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

krzysztofjankowski.com

181–190 of 201 posts

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

#181
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Yes, it was. I'm from Spain. The Macs where for media people, not for the common worker on a boring office, where MS dominated. At home, Macs where a thing maybe for some rounding percent from kids living in a loaded neighbour.

No one got Macs at school either. First DOS, then Windows 95/98. Maybe in some Universities they used Macbooks well into the OSX era, as a reliable Unix machine to compile legacy scientific stuff; and even in those environments GNU/Linux began to work perfectly well recompiling everything from Sparcs and the like with a much cheaper price.

Forget about pre-OSX machines in Spain outside of a newspaper/publishing/AV producing office. Also, by the time XP and 2000 were realiable enough against OSX (w9x was hell) that OS was replaced for much cheaper PC alternatives.

I mean, if w2k/wxp could handle big loads without BSODing every few hours, that was a success. And as the Pentium 4's with SSE2 and Core Duo's happened, suddenly G4's and G'5 weren't that powerful any more.

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

#182
post #170
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.

Amigans are already using AmiSSL and AmiGemini (and some web browsers) perfectly fine in m68k CPU's recreated with FPGA's.

You can do modern TLS stuff with a machine from the 90's if you cut own the damn JavaScript and run services from https://farside.link or gemini://gemi.dev proxying the web to Gemini.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IIRC the Ribbon had real UX testing behind it. All the most common features were truly easier to access, but it was harder to find a certain feature when you needed it. In other words they optimized for the wrong thing.

My favorite was that Paste was a giant button while Cut and Copy were small because the UX research found that people paste more than they cut or copy...

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

#185
post #178

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…

It's a DataExpert OPTI-495SX: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/dataexpert-opti-495sx

It is running some AMI BIOS variant with a copyright date of 1992, I currently don't have the exact version string around to compare with the ROM dumps on retroweb. vbindiff says the "F" and "M" images are identical and the "H" only has a few 1-byte differences, mostly typos in ASCII strings.

I've written a small boot sector program once that tries out memory and CPU information gathering techniques, so I know the INT 15h, E820h, E801h are not implemented but INT 12h and INT 15h AH=88h return something sane. When I have more than 16M installed, the later reports the full 31M of HIMEM, but I'm not sure how the ISA memory hole factors into this.

From what I saw glancing at the scanning code yesterday, syslinux 6.x should fall back onto AH=88h if AX=E820/E801 doesn't work. It's interesting to know that this worked in older SYSLINUX, I'm curious to check out what changed.

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

#186
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not gonna disagree with you, but, as a solo developer who needs to reach audiences of all sorts, from mobile to powerful servers, the most reasonable choice today is Javascript. JS, with its "running environments" (Chrome, Node, etc.), has done what Java was supposed to do in the 90s. It's a pity that Java didn't hold its promises, but the blame is to put all on the companies that ran the show back then (and running…

Javascript is not the problem at all. Rookie developers who use hundreds of node modules or huge CSS frameworks are ruining performance and hurt the environment with bloated software that consumes energy and life time.

JavaScript is another, separate, problem.

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

#187
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The omnipresent coil whine in almost every laptop I got in past 15 years, gives me at least that nostalgic noise that says "computer is working". Whish coil whine was configurable :)

At a very low level, it is. I know the individual that made a "diagnostic" for the floppy drive while working as a tech on the Apple I and Apple II designs which caused the drive to whine in patterns that were distinctly ... orgasmic.

that is just one step from Floppotron...

https://silent.org.pl/home/2022/06/13/the-floppotron-3-0/

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

#188
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…

> Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002...

It really depends on what you are looking at. This is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, but OpenWrt happily works with 16MB of disk space, and can go down to 8MB if you squeeze it. It includes a modern Linux kernel, shell, networking stack, ssh server, package manager, text editor, web server with dynamic pages, etc...

Part of it's trick is that it aggressively pares down the hardware support, such that you normally download an OpenWrt image customized to your exact router. But of course the biggest difference is that it doesn't include a graphics stack or any GUI applications.

I work in embedded Linux, and its a whole different world here of trimming the fat on Linux to keep the BOM prices low. But you'd be surprised how lean we can get it.

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

#189
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a DataExpert OPTI-495SX: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/dataexpert-opti-495sx It is running some AMI BIOS variant with a copyright date of 1992, I currently don't have the exact version string around to compare with the ROM dumps on retroweb. vbindiff says the "F" and "M" images are identical and the "H" only has a few 1-byte differences, mostly typos in ASCII strings. I've written a small boot sector pr…

Yeah, even if syslinux 6.x “falls back” when E820/E801 aren’t there, AH=88h is just a number, not a hole aware map. It can’t describe ISA/ROM/reserved regions, so the loader still might not be able to build something it trusts. If you want to prove it yourself, stick a log right around syslinux_memmap_find() and dump the memmap entries it thinks it has on that BIOS. Its interesting to notice that syslinux 6.03 had a fix for your same issue: "Fix hand over to kernel: "Booting kernel failed: Invalid argument" error." https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/%5Bann...

Based on the POST strings of your motherboard versus mine (https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/fic-486-jal-rev-c), we both have an AMI BIOS so I might be able to run a similar test for my board. You're right that syslinux 6.x should fall back if E820 doesn't work but that hasn't been my experience on my motherboard hence the reversion to 4.x, I can reliably boot with 4-16MB of RAM.

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

#190
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :)

I did grow up in Africa, but West not South.

But yeah, when that nickname was current, it was quite famous -- and nobody else dared use it, even the Aussies! :-D

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