41–50 of 61 posts
I wonder why the 486 DX is supported but not the SX. How is the math coprocessing unit necessary for kernel and basic system tools?
Also, some system tools need FP support (like df).
I wonder why it needs 20MB minimum. Back in the day linux 2.0.33 would boot happily into a GUI and everything on an 8MB machine. Or maybe I misremember... I know my machine at the time got upgraded to 24MB so maybe it was that machine I was running. Anyway it's neat this can still be done.
A floppy distro (especially one relying on a compressed initrd) will inherently require more memory. And I suspect the maker of this distro is using a different definition of "minimum" than we would have used back in the 90s (closer to "recommended").
However, it looks like modern linux kernels just require more memory; The kernel binary is certainly larger, floppinux is spending an entire 888KB on it's very stripped down modern linux (doesn't even have networking enabled), while older floppy distros using 2.2/2.4 kernels keep it under 512KB (with networking, and a bunch of other features.
I wonder why it needs 20MB minimum. Back in the day linux 2.0.33 would boot happily into a GUI and everything on an 8MB machine. Or maybe I misremember... I know my machine at the time got upgraded to 24MB so maybe it was that machine I was running. Anyway it's neat this can still be done.
I had 2.2.x running on my 386 last year in 4MB. Not enough for a full GUI though but enough to set up TCP/IP and Samba to image a drive over the network. 8MB, at least in an emulator, can run a basic Xterm but not a lot else (though it'll happily run as a remote X frontend for a more powerful machine over Ethernet, it was fun to see it try to render Gimp 3 running on my desktop lol) My 16MB 486 had no issues with a f…
I remember around 2002 running my home router without any hdd on fli4l - a single floppy linux router distribution. I slept in the same room as the router was, hence I wanted a solution without a noisy hdd from that era.
This is straining my geriatric memory, but I'm pretty sure my first install of Slackware in 1994 involved 18 floppy disks
See also https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/ , http://www.tinycorelinux.net/
I built a somewhat updated baslin for CD-equipped systems https://github.com/queenkjuul/basiclinux-lcars
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And a Javascript capable HTML4 browser, and a decent-looking and performant GUI desktop too. It's a shame QNX (desktop) died, used to be way more performant and stable compared to Linux or anything else back in the day.
The problem is it wasn't really compatible with anything else, at a time when DOS/Windows and Unix-likes were the most common.
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That's not even big enough to hold a single 1080p framebuffer.
Not at 24bpp, but maybe at 8bpp?
I think 1MB of RAM in a simm was about £100 at that point, but it's been a while!
This is straining my geriatric memory, but I'm pretty sure my first install of Slackware in 1994 involved 18 floppy disks
It was something like that. I can't recall if my first was Yggdrasil or SLS/Slack but it was a stack of floppies in a folder.