Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

krzysztofjankowski.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 201 posts

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

#111

Post by Gormo »

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…

The Amiga had huge success outside of "teenage gamers", even if in niche markets. Amigas were extremely important in TV and video production throughout the 1990s. I remember a local Amiga repair shop in South Florida that stayed in business until about 2007, mainly by servicing Amigas still in service in the local broadcast industry -- all of the local cable providers in particular had loads of them, since they were used for the old Prevue Guide listings, along with lots of other stuff.

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

#112

Post by Cthulhu_ »

justapassenger wrote: post #34
tombert wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Last true step change in computer performance for general home computing tasks was SSD.

I'd add multicore processors as well, which makes multiprocess computing viable. And as a major improvement, Apple's desktop CPUs which are both fast, energy efficient and cool - my laptop fan never turns on. At one point I was like "do they even work?" so I ran a website that uses CPU and GPU to the max, and... still nothing, stuff went up to 90 degrees but no fan action yet. I installed a fan control app to demonstrate that my system does in fact have fans.

Meanwhile my home PC starts blowing whenever I fire up a video game.

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

#113

Post by bombcar »

flomo wrote: post #77
pjmlp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for Internet surfing, a plain Amiga 500 would be good enough for what many folks do at home, between gaming, writing letters, basic accounting and the occasional flyers for party invitations.

Total nostalgia talk. Those machines were just glacially slow at launching apps and really everything, like spell check, go get a coffee. I could immediately tell the difference between a 25Mhz Mac IIci and a 25Mhz Mac IIci with a 32KB cache card. That's how slow they were.

Those machines could be pretty darn fast - if you get one and run the earliest software that still worked on. DOS-based apps would fly on a 486, even as Windows 95 would be barely usable.

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

#114

Post by whalesalad »

userbinator wrote: post #17
hilti wrote: post #4

I remember the QNX Demo on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. It booted straight into a full blown window manager and had a basic web browser. That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards.

MenuetOS/KolibriOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38059961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27249075 That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards. Now you have ;-)

The first time I booted menuet OS (2005? high school?) I was absolutely floored at how capable (and decent looking) an OS that lives entirely on a 1.44mb floppy could be.

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

#116

Post by aidenn0 »

blackhaz wrote: post #42
tombert wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I have MS Office 4.0 installed on my 386DX-40 with 4 MB of RAM and 210 MB HDD, running Windows 3.1, and it is good. Most of the common features are there, it's a perfectly working office setup. The major thing missing is font anti-aliasing. Office 95 and 97 are absolutely awesome.

I do remember running Word on an Am386DX-40 and later an i486DX2-66 and there was an issue that wouldn't be a problem with faster hardware; the widow/orphan control happened live so if you made an edit, then hit print, there was a race condition where you could end up with a duplicated line or missing line across page boundaries. Since later drafts tended to have fewer edits, I once turned in a final draft of a school paper with such an error.

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

#117

Post by goalieca »

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…

> but I think it was snappy even in 1998.

It definitely was snappy. I used it on school computers that were Pentium (1?) with about as much RAM as my current L2 cache (16MB). Dirty rectangles and win32 primitives. Very responsive. It also came with VB6 where you could write your own interpreted code very easily to do all kinds of stuff.

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

#118

Post by kraai »

blackhaz wrote: post #42
tombert wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I have MS Office 4.0 installed on my 386DX-40 with 4 MB of RAM and 210 MB HDD, running Windows 3.1, and it is good. Most of the common features are there, it's a perfectly working office setup. The major thing missing is font anti-aliasing. Office 95 and 97 are absolutely awesome.

Then again, if you'd also run it at low res on an old CRT it might not or barely benefit from anti-aliasing anyway.

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

#119

Post by blackhaz »

kraai wrote: post #118
blackhaz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have MS Office 4.0 installed on my 386DX-40 with 4 MB of RAM and 210 MB HDD, running Windows 3.1, and it is good. Most of the common features are there, it's a perfectly working office setup. The major thing missing is font anti-aliasing. Office 95 and 97 are absolutely awesome.

Then again, if you'd also run it at low res on an old CRT it might not or barely benefit from anti-aliasing anyway.

Oh, right! 800x600 was pretty sharp on a 14", and 1024x768 on 15", and when ClearType came out it actually was blurring things on CRTs.

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

#120

Post by mlacks »

Reminds me of my first linux distro called damnsmall linux. I think this was used as a first attempt to port linux to the gamecube, but the main team driving the effort ended up going with Gentoo instead.

From the main page:

As with most things in the GNU/Linux community, this project continues to stand on the shoulders of giants. I am just one guy without a CS degree, so for now, this project is based on antiX 23 i386. AntiX is a fantastic distribution that I think shares much of the same spirit as the original DSL project. AntiX shares pedigree with MEPIS and also leans heavily on the geniuses at Debian. So, this project stands on the shoulders of giants. In other words, DSL 2024 is a humble little project!

Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002, I’ve done a lot of hunting to find small footprint applications, and I had to do some tricks to get a workable desktop into the 700MB limit. To get the size down the ISO currently reduced full language support for German, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese (de_DE, en_AU, en_GB, en_US, es_ES, fr_FR, es_ES, pt_PT, & pt_BR ). I had to strip the source codes, many man pages, and documentation out. I do provide a download script that will restore all the missing files, and so far, it seems to be working well.

https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Post reply on HN