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Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

krzysztofjankowski.com

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Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

#101

Post by amne »

sockbot wrote: post #10

Over Christmas I tried to actually build a usable computer from the 32-bit era. Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer. Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years, excepting browser-based software. The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part…

I used to run a cs1.6 server on an amd 800mhz with 256mb of ram in the 2000s. I'm looking these days to get a mac mini and while thinking that 16gb will not be enough I remembered about that server. It was a NAT gateway too, had a webserver also with hitstats for the cs server. And it was a popular 16v16 type of server too. What happened? How did we get to 16gb minimum and 32gb will make you not sad.

Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

#102

Post by dfex »

tombert wrote: post #22
sockbot wrote: post #10

Over Christmas I tried to actually build a usable computer from the 32-bit era. Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer. Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years, excepting browser-based software. The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part…

> Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years It baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there…

This! I have the 14-core M4 Macbook Pro with 48GB of RAM, and Word for Mac (Version 16 at this time) runs like absolute molasses on large documents, and pegs a single core between 70 and 90% for most of the time, even when I'm not typing.

I am now starting to wonder how much of it has to do with network access to Sharepoint and telemetry data that most likely didn't exist in the Office 97 dial-up era.

Features-wise - I doubt there is a single feature I use (deliberately) today in Excel or Word that wasn't available in Office 97.

I'd happily suffer Clippy over Co-Pilot.

Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

#103

Post by pjmlp »

flomo wrote: post #94
pjmlp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us do actually use such machines every now and then. The point being made was that for many people whose lives doesn't circle around computers, their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays. For those people, using digital typewriter hardly requires more features than Final Writer, and for what they do with numbers in tables and a couple of automati…

Yeah, I just posted that a lot of that software was amazing and pretty 'feature-complete', all while running on a very limited old personal conmputers. Just please don't gaslight us with some alternate Amiga bullshit history. All that shit was super slow, you were begging for +5Mhz or +25KB of cache. If Amiga had any success outside of teenage gamers, that stuff would have all been historical, just like it was on the…

Goes both ways, Mac was hardly something to write home about outside US, and they did not follow Commodore footsteps into bankruptcy out of sheer luck.

Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

#104

Post by forinti »

sockbot wrote: post #10

Over Christmas I tried to actually build a usable computer from the 32-bit era. Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer. Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years, excepting browser-based software. The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part…

I have a P166 under my desk and once in a blue moon I try to run something on it.

My biggest obstacles are that it doesn't have an ethernet port and that it doesn't have BIOS USB support (although it does have a card with two USB ports).

I've managed to run some small Linux distros on it (I'll definitely try this one), but, you're right, I haven't really found anything useful to run on it.

Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

#105

Post by ale42 »

M95D wrote: post #100
Fiveplus wrote: post #7

The persistence strategy described here (mount -t msdos -o rw /dev/fd0 /mnt) combined with a bind mount to home is a nice clever touch for saving space. I don't know if that's also true for data integrity on physical magnetic media. FAT12 is not a journaling filesystem. On a modern drive, a crash during a write is at best, annoying while on a 3.5" floppy with a 33mhz CPU, a write operation blocks for a perceptible am…

FAT can be made tolerant form the driver just like a journaled FS: 1) mark blocks allocated in first FAT If a crash occurs here, then data written is incomplete, so write FAT1 with data from FAT2 discarding all changes. 2) write data in sectors If a crash occurs here, same as before, keep old file size. 3) update file size in the directory This step is atomic - it's just one sector to update. If a crash occurs here (…

Is this something the FAT driver is Linux can do?

Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

#106

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

flomo wrote: post #94
pjmlp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us do actually use such machines every now and then. The point being made was that for many people whose lives doesn't circle around computers, their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays. For those people, using digital typewriter hardly requires more features than Final Writer, and for what they do with numbers in tables and a couple of automati…

Yeah, I just posted that a lot of that software was amazing and pretty 'feature-complete', all while running on a very limited old personal conmputers. Just please don't gaslight us with some alternate Amiga bullshit history. All that shit was super slow, you were begging for +5Mhz or +25KB of cache. If Amiga had any success outside of teenage gamers, that stuff would have all been historical, just like it was on the…

Amiga was big in Europe. No doubt they were slow though; most computers of the time were.

Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

#108

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #86
jabl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIU the Debian i386 port has effectively required i686 level CPU's for quite a long time (CMOV etc.)? So if he has an older CPU like the Pentium it might not work? But otherwise, yes, Debian 12 should work fine as you say. Not so long ago I installed it on an old Pentium M laptop I had lying around. Did take some tweaking, turned out that the wifi card didn't support WPA2/3 mixed mode which I had configured on my A…

You can force YouTube to use H264 instead (via extensions like H264ify), that should reduce the processing load.

Were there actually Pentium M chipsets that could decode anything but MPEG2?

The CPU will be struggling with most modern video formats including h.264.

Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

#109

Post by krzyk »

anthk wrote: post #97
MrGilbert wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild to remember that I basically grew up with this type of software. I was there, when the MDI/SDI (Multi-Document Interface / Single-Document Interface) discussion was ongoing, and how much backlash the "Ribbon"-interface received. It also shows that writing documents hasn't really changed in the past 30 years. I wonder if that's a good or bad development. With memory prices skyrocketing, I wonder if we will s…

Sadly Electron developers will be fired, and C++ and even Rust ones will be highly praised. QT5/6 will be king for tons of desktop software.

One can dream.

Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

#110

Post by mrighele »

sockbot wrote: post #10

Over Christmas I tried to actually build a usable computer from the 32-bit era. Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer. Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years, excepting browser-based software. The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part…

It seems that both OpenBSD [1] and NetBSD [2] still support i386, for example here [3] you can find the image for a USB stick.

I expect at least the base system (including X) to work without big issues (if your hardware is supported), for extra packages you may need a bit of luck.

[1] https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html

[2] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/

[3] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/

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