[HN Gopher] Floppinux - An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 20...
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Floppinux - An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition
Author : GalaxySnail
Score : 230 points
Date : 2026-02-03 04:33 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (krzysztofjankowski.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (krzysztofjankowski.com)
| heinternets wrote:
| I miss the floppy disk sound and the anticipation then joy of
| finally loading into the OS.
| szszrk wrote:
| 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 :)
| tensility wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| What's a floppy?
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| Floppy is a race of robotic jackalopes, known for their floppy
| ears. A "Single Floppy" is a rare subset of that species where
| only one ear flops down due to a random mutation of their
| hardware.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Embedding Linux has the characteristic of making the single
| floppy highly territorial and aggressive.
| vaylian wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
|
| It's basically what people used before USB sticks. But it was
| also the storage medium that software was sold on, before CD-
| ROMs became widespread.
| GJim wrote:
| Its a real life 3D save icon.
| hilti wrote:
| I 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Would that even fit the unicode tables today?
| userbinator wrote:
| 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 ;-)
| hilti wrote:
| Wow! I never heard of them. KolibriOS looks promising.
| whalesalad wrote:
| The first time I booted menuet OS (2005? high school?) I was
| absolutely floored at how capable (and decent looking) an OS
| that lives entirely on a 1.44mb floppy could be.
| xkriva11 wrote:
| xwoaf-rebuild matches that
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...
| fix4fun wrote:
| I got the same feeling, whey I saw it first time. How they fit
| GUI, drivers all that stuff in 1.44MB.
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| Did I misremember downloading Slackware to 12 floppies in 1997?
| stackghost wrote:
| 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.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| MuLinux was also a floppy-based "live" distro, with optional
| floppy disks for X11, programming languages, etc.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| There was also "Tom's Root Boot" distro that fitted on a
| floppy:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt
| mkesper wrote:
| That had to use non-standard image size though. Mind
| blowing this fits now into regular 1.44MB.
| flomo wrote:
| Before then, a local clone store had an 'insane deal' on floppy
| disks, and they came with Slackware. I had a Mac, and the
| floppies weren't very good so.
| cricalix wrote:
| 12!? I'd swear the Slackware I downloaded was closer to 30+. On
| dialup. Via a VAX. Using FTP to go from internet to the VAX
| box, then Kermit from the VAX to the DOS PC using Procomm Plus.
| Write it all, start the install sequence, find out that the
| 18th disk was bad. Reboot. Rinse. Repeat.
|
| X disks were X11. There were also the A,B, C etc disks.
|
| Then there was the Coherent install, with massive manual on
| ultra thin paper with the shell on the front.
| ggm wrote:
| mgr on sun hardware probably could have come close
| Fiveplus wrote:
| 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 amount of time. If the user hits the power switch or
| the kernel panics while the heads are moving or the FAT is
| updating, that disk is gone. The article mentions sync, but sync
| on a floppy drive is an agonizingly slow operation that users
| might interrupt.
|
| Given the 253KiB free space constraint, I wonder if a better
| approach would be treating the free space as a raw block device
| or a tiny appended partition using a log-structured filesystem
| designed for slow media (like a stripped down JFFS2 or
| something), though that might require too many kernel modules.
|
| Has anyone out there experimented with appending a tar archive to
| the end of the initramfs image inplace for persistence, rather
| than mounting the raw FAT filesystem? It might be safer to
| serialize writes only on shutdown, would love more thoughts on
| this.
| zx8080 wrote:
| > If the user hits the power switch or the kernel panics while
| the heads are moving or the FAT is updating, that disk is gone.
|
| Makes sense, great point. I would rather use a second drive for
| the write disk space, if possible (I know how rare it's now to
| have two floppy drives, but still).
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| 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.
| ars wrote:
| 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| dezgeg wrote:
| 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.
| M95D wrote:
| 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 file name too).
| dezgeg wrote:
| 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 directory renames or when the new
| filename doesn't fit in the existing directory sector.
| ars wrote:
| > If the user hits the power switch or the kernel panics while
| the heads are moving or the FAT is updating, that disk is gone.
|
| This isn't true, I commented lower in the thread, but FAT keeps
| a backup table, and you can use that to restore the disk.
| iberator wrote:
| Ps. On old good days there was not initrd and other ram disk
| stuff - you read entire system straight from the disk.
| Slackware 8 was that for sure and NetBSD (even newest one) is
| still doing it by default
| anthk wrote:
| Slackware has several kernels to choose from.
| M95D wrote:
| 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
| ale42 wrote:
| Is this something the FAT driver is Linux can do?
| dezgeg wrote:
| No. There are proprietary implementations which can, though
| not in 100% of the cases.
| M95D wrote:
| OpenWrt on some devices such as Turris Omnia writes the
| squashfs (mounted as RO root fs) in the "root" partition and
| then, immediately after, in the same partition, it writes a
| jffs2 (mounted as RW overlayfs). So it can be done.
| sockbot wrote:
| 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 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. Secondly, old video card drivers are being dropped
| from the kernel. This means all you have is basic VGA "safe-mode"
| level support, which isn't even fast enough to play an MPEG2. My
| final try was to install Debian 5, which was period correct and
| had support for my hardware, but the live CDs of the the time
| were not hybrid so the ISO could not boot from USB. I didn't have
| a burner so I finally gave up.
|
| So I think these types of projects are fun for a proof of
| concept, but unfortunately are never going to give life to old
| computers.
| tombert wrote:
| > 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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Last true step change in computer performance for general
| home computing tasks was SSD.
| johnisgood wrote:
| In 20 years? That is nothing.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'd add multicore processors as well, which makes
| multiprocess computing viable. And as a major improvement,
| Apple's desktop CPUs which are both fast, energy efficient
| and cool - my laptop fan never turns on. At one point I was
| like "do they even work?" so I ran a website that uses CPU
| and GPU to the max, and... still nothing, stuff went up to
| 90 degrees but no fan action yet. I installed a fan control
| app to demonstrate that my system does in fact have fans.
|
| Meanwhile my home PC starts blowing whenever I fire up a
| video game.
| flomo wrote:
| I think MS Word was basically feature-complete with v4.0
| which ran on a 1MB 68000 Macintosh. Obviously they have added
| lots of UI and geegaws, but the core word processing
| functionality hasn't really changed at all.
|
| (edit to say I'm obviously ignoring i8n etc.)
| blackhaz wrote:
| My dad used to run a whole commercial bank on MS Office 4.0
| and a 386. (A small one, but still!)
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| Small, medium and large colleges in the UK ran on Novell
| servers and 386 client machines with windows for
| workgroups and whatever Office they came with. I think
| the universities were using unixy minicomputers then
| though. Late 80s early 90s. Those 386 machines were built
| like tanks and survived the tender ministrations of
| hundreds of students (not to mention some of the staff).
| hilti wrote:
| I love this story where a C64 in Poland rans a Auto
| repair shop.
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a2313
| 9/c...
| cbdevidal wrote:
| I still use Office 2010 to this day and feel like
| absolutely nothing is missing that I truly need. The only
| issues are Alt-Tab and multiple monitors have bugs. But
| functionality? 100%.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| 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 see a
| freeze in computer hardware requirements for software. Maybe
| it's time to optimize again.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Consumer laptops have been frozen on 8GB of RAM for a while
| already.
|
| Yeah you can get machines which are higher specced easily
| enough, but they're usually at the upper end of the average
| consumers budget.
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| krzyk wrote:
| One can dream.
| anthk wrote:
| Ram shortages are not dreams.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| They're not permanent either.
| blackhaz wrote:
| I have MS Office 4.0 installed on my 386DX-40 with 4 MB of
| RAM and 210 MB HDD, running Windows 3.1, and it is good. Most
| of the common features are there, it's a perfectly working
| office setup. The major thing missing is font anti-aliasing.
| Office 95 and 97 are absolutely awesome.
| hilti wrote:
| Totally agree! I'd pay definitely $300 (lifetime license)
| for a productivity suite like Windows 95 design and Office
| 95 with no bloatware and ads. Just pure speed and
| productivity.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I do remember running Word on an Am386DX-40 and later an
| i486DX2-66 and there was an issue that wouldn't be a
| problem with faster hardware; the widow/orphan control
| happened live so if you made an edit, then hit print, there
| was a race condition where you could end up with a
| duplicated line or missing line across page boundaries.
| Since later drafts tended to have fewer edits, I once
| turned in a final draft of a school paper with such an
| error.
| kraai wrote:
| Then again, if you'd also run it at low res on an old CRT
| it might not or barely benefit from anti-aliasing anyway.
| blackhaz wrote:
| Oh, right! 800x600 was pretty sharp on a 14", and
| 1024x768 on 15", and when ClearType came out it actually
| was blurring things on CRTs.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| it's also proof that Microsoft hasn't done much with office
| in decades... except add bloat, tracking, spyware...
| rkagerer wrote:
| The curse-ed ribbon was a huge productivity regression. I
| still use very old versions of Word and Excel (the latter at
| least until the odd spreadsheet exceeds size limits) because
| they're simply better than the newer drivel. Efficient UI,
| proper keyboard shortcuts with unintrusive habbit-reinforcing
| hints, better performance, not trying to siphon all my files
| up to their retarded cloud. There is almost nothing I miss in
| terms of newer features from later versions.
| speed_spread wrote:
| The ribbon thing was a taste of things to come in the
| degradation of UI standards. Take something that works
| great and looks ok, replace it with something flashy that
| gives marketing people something to say. Break the workflow
| of existing users. Repeat every 10 years.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| hilti wrote:
| Or controlling the heating and AC systems at 19 schools
| under its jurisdiction using a system that sends out
| commands over short-wave radio frequencies
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/
| a...
| flomo wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| flomo wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Goes both ways, Mac was hardly something to write home
| about outside US, and they did not follow Commodore
| footsteps into bankruptcy out of sheer luck.
| anthk wrote:
| The Mac was just an expensive toy for people working on
| different media. No one used it at home, even less at
| school. Ever.
| 2000UltraDeluxe wrote:
| Amiga was big in Europe. No doubt they were slow though;
| most computers of the time were.
| Gormo wrote:
| The Amiga had huge success outside of "teenage gamers",
| even if in niche markets. Amigas were extremely important
| in TV and video production throughout the 1990s. I
| remember a local Amiga repair shop in South Florida that
| stayed in business until about 2007, mainly by servicing
| Amigas still in service in the local broadcast industry
| -- all of the local cable providers in particular had
| loads of them, since they were used for the old Prevue
| Guide listings, along with lots of other stuff.
| anthk wrote:
| The Mac didn't exist in Europe except for expensive A/V
| production machines and the printing world (books,
| artists, movie posters, covers and the like).
|
| If you were from Humanities and worked for a newspaper
| design layout you would use a Mac at work. That's it.
| lproven wrote:
| > The Mac didn't exist in Europe
|
| That is absolutely _not_ a valid generalisation.
|
| I worked on Macs from the start of my career in 1988.
| They were the standard computer for state schools in
| education here in the Isle of Man in the late 1980s and
| early 1990s.
|
| The Isle of Man's national travel company ran on a Mac
| database, Omnis, and later moved to Windows to keep using
| Omnis.
|
| It's still around:
|
| https://www.omnis.net/
|
| I supported dozens of Mac-using clients in London through
| the 1990s and they were the standard platform in some
| businesses. Windows NT Server had good MacOS support from
| the very first version, 3.1, and Macs could access
| Windows NT Server shares over the built-in Appleshare
| client, and store Mac files complete with their Resource
| Forks on NTFS volumes. From 1993 onwards this made mixed
| Mac/PC networks much easier.
|
| I did subcontracted Mac support for a couple of friends
| of mine's consultancy businesses because they were
| Windows guys and didn't "speak Mac".
|
| Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design,
| photography, etc. but not _only_ in those markets. Richer
| types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs
| in the music and dance businesses and other places.
|
| Macs were always there.
|
| Maybe you didn't notice but they always were. Knowing
| PC/Mac integration was a key career skill for me, and the
| rise of OS X made the classic MacOS knowledge segue into
| more general Unix/Windows integration work.
|
| Some power users defected to Windows NT between 1993 and
| 2001 but then it reversed and grew much faster: from
| around 2001, PowerMacs started to become a credible
| desktop workstation for power users because of OS X. From
| 2006, Macintel boxes became more viable in general
| business use because the Intel chips meant you could run
| Windows in a VM at full speed for one or two essential
| Windows apps. They ran IE natively and WINE started to
| make OS X feasible for some apps with no need for a
| Windows licence.
|
| In other words, the rise of OS X coincided with the rise
| of Linux as a viable server and GUI workstation.
| bombcar wrote:
| Those machines could be pretty darn fast - if you get one
| and run the _earliest_ software that still worked on.
| DOS-based apps would _fly_ on a 486, even as Windows 95
| would be barely usable.
| nxobject wrote:
| > 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.
| dfex wrote:
| This! I have the 14-core M4 Macbook Pro with 48GB of RAM, and
| Word for Mac (Version 16 at this time) runs like absolute
| molasses on large documents, and pegs a single core between
| 70 and 90% for most of the time, even when I'm not typing.
|
| I am now starting to wonder how much of it has to do with
| network access to Sharepoint and telemetry data that most
| likely didn't exist in the Office 97 dial-up era.
|
| Features-wise - I doubt there is a single feature I use
| (deliberately) today in Excel or Word that wasn't available
| in Office 97.
|
| I'd happily suffer Clippy over Co-Pilot.
| lproven wrote:
| > I'd happily suffer Clippy
|
| It's an optional install. You can just click Custom, untick
| "Office Assistant" and other horrid bits of bloat like
| "Find Fast" and "Word Mail in Outlook" and get rid of that
| stuff.
| goalieca wrote:
| > but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
|
| It definitely was snappy. I used it on school computers that
| were Pentium (1?) with about as much RAM as my current L2
| cache (16MB). Dirty rectangles and win32 primitives. Very
| responsive. It also came with VB6 where you could write your
| own interpreted code very easily to do all kinds of stuff.
| lproven wrote:
| > I was playing with it recently in a VM
|
| With the small caveat that I only use Word, it runs perfectly
| in WINE and has done for over a decade. I use it on 64-bit
| Ubuntu, and it runs very well: it's also possible to install
| the 3 service releases that MS put out, and the app runs very
| quickly even on hardware that is 15+ years old.
|
| The service packs are a good idea. They improve stability,
| and make export to legacy formats work.
|
| WINE works better than a VM: it takes less memory, there's no
| VM startup/shutdown time, and host integration is better:
| e.g. host filesystem access and bidirectional cut and paste.
| tombert wrote:
| I had trouble getting the Office 97 installer working with
| Wine. Not claiming it's impossible but I figured just to
| play with it I could spin up Qemu.
| jama211 wrote:
| "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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| I don't know enough about CAD to comment but video
| editing is considerably more expensive now for a bunch of
| reasons and I don't think an Amiga could handle it now.
|
| Video compression is a lot more computationally complex
| now than it was in the 90s, and it is unlikely that an
| Amiga with a 68k or old PowerPC would be able to handle
| 4k video with H265 or ProRes. Even if you had specialized
| hardware to decode it, I'm not 100% sure that an Amiga
| has enough memory to hold a single decompressed frame to
| edit against.
|
| Don't get me wrong, Video Toaster is super awesome, but I
| don't think it's up to modern tasks.
| boznz wrote:
| My crappy old 2018 Chromebook is still just about usable with
| 2GB but has gone from a snappy system to a lethargic snail..
| and getting slower every update.. Yeah for progress!
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| Maybe with the price of memory going up, we'll start seeing
| a more conservative use of resources in consumer software.
|
| A fella can dream, anyways.
| starkparker wrote:
| eMMC Chromebooks are notorious for storage-related
| slowdowns. If it's an option, booting a ChromeOS variant or
| similar distro off a high-speed microSD, over USB, or
| (least likely with a Chromebook) via PXE might confirm.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| 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.
| iberator wrote:
| NetBSD is the only 32bit modern Unix still running like a
| charm on 32 bit hardware. OpemBSD is second with great wifi
| support.
| endgame wrote:
| 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...
| zokier wrote:
| > 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. I would expect it to run reasonably well
| on late 32 bit era systems (Pentium4/AthlonXP)
| jabl wrote:
| 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 AP, so I had to downgrade security for the
| experiment. But video was hopeless, it couldn't even play
| 144p videos on youtube without stuttering. Maybe the video
| card (some Intel thing, used the i915 driver) didn't have HW
| decoding for whatever video encoder youtube uses nowadays
| (AV1?), or whatever.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| You can force YouTube to use H264 instead (via extensions
| like H264ify), that should reduce the processing load.
| jabl wrote:
| Good point. Though too late in this particular case,
| since the battery was also busted, I ended up e-wasting
| the machine.
| 2000UltraDeluxe wrote:
| Were there actually Pentium M chipsets that could decode
| anything but MPEG2?
|
| The CPU will be struggling with most modern video formats
| including h.264.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| we were decoding 480x320 MP4 on PalmOS 5 devices in early
| 2000. Those were single-core in-order 200mhz ARM devices
| with no accelerators at all. Pentium M outperforms those
| easily and thus can do it too.
| anthk wrote:
| Mp4 is the container. H264 is the video codec.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| 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 possible (mplayer
| -vo xv for Xvideo support). IIRC I got DVD .iso playback to run
| even on the framebuffer without X running at all (mplayer -vo
| fb). Also the "-framedrop" flag came in handy (you can do away
| with a bit less than 25fps when under load). Also, definitely
| you would need compile-time support for SSE/SSE2 in the CPU. I
| am not even sure I ever had a GPU that had video decoding
| support.
| anthk wrote:
| mpv and yt-dlp will fix that today.
| iberator wrote:
| 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 :)
| M95D wrote:
| loadlin ?
|
| https://youpibouh.thefreecat.org/loadlin/
| jsdevrulethewr wrote:
| > Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the
| power of the computer.
|
| Nope, that's a modern problem. That's what happens when the js-
| inmates run the asylum. We get shitty bloated software and 8300
| copies of a browser running garage applications written by
| garbage developers.
|
| I can't wait to see what LLMs do with that being the bulk of
| their training.
|
| Exciting!
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| not gonna disagree with you, but, as a solo developer who
| needs to reach audiences of all sorts, from mobile to
| powerful servers, the most reasonable choice today is
| Javascript. JS, with its "running environments" (Chrome,
| Node, etc.), has done what Java was supposed to do in the
| 90s. It's a pity that Java didn't hold its promises, but the
| blame is to put all on the companies that ran the show back
| then (and running the show now).
| hilti wrote:
| Javascript is not the problem at all.
|
| Rookie developers who use hundreds of node modules or huge
| CSS frameworks are ruining performance and hurt the
| environment with bloated software that consumes energy and
| life time.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| 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
| on how you can boot the 32bit target machine, so a 'hardware
| regress' I suppose).
|
| My second thought: If target machine is bootable from a more
| recent live linux, try a debootstrap install of a minimal Lenny
| with networking (assuming you can connect target machine to a
| network, I'm guessing with a cable rather than wifi). Reboot
| and install more software as required.
| wink wrote:
| 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.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| 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).
| anthk wrote:
| My ~/yt-dlp.conf: #inicio de fichero
| --format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
| #fin de fichero
|
| My ~/.config/mpv/config
|
| #inicio ytdl-
| format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
| ao=sndio vo=gpu,xv audio-pitch-
| correction=no quiet=yes pause=no
| profile=fast vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all
| #demuxer-cache-wait=yes #demuxer-max-bytes=4MiB
| #fin
|
| Usage: mpv $YOUTUBE_URL
|
| Upgrade ASAP.
| anthk wrote:
| The last release of NetBSD still has drivers.
| amne wrote:
| 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.
| forinti wrote:
| 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.
| mrighele wrote:
| It seems that both OpenBSD [1] and NetBSD [2] still support
| i386, for example here [3] you can find the image for a USB
| stick.
|
| I expect at least the base system (including X) to work without
| big issues (if your hardware is supported), for extra packages
| you may need a bit of luck.
|
| [1] https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html
|
| [2] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/
|
| [3] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/
| leidenfrost wrote:
| Try Plop Boot Manager: https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html
|
| It can boot from a floppy or from a CD drive, and it lets you
| chainload into a live usb even on old computers.
|
| I used it to boot from CD from a floppy in an old Pentium MMX
| and it worked great (although slow, of course)
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| i had an original 7" eeepc from 2007, running archlinux-32 from
| ~2017, with Xfce and all that, and few months ago updated it..
| took me almost a day, going through various rabbit-holes, like
| 1-2 static-built pacmans and python and manually picking and
| combining various versions. The result was okay but somehow
| took more space than before (it has 4G ssd, from which i did
| have 2gb free, now only 1.5). But it maybe that is not old
| enough as machine..
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| >Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for
| 20 years
|
| Little known fact; before 2006 all we did was play Pong and
| make beep-boop noises on our computers.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I thought Linux dropped driver support for real floppy drives.
| Did that not happen, or am I missing something?
| madduci wrote:
| No but I find this line interesting:
|
| The Linux kernel drops i486 support in 6.15 (released May
| 2025), so 6.14 (released March 2025) is the latest version with
| full compatibility.
| zx8080 wrote:
| Any chance of backporting changes to be able to run on older
| hardware?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| https://kernel.org/ says 6.12 is still a supported LTS, so
| you could just run that.
| creatonez wrote:
| Don't think so? Linux should still support almost all builtin
| motherboard floppy controllers, for the platforms it still runs
| on. ISA floppy controller support is probably not as
| comprehensive, but not because anything has been dropped.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Huh, yeah looks like I misremembered.
| jabl wrote:
| Someone was still working on some minor cleanups in August
| 2025:
| https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250825163545.39303-1-andriy.s...
|
| (That mail also mentions the floppy driver is "basically
| orphaned" though. But evidently it's still there and builds.)
|
| Maybe you're thinking of the floppy tape (ftape) driver, which
| was removed back in the 2.6.20 kernel. Though there's a project
| keeping an out-of-tree version of it working with recent
| kernels at https://github.com/dbrant/ftape
| jdub wrote:
| > After 5 minutes I got freshly burned floppy.
|
| oh god
| userbinator wrote:
| That is an indication of someone who grew up in the CD-R/RW
| era.
| dirkc wrote:
| We 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.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Is that name used with an eyebrow raised, or did that
| particular double entendre not make it out of the UK?
| dirkc wrote:
| My level of English was very basic during the age of
| stiffies, so that double entendre never occurred to me at the
| time
| lproven wrote:
| > We used to call the 1.44MB (3.5inch) disk stiffies
|
| Are you from South Africa? I understand it was the standard
| slang name there -- and nowhere else, because of the _double
| entendre_.
| dirkc wrote:
| I am indeed. Very specific knowledge of South Africa you have
| there :)
| grewil2 wrote:
| Since it's an 1.44M image I assume they use 3.5" diskettes. The
| terms floppy and diskette are used as synonyms today, but the
| different names make sense since floppies are flexible and
| "floppy". Diskettinux?
| jstrebel wrote:
| Ok, 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?
| cbdevidal wrote:
| 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.
| mobilio wrote:
| 25 years ago i used floppyfw
|
| https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
|
| to setup small router on 486 with 12 MB ram and run flawless.
| Later i get Linksys WRT54GL and decommissioned that machine.
| enricotr wrote:
| Me too, was CoyoteLinux.
| Snoddas wrote:
| This brings back memories. I used CoyoteLinux to
| surreptitiously share my ADSL connection with my SO. This was
| against my provider's ToS at the time.
| zoobab wrote:
| I was making routers our of old PCs (486 or early pentiums) with
| 2 network cards (3com or ne2000) back in 2000 with floppies and
| CoyoteLinux. Installed 10s of them in the students houses.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| I was hoping someone would mention CoyoteLinux. It was my
| residential router for several years in the early 2000s. My
| 'disaster recovery plan' consisted of a second floppy disk
| (which fortunately I never had to use).
| urbandw311er wrote:
| There's something really lovely about this project - especially
| as they're using the last kernel from May 2025 before x486
| support was removed. It feels like somebody lovingly mending
| their car for one last time or something similar. (I'm tired but
| you can probably find a cuter metaphor)
| amelius wrote:
| I remember the days when Linux came on 50 floppies.
| tensility wrote:
| If I recall correctly, when you wanted all of the bells and
| whistles that Slackware had to offer, it required 72 floppy
| disks.
| cbdevidal wrote:
| It's amazing to me that the floppy is still a relevant target
| unit. Just large enough to be useful, small enough to be a real
| challenge to use well. I don't see the same passion for 700MB
| CDROM distributions, probably because the challenge just isn't
| there.
| tensility wrote:
| Bring back Slackware?
| ok123456 wrote:
| It never went anywhere.
| M95D wrote:
| 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?
| arthurfirst wrote:
| The original software for the ISS (space station) was stored on a
| single floppy disk. Not sure about density but one of the
| engineers told me.
| kiriberty wrote:
| Ok now I need to buy a floppy drive and floppy disks in 2026? Hmm
| where should I go to buy those?
| mlacks wrote:
| Reminds me of my first linux distro called damnsmall linux. I
| think this was used as a first attempt to port linux to the
| gamecube, but the main team driving the effort ended up going
| with Gentoo instead.
|
| From the main page:
|
| As with most things in the GNU/Linux community, this project
| continues to stand on the shoulders of giants. I am just one guy
| without a CS degree, so for now, this project is based on antiX
| 23 i386. AntiX is a fantastic distribution that I think shares
| much of the same spirit as the original DSL project. AntiX shares
| pedigree with MEPIS and also leans heavily on the geniuses at
| Debian. So, this project stands on the shoulders of giants. In
| other words, DSL 2024 is a humble little project!
|
| Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in
| 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002, I've done a lot of hunting to
| find small footprint applications, and I had to do some tricks to
| get a workable desktop into the 700MB limit. To get the size down
| the ISO currently reduced full language support for German,
| English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese
| (de_DE, en_AU, en_GB, en_US, es_ES, fr_FR, es_ES, pt_PT, & pt_BR
| ). I had to strip the source codes, many man pages, and
| documentation out. I do provide a download script that will
| restore all the missing files, and so far, it seems to be working
| well.
|
| https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I was just reacquainting myself with Puppy Linux, DSL, and
| TinyCoreLinux a couple weeks ago to sandbox an LLM agent in a
| VM. Good stuff.
|
| For those who are curious, Alpine was the recommended distro as
| I went through various reviews. I don't know how reliable that
| advice is.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Alpine is great, especially for anything single purposed and
| headless (be it physical, VM, or container) so long as that
| thing isn't too tied to glibc. Been around a long time with a
| stable community (who are mostly using it for containers). It
| also defaults to a typical versioned release scheme but has
| the ability to switch to rolling just by changing the repo if
| you know you need the latest versions.
|
| I once tried to use it as a GUI daily driver on my work
| laptop (since I was already using it for containers and VMs
| at work) and found that stretched it a bit too far out of its
| speciality. It definitely had the necessary packages, just
| with a lot of rough edges and increased rate of problems
| (separate from glibc, systemd, or other expected
| compatibility angles). Plus the focus on having things be
| statically linked makes really wide (lots of packages)
| installs negated any space efficiency gains it had.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| So, about twenty people still have hardware to run this? I
| respect the work regardless.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> There is 264KB of space left for your newly created files._
|
| This could be increased noticeably by using one of the common
| extended floppy formats. The 21-sectors-per-track format used by
| MS1 for Windows 95's floppy distribution was widely supported
| enough by drives (and found to be reliable enough on standard
| disks) that they considered it safe for mass use, and gave 1680KB
| instead of the 1440Kb offered by the standard 18-sector layout.
| The standard floppy formatting tools for Linux support creating
| such layouts.
|
| --------
|
| [1] There was some suggestion2 that MS invented the extended
| floppy format, they were sometimes called "windows format", but
| it3 had been used elsewhere for some time before MS used them for
| Windows and Office.
|
| [2] I'm not sure if this came from MS themselves, or was invented
| by the tech press.
|
| [3] and even further extended formats, including 1720KByte by
| squeezing in two extra tracks as well as more data per track
| which IIRC was used for OS/2 install floppies.
| incanus77 wrote:
| My search continues for a Linux that will run on my 386SX 25MHz
| with 8MB RAM. So far I've only been able to use ELKS, which
| technically isn't a Linux.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| in theory, 2.4-vintage mainline kernel should be buildable for
| your system. try it
| incanus77 wrote:
| I should've been more clear. Sure, I started my Linux days on
| 2.0.36, which booted by floppy, on a Pentium 2. But what I
| want is some semblance of a distro, with tools and a way to
| do things, not just rolling my own technically-bootable
| kernel.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| debian, a few releases back
|
| or busybox (surprisingly useful)
| incanus77 wrote:
| Note that i386 does not mean that the 386 is supported.
| Distros have removed support for 386 for many years, and
| some for 486 for years as well.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/i386/ch02s01.html.
| en
|
| Sarge dropped i386, Squeeze i486
| anthk wrote:
| http://delicate-linux.net/ This. add 8-16MB of RAM and you will
| happily run X.
| st_goliath wrote:
| Have you tested this on an actual 486?
|
| Sadly, it does not seem to boot on my 486 DX2, I even stuffed 32M
| of RAM into the machine (8*4M, maximum the mainboard supports),
| more than the recommended 20M.
|
| I have copied the floppy image from the site. It churns for about
| a minute and a half, loading kernel and initrd, then says
| "Booting kernel failed: Invalid Argument" and drops into SYSLINUX
| prompt.
|
| EDIT: I tried a few more floppies to rule that out as the cause
| of the problem.
|
| Here are some screenshots:
| https://imgur.com/a/floppinux-0-3-1-Mdh1c0w
|
| EDIT 2: I cloned SYSLINUX, checked out the specific commit and
| did some prodding around.
|
| The function `bios_boot_linux` in
| `com32/lib/syslinux/load_linux.c` initializes errno to EINVAL.
| Besides sanity checking the header of the kernel image, there are
| a few other error paths that also `goto bail;` _without_ changing
| errno.
|
| Those other error paths all seem to be related to handling the
| memory map. I know that the BIOS in my machine does not support
| the E820h routine. I have a hunch that this might be the reason
| why it fails.
|
| The website has an image gallery where people ran it on actual
| hardware: https://krzysztofjankowski.com/floppinux/floppinux-in-
| the-wi...
|
| Most of those machines seem to be newer systems which probably
| support E820h, except for another 486 DX2 with a similar vintage
| as mine, that also failed to boot.
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