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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

#151

Post by boznz »

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…

My crappy old 2018 Chromebook is still just about usable with 2GB but has gone from a snappy system to a lethargic snail.. and getting slower every update.. Yeah for progress!

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

#152

Post by anthk »

dmitrygr wrote: post #146
2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mp4 is the container. H264 is the video codec.

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

#153

Post by tombert »

dsr_ wrote: post #149
jama211 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

I don’t know enough about CAD to comment but video editing is considerably more expensive now for a bunch of reasons and I don’t think an Amiga could handle it now.

Video compression is a lot more computationally complex now than it was in the 90s, and it is unlikely that an Amiga with a 68k or old PowerPC would be able to handle 4k video with H265 or ProRes. Even if you had specialized hardware to decode it, I’m not 100% sure that an Amiga has enough memory to hold a single decompressed frame to edit against.

Don’t get me wrong, Video Toaster is super awesome, but I don’t think it’s up to modern tasks.

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

#154

Post by tombert »

lproven wrote: post #141
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 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 fo…

I had trouble getting the Office 97 installer working with Wine. Not claiming it’s impossible but I figured just to play with it I could spin up Qemu.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

st_goliath wrote: post #140

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 mo…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

boznz wrote: post #151
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…

My crappy old 2018 Chromebook is still just about usable with 2GB but has gone from a snappy system to a lethargic snail.. and getting slower every update.. Yeah for progress!

Maybe with the price of memory going up, we'll start seeing a more conservative use of resources in consumer software.

A fella can dream, anyways.

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

#157

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

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

Little known fact; before 2006 all we did was play Pong and make beep-boop noises on our computers.

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

#158

Post by incanus77 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #147
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

I should've been more clear. Sure, I started my Linux days on 2.0.36, which booted by floppy, on a Pentium 2. But what I want is some semblance of a distro, with tools and a way to do things, not just rolling my own technically-bootable kernel.

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

#159

Post by speed_spread »

rkagerer wrote: post #57
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…

The curse-ed ribbon was a huge productivity regression. I still use very old versions of Word and Excel (the latter at least until the odd spreadsheet exceeds size limits) because they're simply better than the newer drivel. Efficient UI, proper keyboard shortcuts with unintrusive habbit-reinforcing hints, better performance, not trying to siphon all my files up to their retarded cloud. There is almost nothing I miss…

The ribbon thing was a taste of things to come in the degradation of UI standards. Take something that works great and looks ok, replace it with something flashy that gives marketing people something to say. Break the workflow of existing users. Repeat every 10 years.
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