Last weekend I was very bored, and while browsing learned about Floppinux, a Linux distro that fits on a single 1.44mb floppy disk, it doesn’t have anything fancy like networking or an installer, but it has the newest(at the time) Linux kernel, a shell, and some essential programs(mount, umount, cat, etc). It’s quite impressive don’t get me wrong, and you could probably figure out how to do at least a few useful things if you use the built-in commands to copy some network utilities and a bootloader to your hard drive, but I thought “hey fuck it, I’m smart, I could probably do that.” Which is how most of my projects start, out of pure hubris and boredom.

Goals For This Project

My goal for this project is to have a barebones Linux distro for old machines that can install itself, and be used as an actual daily driver, assuming you are insane enough to put it on a computer.

My requirements for this project:

  • Basic networking utilities(netctl, wget, ping, etc)
  • A somewhat functional package manager
  • Able to run on very old computers(I am using a 2002 Emachines to test this)
  • Able to fit on a handful of floppy disks

The Machine

I got this 2002 Emachines desktop from a vintage computer meetup a few weeks back, I couldn’t find much information on it but I have discovered that it has 128mb of RAM, a very old 1.2ghz Celeron CPU, a 10GB IDE hard drive, a 3.5 inch floppy drive, a very loud power supply, and the reason for this whole project, a very dead IDE 48x CD drive. This project would have ended with me installing Gentoo were it not for the fact that it can’t read DVDs, and is too old to support USB booting(not even with Plop, wierdly)

the bios

Progress so Far

This is the farthest I managed to get into the boot process, I had built the kernel and Busybox, but it fails, mostly because I messed up the config, but also because I’m compiling on a 64-bit Thinkpad, and while gcc supports 32-bit builds, I should probably use a native i686 computer for better compatibility(luckily, I have a Pentium II laptop!)