Comments on: Three floppy-based distros

By: AgentOss

AgentOss — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:42:06 +0000

I tried BasicLinux on my 16Mb Thinkpad 365X and was impressed to get X working on it! (although in monochrome mode)

And my soundcard was working too. Unfortunately the provided mpg123 was too old to play recent mp3 files

In the end, those kind of floppy distros are more useful for learning purposes I think

By: theologian

theologian — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 12:38:08 +0000

I have MS-DOS 6.22 & Windows 3.1, with Word 6.0, MathCAD 4.0, Ami-Pro 3.0, F-PC FORTH, etc. running on a 4MB RAM, 80MB HDD laptop from 1992: guess what – it works very well indeed, with plenty of room to spare.

This raises two points:

1: This fairly complete OS/desktop/App combination, which is about 50% bigger than the current Linux kernel alone, all works in well under 4MB RAM. What does this say about Linux?

2: How is it that there are very few systems contemporary to 6.22+3.1 which will actually run in as little RAM? A ‘tiny’ Linux/Unix distro that needs a minimum of 8MB RAM is little more than a featureless base.

Linux seems to have been bloated from the start.

BTW, I use LinuxMint & #! as my mainstays & am looking at SliTaz & Slax, both of which are very accessible, so this isn’t a ‘troll’, or a ‘gnome’ for that matter.

By: Pascal

Pascal — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:51:11 +0000

You can build a Tiny Core floppy (7 floppies) set with this tool:
http://mirror.slitaz.org/floppies/builder/

By: Pascal

Pascal — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:48:29 +0000

SliTaz tiny needs floppy and 8Mb ram. It run a 2.6.33 linux kernel.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_SliTaz

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 22:33:51 +0000

SliTaz also does floppies for all of its stable versions (including the current one):

http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/index.html#floppy
http://mirror.slitaz.org/floppies/

By: Links 2/6/2010: KDE SC 4.4.4; Firefox 4 Previews | Techrights

Links 2/6/2010: KDE SC 4.4.4; Firefox 4 Previews | Techrights — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:55:37 +0000

[...] Three floppy-based distros This might sound strange, but I generally don’t endorse the floppy distros that are still available here and there on the Internet, and as a general rule, still work fine. I don’t hold any prejudice toward them, but I find that they’re out of date, intended for specific hardware arrangements, or just a bit too … personalized. [...]

By: Luca

Luca — Mon, 31 May 2010 23:45:15 +0000

Nice roundup, I assumed the last major release of any floppy distro was 1999 It’s good to see this sort of thing is still being worked on.

In terms of creating a floppy distro, using uClibc and busybox as a base should do the trick. There is an LFS guide of how to do this, however when I last tried it around two years ago it wasn’t great… and even then I don’t think it had been updated for a couple of years (and from the looks of it, it still hasn’t). Either way, I for one would be interested to see this!