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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

#161

Post by starkparker »

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!

eMMC Chromebooks are notorious for storage-related slowdowns. If it's an option, booting a ChromeOS variant or similar distro off a high-speed microSD, over USB, or (least likely with a Chromebook) via PXE might confirm.

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

#162

Post by dmitrygr »

incanus77 wrote: post #158
dmitrygr wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

debian, a few releases back

or busybox (surprisingly useful)

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

#163

Post by incanus77 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #162
incanus77 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

debian, a few releases back or busybox (surprisingly useful)

Note that i386 does not mean that the 386 is supported. Distros have removed support for 386 for many years, and some for 486 for years as well.

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

#164

Post by dmitrygr »

incanus77 wrote: post #163
dmitrygr wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

debian, a few releases back or busybox (surprisingly useful)

Note that i386 does not mean that the 386 is supported. Distros have removed support for 386 for many years, and some for 486 for years as well.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151223083654/https://www.debia...

Sarge dropped i386, Squeeze i486

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

#165

Post by anthk »

iberator wrote: post #49
Fiveplus wrote: post #7

The 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…

Ps. On old good days there was not initrd and other ram disk stuff - you read entire system straight from the disk. Slackware 8 was that for sure and NetBSD (even newest one) is still doing it by default

Slackware has several kernels to choose from.

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

#166

Post by anthk »

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.

http://delicate-linux.net/ This. add 8-16MB of RAM and you will happily run X.

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

#167

Post by dmitrygr »

anthk wrote: post #152
dmitrygr wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

got me, it was DivX and XviD which are indeed newer and fancier than MPEG2

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

#168

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

"There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source."

This statement must be Linux-only

Pre-compiled packages for i386 are still available for all versions of NetBSD including the current one

I still compile software for i386 from pkgsrc

https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/

NB. I'm not interested in graphical software, I prefer VGA textmode

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

#169

Post by kelnos »

anthk wrote: post #121
krzyk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can dream.

Ram shortages are not dreams.

I think GP was dreaming about Electron developers being fired, not suggesting that RAM shortages weren't happening.

But perhaps I'm just projecting. Ugh, Electron.

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

#170

Post by kelnos »

pjmlp wrote: post #89
flomo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.

So in other words, their computer needs have changed significantly.

You can't do most modern web-related stuff on a machine from the 90s. Assuming you could get a modern browser (with a modern TLS stack, which is mandatory today) compiled on a machine from the 90s, it would be unusably slow.

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