Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Exactly
Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
191–200 of 201 posts
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 st…
So, not a conspicuously wealthy country, then?
Whereas I lived (and am back, sadly) in an offshore tax haven.
The rich used Macs. Musicians used Macs. They were not some dedicated tool only found in certain places. Entire industries, big important industries, ran on them.
What killed Commodore and Atari was that in the end although they had niches, they didn't conquer whole sectors.
This is why Sinclair Research tried to push into the business market with the QL. Sir Clive knew that the home/games sector was about thin margins and price battles, while in rich America, you could get fat on it, you can't in Europe.
He carved out an early niche as the cheapest home computers that were good enough and were competitive, but it was low-margin/high-unit-count.
The business market will pay for good tools. Bits of it paid extra for Macs for decades because they were good at some things.
That is a viable long-term market: "the best cheap home computer for the money" is not.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#193Earlier 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.
And you’re aware of all the reasons why that hardware wouldn’t handle modern workflows, right? Show me an amiga that will play 4K video let alone render it.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#194Over 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…
I used to run a cs1.6 server on an amd 800mhz with 256mb of ram in the 2000s. I'm looking these days to get a mac mini and while thinking that 16gb will not be enough I remembered about that server. It was a NAT gateway too, had a webserver also with hitstats for the cs server. And it was a popular 16v16 type of server too. What happened? How did we get to 16gb minimum and 32gb will make you not sad.
i ran my whole house network off a laptop with the specs of a raspberry pi 2 for a really long time. I finally broke and moved it to a VM because the laptop's built in port and USB were finally too slow to route traffic, 11mbit USB! It took a decade+[1] of "innovation" in the US before i could finally buy internet faster than 11mbit. IIRC i switched to VM based IPCop in ~2007.
[1] My first broadband connection was in 1998 at 768/768 kbit symmetrical. My first megabit speed connection was in 2006 or 2007. in 2010 or 2011 we got VDSL and it was 16 whole megabits. Now i have 300mbit on a good day, and 150mbit on a bad day.
I literally wrote the guide on how to use old hardware with VM tech to route your house, first with ipcop[2], then generically[3], and just this week i wrote a guide on how to get ipv6 working with starlink and dd-wrt[4].
i've been in this a long time.
[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20220323223325/https://www.dslre...
[3]https://web.archive.org/web/20131214075417/https://www.dslre...
and the dd-wrt starlink one from this week:
[4]https://nextcloud.projectftm.com/index.php/s/4iScqZbrfYiNcKy
ETA: it is hilarious how much pushback i got about doing all of this in a VM, just scant years before "you should just use a VM for that" became the default answer, and a decade before "just put it in a k8s cluster and pay someone a quarter million a year to babysit it" became a thing...
also ipcop booted and installed off a single floppy forever
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#195Over 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…
Office 97 was fantastic and the one that followed in 2000 was peak Microsoft quality all the way up to the 2003 edition.
Still remember it was possible to perfectly mimick existing documents that had long stopped being printed with such a quality in replication.
The introduction of ribbons was a cruel mistake. It gets harder and harder to know where anything is located nowadays because ribbons hide options too often.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#196Over 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…
I have a P166 under my desk and once in a blue moon I try to run something on it. My biggest obstacles are that it doesn't have an ethernet port and that it doesn't have BIOS USB support (although it does have a card with two USB ports). I've managed to run some small Linux distros on it (I'll definitely try this one), but, you're right, I haven't really found anything useful to run on it.
Could you share motherboard vendor and model
I will check your options
I have P1 90mhz P2 500mhz and typing from P4 just now :P
I think biggest limit will be missing SSE2 PAE POPCNT modern distros need this
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#197Over 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…
[deleted]
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#198Over 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…
The way an ISO is supposed to be made to boot from USB (or HDD, SSD) is to set up the BIOS to boot to the proper type device (or let you select from a boot menu).
Start with a conventional MBR and active FAT32 partition, and make sure it will boot to MS-DOS, this only requires the 3 DOS OS files to be present when the bootsector is a DOS bootsector (which seeks IO.SYS).
Once that's done, then (optionally) copy the DOS bootsector to a file on that FAT32 volume, name the (512 byte) file BOOTSECT.DOS. A disk editor can do this, or carefully use dd in Linux.
I then boot to Windows and use its CLI to run SYSLINUX.EXE (v6.03 on virgin media), to "Syslinux" (verb) the FAT32 volume. You can alternatively do this from Linux. This replaces the DOS bootsector with a Syslinux bootsector that will seek a Syslinux folder instead of seeking IO.SYS. Also writes ldlinux.sys and ldlinux.c32 to the FAT volume.
You do have to be consistent with your Syslinux version, the .C32 files in use must be from the same version of Syslinux that you use to "Syslinux" the FAT volume. And must match the version of Isolinux used to make the ISO. To find out which version of Isolinux was originally used on the ISO, open the ISO in a disk editor and these have big sectors but about the third sector down will be some readable text with the Isolinux version number.
Then copy all the files & folders from the mounted ISO to the FAT volume, change the name of the isolinux folder to syslinux, in the syslinux folder change the name of isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg.
A properly prepared distro distributed in ISO form should then boot normally the way it is intended when stored on a FAT filesystem instead.
Show-stoppers can still arise when some live distros have .CFG bootstrings within their Isolinux folder that specify CDROM or other hardcoded deficiencies, for USB you can sometimes specify REMOVABLE after you change the foldername to Syslinux. You can also specify a chosen volume in case it's not picked up by default.
You may need to look at every .CFG file in the Syslinux folder, they are all usually linked, ideally there is only syslinux.cfg but some people make it more complicated than that. Back them up before editing but they are just text files.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how Linux driver updates FAT, but if it doesn't do it the way DOS did, then it's a bug that puts data at risk. 1) Allocate space in FAT#2, 2) Write data in file, 3) Allocate space in FAT#1, 4) Update directory entry (file size), 5) Update free space count. Rename in FAT is an atomic operation. Overwrite old name with new name in the directory entry, which is just 1 sector write (or 2 if it has a long fil…
No, the VFAT driver doesn't do anything even slightly resembling that. In general "what DOS did" doesn't cut for a modern system with page and dentry caches and multiple tasks accessing the filesystem without completely horrible performance. I would be really surprised if Windows handled all those cases right with disk caching enabled. While rename can be atomic in some cases, it cannot be in the case of cross direct…
> No, the VFAT driver doesn't do anything even slightly resembling that.
Which driver? DOS? FreeDOS? Linux? Did you study any of them?
> While rename can be atomic in some cases, it cannot be in the case of cross directory renames or when the new filename doesn't fit in the existing directory sector.
That's a "move". Yes, you would need to write 2-6 sectors in that case.
For short filenames, the new filename can't not fit the directory cluster, because short file names are fixed 8.3 characters, pre-allocated. A long file name can occupy up to 10 consecutive directory entries out of the 16 fixed entries each directory sector (512B) has. So, an in-place rename of a LFN can write 2 sectors maximum (or 1KB).
Considering that all current drives use 4KB sectors at least (a lot larger if you consider the erase block of a SSD) the rename opearation is still atomic in 99% of cases. Only one physical sector is written.
The most complicated rename operation would be if the LFN needs an extra cluster for the directory, or is shorter and one cluster is freed. In that case, there are usually 2 more 1-sector writes to the FAT tables.
Edit: I corrected some sector vs. cluster confusion.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#200Ok, impressive, but - why? No current computer has a floppy disk drive anymore. The Web Page claims building such a disk is a learning exercise, but the knowledge offered is pretty arcane, even for regular Linux users. Is this pure nostalgia?
If you have to ask why this is not for you. Why climb a mountain that’s already been climbed hundreds of times? For the challenge.
Well, in a world of finite resources, I think I would need a better reason to invest time into this topic than just "for the challenge". I mean I just think that I have ample opportunities to do something more sensible with my time.
Climbing a mountain at least gives you bragging rights; I don't think a bootable floppy disk is impressing anyone these days.