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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

#131

Post by dezgeg »

ale42 wrote: post #105
M95D wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. There are proprietary implementations which can, though not in 100% of the cases.

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

#132

Post by dezgeg »

M95D wrote: post #122
dezgeg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fil…

No, the VFAT driver doesn't do anything even slightly resembling that.

In general "what DOS did" doesn't cut for a modern system with page and dentry caches and multiple tasks accessing the filesystem without completely horrible performance. I would be really surprised if Windows handled all those cases right with disk caching enabled.

While rename can be atomic in some cases, it cannot be in the case of cross directory renames or when the new filename doesn't fit in the existing directory sector.

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

#133

Post by anthk »

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 Mac didn't exist in Europe except for expensive A/V production machines and the printing world (books, artists, movie posters, covers and the like).

If you were from Humanities and worked for a newspaper design layout you would use a Mac at work. That's it.

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

#134

Post by anthk »

pjmlp wrote: post #103
flomo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Mac was just an expensive toy for people working on different media. No one used it at home, even less at school. Ever.

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

#135

Post by anthk »

wink wrote: post #62
2b3a51 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 32 bit laptop is a Thinkpad T42 from 2005 which has a functioning CDROM, and which can run Slackware15 stable 32bit install OKish, so I haven't tried any of this but: My first thought: How about using a current computer to run qemu then mounting the Lenny iso as an image and installing to a qemu hard drive? Then dd the hard drive image to your 32bit target. (That might need access to a hard drive caddy depending o…

I have OpenBSD running on my old 2004 Centrino notebook (I might be lagging 2-3 versions behind, I don't really use it, just play around with it) and it's fine until you start playing YouTube videos, that is kinda hard on the CPU.

My ~/yt-dlp.conf:

    #inicio de fichero
    --format=bestvideo[height
My ~/.config/mpv/config

#inicio

      ytdl-format=bestvideo[height
Usage: mpv $YOUTUBE_URL

Upgrade ASAP.

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

#138

Post by svilen_dobrev »

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 had an original 7" eeepc from 2007, running archlinux-32 from ~2017, with Xfce and all that, and few months ago updated it.. took me almost a day, going through various rabbit-holes, like 1-2 static-built pacmans and python and manually picking and combining various versions. The result was okay but somehow took more space than before (it has 4G ssd, from which i did have 2gb free, now only 1.5). But it maybe that is not old enough as machine..

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

#139

Post by zamadatix »

alsetmusic wrote: post #124
mlacks wrote: post #120

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 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.

Alpine is great, especially for anything single purposed and headless (be it physical, VM, or container) so long as that thing isn't too tied to glibc. Been around a long time with a stable community (who are mostly using it for containers). It also defaults to a typical versioned release scheme but has the ability to switch to rolling just by changing the repo if you know you need the latest versions.

I once tried to use it as a GUI daily driver on my work laptop (since I was already using it for containers and VMs at work) and found that stretched it a bit too far out of its speciality. It definitely had the necessary packages, just with a lot of rough edges and increased rate of problems (separate from glibc, systemd, or other expected compatibility angles). Plus the focus on having things be statically linked makes really wide (lots of packages) installs negated any space efficiency gains it had.

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

#140

Post by st_goliath »

Have you tested this on an actual 486?

Sadly, it does not seem to boot on my 486 DX2, I even stuffed 32M of RAM into the machine (8*4M, maximum the mainboard supports), more than the recommended 20M.

I have copied the floppy image from the site. It churns for about a minute and a half, loading kernel and initrd, then says "Booting kernel failed: Invalid Argument" and drops into SYSLINUX prompt.

EDIT: I tried a few more floppies to rule that out as the cause of the problem.

Here are some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/floppinux-0-3-1-Mdh1c0w

EDIT 2: I cloned SYSLINUX, checked out the specific commit and did some prodding around.

The function `bios_boot_linux` in `com32/lib/syslinux/load_linux.c` initializes errno to EINVAL. Besides sanity checking the header of the kernel image, there are a few other error paths that also `goto bail;` without changing errno.

Those other error paths all seem to be related to handling the memory map. I know that the BIOS in my machine does not support the E820h routine. I have a hunch that this might be the reason why it fails.

The website has an image gallery where people ran it on actual hardware: https://krzysztofjankowski.com/floppinux/floppinux-in-the-wi...

Most of those machines seem to be newer systems which probably support E820h, except for another 486 DX2 with a similar vintage as mine, that also failed to boot.

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