Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ram shortages are not dreams.
Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
121–130 of 201 posts
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it is very well known what will happen: you can get lost cluster chains, which are easily cleaned up. As long as the order of writes is known, there is no problem.
Better hope you didn't have a rename in progress with the old name removed without the new name in place. Or a directory entry written pointing to a FAT chain not yet committed to the FAT. Yes, soft updates style write ordering can help with some of the issues, but the Linux driver doesn't do that. And some of the issues are essentially unavoidable, requiring a a full fsck on each unclean shutdown.
I don't know how Linux driver updates FAT, but if it doesn't do it the way DOS did, then it's a bug that puts data at risk.
1) Allocate space in FAT#2, 2) Write data in file, 3) Allocate space in FAT#1, 4) Update directory entry (file size), 5) Update free space count.
Rename in FAT is an atomic operation. Overwrite old name with new name in the directory entry, which is just 1 sector write (or 2 if it has a long file name too).
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#123Bring back Slackware?
It never went anywhere.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#124Reminds 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 i3…
I was just reacquainting myself with Puppy Linux, DSL, and TinyCoreLinux a couple weeks ago to sandbox an LLM agent in a VM. Good stuff.
For those who are curious, Alpine was the recommended distro as I went through various reviews. I don't know how reliable that advice is.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#125So, about twenty people still have hardware to run this? I respect the work regardless.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#126The 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…
OpenWrt on some devices such as Turris Omnia writes the squashfs (mounted as RO root fs) in the "root" partition and then, immediately after, in the same partition, it writes a jffs2 (mounted as RW overlayfs). So it can be done.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#127Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#128> There is 264KB of space left for your newly created files.
This could be increased noticeably by using one of the common extended floppy formats. The 21-sectors-per-track format used by MS¹ for Windows 95's floppy distribution was widely supported enough by drives (and found to be reliable enough on standard disks) that they considered it safe for mass use, and gave 1680KB instead of the 1440Kb offered by the standard 18-sector layout. The standard floppy formatting tools for Linux support creating such layouts.
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[1] There was some suggestion² that MS invented the extended floppy format, they were sometimes called “windows format”, but it³ had been used elsewhere for some time before MS used them for Windows and Office.
[2] I'm not sure if this came from MS themselves, or was invented by the tech press.
[3] and even further extended formats, including 1720KByte by squeezing in two extra tracks as well as more data per track which IIRC was used for OS/2 install floppies.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#129Over 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…
Try Plop Boot Manager: https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html
It can boot from a floppy or from a CD drive, and it lets you chainload into a live usb even on old computers.
I used it to boot from CD from a floppy in an old Pentium MMX and it worked great (although slow, of course)