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I remember Linux on a floppy in the 2.4 era. You generally needed to do some interesting formatting to the disks to get much of a user land, but you could have
by wiredfool 3y ago
I remember Linux on a floppy in the 2.4 era. You generally needed to do some interesting formatting to the disks to get much of a user land, but you could have a router running from floppy/ram in 1.4->1.7 mb of disk.
- squarefoot 3y agoWas it floppyfw? (0) I used it as firewall ages ago, and if memory serves was the one I moved to a DiskOnModule flash drive to make boot faster and more reliable. 0 - https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/ https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
- RetroTechie 3y agoIn the late 90's I lived in a house with +/- 10 others (mostly students). Internet was shared using Windows ICS (ugh!) on someone's PC, which was also used for that guys' regular work. Which included playing Diablo & such. Obviously a lousy setup. And of course internet (for the rest o/t house) was often down as a result. At some point people got fed up. And (having some Linux experience at the time) I knew where to look. Put together and old Pentium PC with 2 network cards, no hdd, and in went a floppy called FreeSCO. After fiddling with the software's power management settings, I put the CPU on passive cooling. Shoved the box in a corner & never looked back - rock solid. Uptime usually limited by power failures or ISP messing with configuration of their systems. Indeed: Linux 2.0~2.4 days.
- actionfromafar 3y agoFreesco! I'd forgotten about it completely. It was user friendly, menu driven.
- eep_social 3y agoWebsite is still up with a 2007 copyright and a 2.0.39 kernel on offer.
- jojobas 3y agoOld Pentium in the 90s!? What were you, a billionaire?
- freeopinion 3y agoIn 1998, an old Pentium might have been four or five years old and cast off.
- jojobas 3y agoFirst Pentium II was released in the middle of 1997. By 1997 the first Pentiums were some 4x outclocked by later Pentiums, but probably not more than 2x slower in real world applications, by no means an obsolete machine. My ~1996 P75 lasted me till about 2002, fun times.
- freeopinion 3y agoExactly. So the idea of reusing an old Pentium as a cheap router in the late 90s is plausible.
- jojobas 3y agoThe entire machine would be still worth hundreds of dollars! Hundreds!
- G3rn0ti 3y agoNo. Nobody wanted Pentiums from the mid nineties by the end of the decade. Clock frequencies were racing to jump over the 1 GHz barrier. We produced a lot of electronics trash in the 90s. You bought a computer and two years later you had to replace it. Upgrade paths were also severely limited due to new sockets and chipsets all the time. It was stressful if you wanted to stay cutting edge with your gaming PC I can tell you.
- jojobas 3y ago
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- snvzz 3y agoI remember muLinux from circa 1997. Surprisingly, the website is still up[0]. IIRC it was a couple floppies, with an extra one for X11. It ran w/o issue on 486. 0. http://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/ http://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/
- littlecranky67 3y agoYes, I used this "fli4l" distro from a single, bootable 1.44MB floppy as a Ethernet/DSL NAT gateway in the early 2000s. Consumergrade DSL routers where unheard of (or expensive) so using an old 486 machine with two NICs was more viable. Good memories.
- FreeFull 3y agohttps://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html Check this out, it's a single-floppy linux that includes X11 (!) and a bunch of utilities