Bring back Slackware?
Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
81–90 of 201 posts
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#82I remember the days when Linux came on 50 floppies.
If I recall correctly, when you wanted all of the bells and whistles that Slackware had to offer, it required 72 floppy disks.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
My 32 bit laptop is a Thinkpad T42 from 2005 which has a functioning CDROM, and which can run Slackware15 stable 32bit install OKish, so I haven't tried any of this but: My first thought: How about using a current computer to run qemu then mounting the Lenny iso as an image and installing to a qemu hard drive? Then dd the hard drive image to your 32bit target. (That might need access to a hard drive caddy depending o…
I have OpenBSD running on my old 2004 Centrino notebook (I might be lagging 2-3 versions behind, I don't really use it, just play around with it) and it's fine until you start playing YouTube videos, that is kinda hard on the CPU.
Yes, NetBSD and OpenBSD work fine on the 2005 T42 but as you say video performance is low. Recent OpenBSD versions have had to reduce the range of binary packages (i.e. outside of the base and installed with pkg_add) on i386 because of the difficulty of compiling them (e.g. Firefox, Seamonkey needing dependencies that are hard to compile on i386, a point the poster up thread made).
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, it is very well known what will happen: you can get lost cluster chains, which are easily cleaned up. As long as the order of writes is known, there is no problem.
Better hope you didn't have a rename in progress with the old name removed without the new name in place. Or a directory entry written pointing to a FAT chain not yet committed to the FAT.
Yes, soft updates style write ordering can help with some of the issues, but the Linux driver doesn't do that. And some of the issues are essentially unavoidable, requiring a a full fsck on each unclean shutdown.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#85I miss the floppy disk sound and the anticipation then joy of finally loading into the OS.
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.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies That seems odd? Debian 12 Bullseye (oldstable) has fully supported i386 port.…
AFAIU the Debian i386 port has effectively required i686 level CPU's for quite a long time (CMOV etc.)? So if he has an older CPU like the Pentium it might not work? But otherwise, yes, Debian 12 should work fine as you say. Not so long ago I installed it on an old Pentium M laptop I had lying around. Did take some tweaking, turned out that the wifi card didn't support WPA2/3 mixed mode which I had configured on my A…
You can force YouTube to use H264 instead (via extensions like H264ify), that should reduce the processing load.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#87Did I misremember downloading Slackware to 12 floppies in 1997?
MuLinux was also a floppy-based “live” distro, with optional floppy disks for X11, programming languages, etc.
There was also "Tom's Root Boot" distro that fitted on a floppy:
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#88We used to call the 1.44MB (3.5inch) disk stiffies, since they are rigid, while the physically bigger disks we used to refer to as floppies. And they used to fail all the time, especially when you had something that spanned more than a single disk.
Is that name used with an eyebrow raised, or did that particular double entendre not make it out of the UK?
My level of English was very basic during the age of stiffies, so that double entendre never occurred to me at the time
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for Internet surfing, a plain Amiga 500 would be good enough for what many folks do at home, between gaming, writing letters, basic accounting and the occasional flyers for party invitations.
Total nostalgia talk. Those machines were just glacially slow at launching apps and really everything, like spell check, go get a coffee. I could immediately tell the difference between a 25Mhz Mac IIci and a 25Mhz Mac IIci with a 32KB cache card. That's how slow they were.
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 automatic updated cells, something like Superplan would also be enough.
Re: Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
MuLinux was also a floppy-based “live” distro, with optional floppy disks for X11, programming languages, etc.
There was also "Tom's Root Boot" distro that fitted on a floppy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt
That had to use non-standard image size though. Mind blowing this fits now into regular 1.44MB.