running a certain task -- typically some form of data-recovery app, system repair/maintenance or similar -- and they would fit on a single CD-R, have almost no system requirements, and, if I recall successfully, be bloody useful to my school's computer administrators…

There used to be a hacked version of Windows 3.1 in the early '90s that fit on a 3.5" floppy (I think it was called Windows Lite), and it was extremely stripped down. The use case was that it could launch Write.exe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write ), which let you present formatted materials onscreen similar to Word, so it acted sort of like a light-weight alternative to PowerPoint. Anytime I had to pr…

those were seemingly easy to make, kernel.exe gdi.exe user.exe some drivers and ONE FONT.. lol maybe one program. its been a while but it was 'neat'.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#80

Post by ulzeraj »

kunagi7 wrote: post #22
cjdell wrote: post #9

Love this. Now someone show me how to make a nano Windows 10 installation without all the telemetry BS. Essentially the kernel only with custom explorer.exe. Experimented with modding Hyper-V Server (the free one) with some success, but too many DLLs missing and multimedia functions don't work.

Maybe you could try by modifying WinPE images [0]. They're quite lightweight. WinPE has been around since Windows XP and it's updated regularly. The last version matches with Windows 11 incoming release. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Enviro...

WinPE is super convenient.

I've used to build Linux USB installers for PoS systems. Some of these systems used some kind of flashable custom keyboard that most of the time had to be programmed in place and the proprietary software ran on Windows.

I've build a 100MB-ish image containing the current version of WinPE and the program along with its library dependencies. I think I had to download some kind of special blob to that Syslinux could load it into memory.

I also remember booting a small WinPE ISO into the server virtual ISO ILO function to repair remote Windows servers on remote retail stores. Pretty much all the disk related stuff is included. That particular ISO had the proprietary drivers for the server raid controllers.

Anyway very good stuff if you only need to run some old style software that doesn't require multitasking.

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