> After 5 minutes I got freshly burned floppy. oh god
That is an indication of someone who grew up in the CD-R/RW era.
Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
21–30 of 201 posts
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#22Over 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's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#23I remember the QNX Demo on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. It booted straight into a full blown window manager and had a basic web browser. That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards.
MenuetOS/KolibriOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38059961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27249075 That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards. Now you have ;-)
Wow! I never heard of them. KolibriOS looks promising.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#24The 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…
Controversial position: journaling is not as beneficial as commonly believed. I have been using FAT for decades and never encountered much in the way of data corruption. It's probably found in far more embedded devices than PCs these days.
If you make structural changes to your filesystem without a journal, and you fail mid way, there is a 100% chance your filesystem is not in a known state, and a very good chance it is in a non-self-consistent state that will lead to some interesting surprises down the line.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#25Did I misremember downloading Slackware to 12 floppies in 1997?
Probably not. Pretty sure it was Puppy Linux (among I'm sure others) that could be run on just two floppies. I used to have this old 933MHz Coppermine system that I took when a medical office was going to throw it out, some time in the early 00s.
The HDD was borked but it had a 3.5" bay that worked, so I got a floppy-based distro running on it. I later replaced the drive and then made the mistake of attempting to compile X11 on it. Results were... mixed.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#26Over 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…
NetBSD is probably what would make most sense to run on that old hardware.
Alternatively you may have accidently built a great machine for installing FreeDOS to run old DOS games/applications. It does install from USB, but needs BIOS so can't run it on modern PC hardware.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#27I remember the QNX Demo on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. It booted straight into a full blown window manager and had a basic web browser. That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards.
xwoaf-rebuild matches that
https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#28Over 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…
You might have some luck applying isohybrid(1) to the period-correct .iso image, making it bootable by other means: https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/syslinux-utils/isohybrid...
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#29Over 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…
It's crazy too to realise how much of the multi-application interop vision was realized in Office 97 too. Visual Basic for Applications had rich hooks into all the apps, you could make macros and scripts and embed them into documents, you could embed documents into each other.
It's really astonishing how full-featured it all was, and it was running on those Pentium machines that had a "turbo" button to switch between 33 and 66 MHz and just a few MBs of RAM.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Controversial position: journaling is not as beneficial as commonly believed. I have been using FAT for decades and never encountered much in the way of data corruption. It's probably found in far more embedded devices than PCs these days.
If you make structural changes to your filesystem without a journal, and you fail mid way, there is a 100% chance your filesystem is not in a known state, and a very good chance it is in a non-self-consistent state that will lead to some interesting surprises down the line.
FAT has two allocation tables, the main one and a backup. So if you shut it off while manipulating the first one you have the backup. You are expected to run a filesystem check after a power failure.