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

krzysztofjankowski.com

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

#91

Post by nxobject »

tombert wrote: post #22
sockbot wrote: post #10

Over 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…

> old Office UI to the ribbon

Truly, I do not miss the swamp of toolbar icons without any labels. I don't weep for the old interface.

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

#92

Post by M95D »

I wonder if formatting the floppy is necessary. Could syslinux or maybe lilo load the kernel directly from raw floppy sectors and have the initrd appended to it and the commad line directly inside the kernel via CONFIG_CMDLINE? I know u-boot can do it, but that's 8+ MB.

As an alternative, isn't ext2 smaller by having no FAT tables?

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

#94

Post by flomo »

pjmlp wrote: post #89
flomo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 automati…

Yeah, I just posted that a lot of that software was amazing and pretty 'feature-complete', all while running on a very limited old personal conmputers.

Just please don't gaslight us with some alternate Amiga bullshit history. All that shit was super slow, you were begging for +5Mhz or +25KB of cache. If Amiga had any success outside of teenage gamers, that stuff would have all been historical, just like it was on the Mac.

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

#95

Post by jabl »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #86
jabl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good point. Though too late in this particular case, since the battery was also busted, I ended up e-wasting the machine.

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

#96

Post by anthk »

sockbot wrote: post #10

Over 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 last release of NetBSD still has drivers.

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

#97

Post by anthk »

MrGilbert wrote: post #40
tombert wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wild to remember that I basically grew up with this type of software. I was there, when the MDI/SDI (Multi-Document Interface / Single-Document Interface) discussion was ongoing, and how much backlash the "Ribbon"-interface received. It also shows that writing documents hasn't really changed in the past 30 years. I wonder if that's a good or bad development. With memory prices skyrocketing, I wonder if we will s…

Sadly Electron developers will be fired, and C++ and even Rust ones will be highly praised. QT5/6 will be king for tons of desktop software.

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

#98

Post by anthk »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #47
sockbot wrote: post #10

Over 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 was on linux as my main driver in the early 2000s an we did watch movies back then, even DVDs. Of course, the formats where not HD and it was DivX or DVD ISOs. I remember running Gentoo and optimizing build flags for mplayer to get it working, at a time I had a 500Mhz Pentium III, later 850Mhz. And I also remember having to tweak the mplayer output driver params to get a good and smooth playback, but it was possibl…

mpv and yt-dlp will fix that today.

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

#99

Post by M95D »

iberator wrote: post #48
sockbot wrote: post #10

Over 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 can always run Linux off the dos partition with vmlinux loader. Or Slackware DOS version (forgot it's name). Don't lose hope. You can boot it one way or other :)

loadlin ?

https://youpibouh.thefreecat.org/loadlin/

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

#100

Post by M95D »

Fiveplus wrote: post #7

The 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…

FAT can be made tolerant form the driver just like a journaled FS:

  1) mark blocks allocated in first FAT
  If a crash occurs here, then data written is incomplete, so write FAT1 with data from FAT2 discarding all changes.
  
  2) write data in sectors
  If a crash occurs here, same as before, keep old file size.
  
  3) update file size in the directory
  This step is atomic - it's just one sector to update. If a crash occurs here (file size matches FAT1), copy FAT1 to FAT2 and keep the new file size.
  
  4) mark blocks allocated in the second FAT
  If a crash occurs here, write is complete, just calculate and update free space.
  
  5) update free space
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