141–150 of 185 posts
Interesting fact is that DSL used to be 50MB because that’s how big a business-card sized CDs were. And yes, there used to be business-card sized CDs.
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Plus just earning the money to buy the new hardware is bad enough.
So, for the sake of "the environment," the solution is to go backwards? Stop working and stuff?
We used to ridicule the likes of HP shipping a replacement screw in a 3 foot cube box - perhaps we should be applying similar thinking to software.
Interesting fact is that DSL used to be 50MB because that’s how big a business-card sized CDs were. And yes, there used to be business-card sized CDs.
Wow, I completely forgot about this! You just teleported me back in time for a minute there. For anyone else interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card
http://www.baseballcardpedia.com/index.php/1999_Upper_Deck_P...
http://www.baseballcardpedia.com/index.php/2000_Upper_Deck_P...
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I got it running as a VM guest on QEMU+KVM, exposing only a 486 CPU profile with 256 MB RAM, and it was still usable (with terminal, file manager, and some light web browsing). Looking at the system's memory usage though, it appears that going much lower than about 200 MB RAM would probably make it quite difficult to use (at least without relying on swap, which could make it even more miserable depending on the devic…
That only fakes some cpuid flags. KVM cannot blacklist specific instructions or emulate idiosyncrasies of specific vintage CPUs.
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In 2000 i was using FloppyFW for same reason.
Was that reason running IP Masq to share a 56k modem connection? :)
I even had it set up to use "dial knocking" to force it to connect remotely and send me an email with its IP address so I didn't need dynamic DNS.
In addition to NAT for my Ethernet (10BASE2) connected devices, it provided an Internet connection to my Telnet-accessible PDP-11/73 (15.2 MHz CPU, 4MB RAM, 456 MB hard drive [14" / 36 cm platters, 148 lb / 67 kg]) running 2.11BSD via SLIP.
Wow, this is crazy. I came across the DSL website last night while trying to figure out how to compile a minimal Linux kernel myself, and now here it is on HN! I used DSL back in high school when it was new. As a side note, why does compiling Linux have to be so... obtuse? It just stops for me after several minutes of building out objects with no explanation.
Are you looking to build just a minimal kernel or also a minimal distribution? (Which is what I happened to be thinking about last night :)) In the latter case, do you know any good resources about that topic?
No, I don't need to go this far, but I want to.
Unfortunately, I don't really have any resources to share. I just know how to boot a vmlinuz with an initramfs using QEMU, and decided to download the Linux kernel source code and try compiling it.
Interesting fact is that DSL used to be 50MB because that’s how big a business-card sized CDs were. And yes, there used to be business-card sized CDs.
I still have a stack of these lying around. I used them in high school for carrying a live Linux distro in my wallet to use on the school computers since the BIOSs were too old to support booting from USB. Needless to say, the school district IT department was not happy with me.
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I've been quite happy with Alpine Linux. You can build it up to suit your needs for desktop, server, embedded or containers, but will run quite speedily on any supported arch from a few tens of MB of memory. The APK package manager is pleasant and quick, and the package list is quite extensive.
Wow I've never heard of someone running Alpine as a desktop OS before. How is the experience without glibc? What are you using for a DE? I'd thought X relied on glibc
But yeah, full Wayland desktop (well, sway) and Firefox -- no problem. I occasionally use a debian chroot to pull up gnucash (accounting program) which works as a backup but it's rare. My debian chroot is mostly to run a 10 year old printer driver from Epson that's compiled against glibc, but doing a little trickery with a small C program works just fine with CUPS still running in alpine (print filters operate on stdin and stdout, so you can launch them in a chroot by themselves no problem).
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Linux From Scratch (LFS)[1] is well known but doesn't get a lot of fanfare. It was designed as a learning tool, but the avenues for exploration are endless. 1: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
I've always felt Gentoo was a decent cross between LFS and a "real" distro like Debian - much of the install is similar to LFS with some hand-holding, and the end result is a system that has package management tools.
Edit: found the announcement https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/12/29/Gentoo-binary.html