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

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

#141

Post by lproven »

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…

> I was playing with it recently in a VM

With the small caveat that I only use Word, it runs perfectly in WINE and has done for over a decade. I use it on 64-bit Ubuntu, and it runs very well: it's also possible to install the 3 service releases that MS put out, and the app runs very quickly even on hardware that is 15+ years old.

The service packs are a good idea. They improve stability, and make export to legacy formats work.

WINE works better than a VM: it takes less memory, there's no VM startup/shutdown time, and host integration is better: e.g. host filesystem access and bidirectional cut and paste.

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

#142

Post by lproven »

dfex wrote: post #102
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…

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'd happily suffer Clippy

It's an optional install. You can just click Custom, untick "Office Assistant" and other horrid bits of bloat like "Find Fast" and "Word Mail in Outlook" and get rid of that stuff.

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

#143

Post by ThinkingGuy »

zoobab wrote: post #56

I was making routers our of old PCs (486 or early pentiums) with 2 network cards (3com or ne2000) back in 2000 with floppies and CoyoteLinux. Installed 10s of them in the students houses.

I was hoping someone would mention CoyoteLinux. It was my residential router for several years in the early 2000s. My 'disaster recovery plan' consisted of a second floppy disk (which fortunately I never had to use).

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

#144

Post by lproven »

anthk wrote: post #133
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…

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.

> The Mac didn't exist in Europe

That is absolutely not a valid generalisation.

I worked on Macs from the start of my career in 1988. They were the standard computer for state schools in education here in the Isle of Man in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Isle of Man's national travel company ran on a Mac database, Omnis, and later moved to Windows to keep using Omnis.

It's still around:

https://www.omnis.net/

I supported dozens of Mac-using clients in London through the 1990s and they were the standard platform in some businesses. Windows NT Server had good MacOS support from the very first version, 3.1, and Macs could access Windows NT Server shares over the built-in Appleshare client, and store Mac files complete with their Resource Forks on NTFS volumes. From 1993 onwards this made mixed Mac/PC networks much easier.

I did subcontracted Mac support for a couple of friends of mine's consultancy businesses because they were Windows guys and didn't "speak Mac".

Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design, photography, etc. but not only in those markets. Richer types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs in the music and dance businesses and other places.

Macs were always there.

Maybe you didn't notice but they always were. Knowing PC/Mac integration was a key career skill for me, and the rise of OS X made the classic MacOS knowledge segue into more general Unix/Windows integration work.

Some power users defected to Windows NT between 1993 and 2001 but then it reversed and grew much faster: from around 2001, PowerMacs started to become a credible desktop workstation for power users because of OS X. From 2006, Macintel boxes became more viable in general business use because the Intel chips meant you could run Windows in a VM at full speed for one or two essential Windows apps. They ran IE natively and WINE started to make OS X feasible for some apps with no need for a Windows licence.

In other words, the rise of OS X coincided with the rise of Linux as a viable server and GUI workstation.

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

#145

Post by lproven »

dirkc wrote: post #38

We used to call the 1.44MB (3.5inch) disk stiffies, since they are rigid, while the physically bigger disks we used to refer to as floppies. And they used to fail all the time, especially when you had something that spanned more than a single disk.

> We used to call the 1.44MB (3.5inch) disk stiffies

Are you from South Africa? I understand it was the standard slang name there -- and nowhere else, because of the double entendre.

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

#146

Post by dmitrygr »

2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #108
UncleSlacky wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

we were decoding 480x320 MP4 on PalmOS 5 devices in early 2000. Those were single-core in-order 200mhz ARM devices with no accelerators at all. Pentium M outperforms those easily and thus can do it too.

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

#147

Post by dmitrygr »

incanus77 wrote: post #136

My search continues for a Linux that will run on my 386SX 25MHz with 8MB RAM. So far I’ve only been able to use ELKS, which technically isn’t a Linux.

in theory, 2.4-vintage mainline kernel should be buildable for your system. try it

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

#148

Post by jama211 »

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…

“Powerful enough for productivity tasks” is very variable depending on what you need to be productive in. Office sure. 3D modelling? CAD? Video editing? Ehhhhh not so sure.

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

#149

Post by dsr_ »

jama211 wrote: post #148
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…

“Powerful enough for productivity tasks” is very variable depending on what you need to be productive in. Office sure. 3D modelling? CAD? Video editing? Ehhhhh not so sure.

I hate to tell you this, but people were doing CAD and CNC work on PCs back when a 33MHz 80386 with 8MB of RAM was an expensive computer.

And they did video editing on Amigas with an add-on peripheral called a Video Toaster.

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

#150

Post by dirkc »

lproven wrote: post #145
dirkc wrote: post #38

We used to call the 1.44MB (3.5inch) disk stiffies, since they are rigid, while the physically bigger disks we used to refer to as floppies. And they used to fail all the time, especially when you had something that spanned more than a single disk.

> We used to call the 1.44MB (3.5inch) disk stiffies Are you from South Africa? I understand it was the standard slang name there -- and nowhere else, because of the double entendre .

I am indeed. Very specific knowledge of South Africa you have there :)
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