201–210 of 258 posts
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To really hammer this home: Alpine uses musl instead of glibc for the C standard library. This has caused me all types of trouble in unexpected places. I'm all for suggestions for a better base OS in small docker containers, mostly to run nginx, php, postgress, mysql, redis, and python.
How about debian-slim?
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Computers didn't used to have GPUs back then when 150kB was a significant amount of graphics memory.
The IBM PGC (1984) was a discrete GPU with 320kB of RAM and slightly over 64kB of ROM. The EGA (1984) and VGA (1987) could conceivably be considered a GPU although not turning complete. EGA had 64, 128, 192, or 256K and VGA 256K. The 8514/A (1987) was Turing complete although it had 512kB. The Image Adapter/A (1989) was far more powerful, pretty much the first modern GPU as we know them and came with 1MB expandable t…
The PGC was kind of a GPU if you squint a bit. It didn't work the way a modern GPU does where you've got masses of individual compute cores working on the same problem, but it did have a processor roughly as fast as the host processor that you could offload simple drawing tasks to. It couldn't do 3D stuff like what we'd call a GPU today does, but it could do things like solid fills and lines.
In today's money the PGC cost about the same as an RTX PRO 6000, so no-one really had them.
Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to. Phenomenal for those low powered servers you just want to leave on and running some tiny batch of cronjobs [1] or something for months or years at a time without worrying too much…
"Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to." Before RPI existed, I always made filesystem images for USB sticks in NetBSD so that writes never touched "disk" ("diskless"). This allows me to remove the USB stick after boot,…
In around 2002, I got my hands on an old 386 which I was planning to use for teaching myself things. I was able to breathe life into it using MicroLinux. Two superformatted 1.44" floppy disks and the thing booted. Basic kernel, 16 colour X display, C compiler and Editor. I don't know if there are any other options for older machines other than stripped down Linux distros.
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"Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to." Before RPI existed, I always made filesystem images for USB sticks in NetBSD so that writes never touched "disk" ("diskless"). This allows me to remove the USB stick after boot,…
I suspect the majority of "SD corruption" on RPis is due to bad power supplies or EMI causing the system to misbehave (and write erroneous data to the card) rather than actually exhausting the card's write capacity.
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Alpine also has a lesser known RPi build on their download page; by using musl instead of glibc the difference in size and resources used compared to regular distros is huge as well. https://alpinelinux.org/downloads/
I recently put Alpine with i3 on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and I'm super impressed with how snappy it is. I find it much better even than Raspberry Pi OS Lite.
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I had a 386 PC with 4MB of RAM when I was a kid, and it ran Windows 3.1 with a GUI, but that also had a VGA display at 640x480, and only 16-bit color (4 bits per pixel). So 153,600 bytes for the frame buffer.
> and only 16-bit color (4 bits per pixel). The "high color" (16 bit) mode was 5:6:5 bits per channel , so 16 bits per pixel . > So 153,600 bytes for the frame buffer. And so you're looking at 614.4 KB (600 KiB) instead.
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> and only 16-bit color (4 bits per pixel). The "high color" (16 bit) mode was 5:6:5 bits per channel , so 16 bits per pixel . > So 153,600 bytes for the frame buffer. And so you're looking at 614.4 KB (600 KiB) instead.
"Windows 3.1 primarily used palette-based color modes, common modes included 16 colors (VGA/EGA) and 256 colors (SuperVGA)"
To be frank, I wasn't aware such a mode was a thing, but it makes sense.
Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to. Phenomenal for those low powered servers you just want to leave on and running some tiny batch of cronjobs [1] or something for months or years at a time without worrying too much…
Alpine also has a lesser known RPi build on their download page; by using musl instead of glibc the difference in size and resources used compared to regular distros is huge as well. https://alpinelinux.org/downloads/