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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

#171

Post by musicale »

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 -…

What Intel/AMD/(and now)Apple giveth, Microsoft taketh away.

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

#172

Post by pjmlp »

kelnos wrote: post #170
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…

> 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.

Not everyone is all the time on the Internet, for some folks their computer needs have stayed the much pretty much the same.

If they want to travel they go to an agency, they still go to the local bank branch to do their stuff, news only what comes up on radio and TV, music is what is on radio, CDs and vinyl, and yet manage to have a good life.

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

#173

Post by pjmlp »

lproven wrote: post #144
anthk wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Portugal there was only one single shop for the whole country, Interlog, located in Lisbon.

Wanted to get a Mac, needed to travel there, or order by catalogue, from magazine ads.

On my university there were about 5 LCs on a single room for students use, while the whole campus was full of PCs, and UNIX green/amber phosphor terminals to DG/UX rooms, on all major buildings.

Besides that single room, there were two more on the IT department, and that was about it.

When Apple was going down, between buying Be or NeXT as last survival decision, the fate of the university keeping those Macs around was being discussed.

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

#174

Post by anthk »

dmitrygr wrote: post #167
anthk wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mp4 is the container. H264 is the video codec.

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

And still much easier to play than h264. A Pentium II with NetBSD was more than enough.

Nowadays on an n270 CPU based netbook I use mpv and yt-dlp capped to 420p, even if I can play 720p@30FPS.

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

#175

Post by anthk »

lproven wrote: post #144
anthk wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

So, A/V production, something I said too. My point still stands. Macs in Europe were seen as something fancy for media production people and that's it. Something niche for the arts/press/TV/cinema world.

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

#176

Post by guenthert »

6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote: post #5

Did I misremember downloading Slackware to 12 floppies in 1997?

Iirc (it's been a while), Interactive Unix (full?) install required some 40 (forty!) 5 1/4" floppies (I believe 1.2MiB) anno 1992 or so. Linux (SLS) install was (a little later) so much smaller, even with X11 and TeX, as it had shared libraries (somewhat new in the *nix world then).

Ah, good times ;-)

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

#177

Post by [deleted] »

hilti wrote: post #67
blackhaz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad used to run a whole commercial bank on MS Office 4.0 and a 386. (A small one, but still!)

I love this story where a C64 in Poland rans a Auto repair shop. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23139/c...

[deleted]

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

#178

Post by snac »

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…

What’s your board and BIOS? Syslinux 6.x COM32 Linux loader goes through the memmap layer syslinux_memmap_find() to place the kernel/initrd. If INT 15h E820 is missing and/or buggy on a 486 BIOS, it can surface as “invalid argument”.

For my 486 distro[see snacklinux.org], I use syslinux 4.07 due to similar issues. I never had any luck with syslinux 6.x, I’d recommend a similar path. It always seems funny to me when I see similar projects, claiming it runs on 486 hardware but rarely do I see people actually doing that, and just fire up qemu instead. Running Linux in a vacuum isn’t realistic, especially when we’re talking old hardware and configuring IRQs manually.

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

#179

Post by lproven »

anthk wrote: post #175
lproven wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. So, A/V production, something I said too. My point still stands. Macs in Europe were seen as something fancy for media production people and that's it. Something niche for the arts/press/TV/cinema wo…

Nope. Wrong. My own extensive personal experience, travelling and working in multiple countries. Not true, never was.

Like I said, and you missed: but not only there.

People often mistake "Product A dominates in market B" -- meaning A outsells all others in B -- for "A only sells in market B."

Macs were expensive. Clone PCs were cheap. Yeah, cheap products outsell expensive ones. Doesn't mean that the expensive ones are some kind of fancy designer brand only used by the idle rich.

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

#180

Post by lproven »

tombert wrote: post #154
lproven wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have used this on half a dozen machines with precisely zero special config.

Step by step:

1. Install WINE, all defaults from OS package manager.

2. Open terminal. Change to directory with Office 97 install files.

3. Run `wine setup`

4. For me: turn off everything except the essential bits of Word. Do not install OS extensions, as they won't work. No bits that plug into other apps. No WordMail, no FastFind, no Quicklaunch toolbar, no Office Assistant.

5. Enter product key: 11111-1111111

6. Allow to complete.

7. Install SRs.

8. Run and use app.

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