alt Hacker NewsAn Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy
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I remember around 2002 running my home router without any hdd on fli4l - a single floppy linux router distribution. I slept in the same room as the router was, hence I wanted a solution without a noisy hdd from that era.
This project has a website that was previously posted on HN[1], I (unsuccessfully) tried to boot it on an actual 486 machine[2], as the site boasts about supporting that.
The version of the SYSLINUX bootloader that it uses had a bug in the fallback path if E820 memory information is not available from the BIOS, and the BIOS on my machine indeed does not support it, or E801 for that matter[3].
I have not gotten around to further testing and fixing the actual issue in SYSLINUX yet (also one of the RAM sticks has sadly developed a parity issue, so I'm stuck at 16M for now). However, I did manage to dig up a newer 486 machine[4][5]. From some testing just this weekend, the BIOS on that one does support INT 15h, AX=E820. I'll have to dig up more memory, but I'm looking forward to another round of trying to get this to boot on the actual hardware, once again :-)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866544
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873814
[3] https://imgur.com/a/GCG9jO7
I always had a muLinux disk handy in my computer toolbox. Most of its shell commands came from a simple script ingeniously written by the distro's author. It's been around since the mid-90s, I'd guess.
https://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/mu/html/...
I guess I made a floppy-based "distribution" of Linux back in the late 90s without even realizing it.
I built it to do network-based disk imaging of fleets of Windows 9X PCs in a K12 school district. I used udpcast[0] to receive the image of a FAT32 volume (as a raw dd of the source drive gzip'd) and would stream it in realtime (decompressing and writing) to the hard disk drive on the clients.
I would run the udpcast sender on a "gold master" PC and stream its drive out to as many clients as I wanted (over 10Base-T Ethernet at the time, but later over faster networks). Since the sending PC's CPU was typically the bottleneck the receiving PCs never had problems falling behind receiving and writing the stream.
The most time consuming part of this "generation" of the tool was writing all zeros to the free space on the "gold master" computer to minimize transferring "slack" space (since I was just using dd and not a filesystem-aware tool). I'd mount up the drive in a Linux distro and dd from /dev/zero to a dummy file on the volume until it was full, then delete the dummy file. (One of Jeff's axioms of computing in play: Never underestimate the power of stupid technology.)
I updated the "distribution" in the early 2000's to support NTFS using the various ntfsprogs tools (ntfsclone, ntfsresize) to support imaging Windows XP machines. It was vastly more efficient than the dd method because it only transferred the used blocks of the filesystem.
Since you could make bootable CDs (and later DVDs) using floppy diskette images as the "boot media" I updated the "distribution" again to support mounting a local optical disk and streaming the image off a bzip2'd ntfsclone image. I even added some silly multi-disk "spanning" capability for images >4.7GB. (It was very janky and involved recombining the image chunks in a temporary partition on the local drive, then imaging the machine from that local copy. The I/O contention of reading / writing from the same drive made that very, very slow.)
Finally, when PXE-capable NICs were more common, I would PXE boot the "distribution" (because PXE easily supported booting floppy disk images) and modified it to pull from HTTP, local optical drive, or udpcast.
I gave up when AHCI became common because I couldn't keep up with making the "modern" Linux kernels work with the various models of PCs I was using. I moved over to a Windows PE-based tool in about 2006 - 2007.
I used to use brazilfw on my server, it was only a single floppy
“Floppydistros” were a thing back in the day.
When i was 12 or 13 in the very early 2000s i tried to download something called “coyote linux” (from sourceforge iirc) and boot it on an internet cafe pc because i really wanted to try this linux thing.
But i was very nooby and of course it mostly didn’t go anywhere. I have vague memories of maybe getting it to boot, getting a shell and then not know what to do with it.
Fun times :)
I wonder why it needs 20MB minimum. Back in the day linux 2.0.33 would boot happily into a GUI and everything on an 8MB machine.
Or maybe I misremember... I know my machine at the time got upgraded to 24MB so maybe it was that machine I was running.
Anyway it's neat this can still be done.