T2 24.12 "Sky's the Limit " – 37 ISOs for 25 CPU ISAs | Hacker News Reader

T2 24.12 "Sky's the Limit " – 37 ISOs for 25 CPU ISAs

t2sde.org

31 pointszdw12 comments

An interesting quirk of the ISO 9660 standard is that the first sector of the disc is explicitly undefined, in order to accommodate a platform-specific boot sector. I sometimes wonder how many platforms could be accommodated by a single "polyglot" disc image.

Bootable whatever polyglots are a recurring feature in PoC||GTFO, which I find to always be an enlightening read: https://github.com/angea/pocorgtfo?tab=readme-ov-file#0x22

That feels like the ISO equivalent of Cosmopolitan libc [0].

[0] - https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

> The Makefile will download cosmocc automatically.

What can go wrong ?

> It's recommended that you install a systemwide APE Loader. This command requires sudo access to copy the ape command to a system folder and register with binfmt_misc on Linux, for even more performance.

A security nightmare.

How is this different from all the other installation instructions asking to `curl https://foo/install.sh | sh` or even add a custom apt/rpm repo or just install a deb or rpm locally?

They all might get sudo access.

I do agree, but the same holds for the above methods too.

whew, the "use my favorite shell-based build awesomesauce" is strong with this thing https://svn.exactcode.de/t2/tags/8.0/package/shells/bash/bas...

I also especially enjoy that the documentation cribbed so strong from the Subversion redbean book that it still says https://t2sde.org/handbook/html/index.html#:~:text=version%2...

m68k (68020 specifically) seems supported.

Yet I cannot find any platform specific install instructions (For amiga, atari, mac, x68k, etc).

It would be nice, as the state of most distributions in this architecture is quite sad.

I suspect that the m68k that it targets is weird embedded systems that need some custom hand-holding to target, rather than "normal" consumer hardware like you're thinking of. Not that you couldn't make it do that, just that I suspect the code is mostly maintained by and for folks who use it to run very specific hardware.

Since classic computer platforms are very different to each other (e.g. an Amiga has nothing to do with a 68k Mac), they absolutely need platform-specific instructions, like these embedded systems.

But there do not seem to be instructions for either.

I have no clue where to even start in order to use this on my 030@50 w/FPU A1200.

The web page for this project comes off as an LLM-generated troll.

I don't think so at all, no.

I think it's a very typical sort of in-group nerd communication: "here is the cool stuff that we do" with zero thought or consideration for explaining what the common assumptions are for a non-initiate.

The first time I encountered the project, I spent a while reading, baffled, then joined the mailing list and asked WTF it was.

It's a Linux distro, with a focus on build tools rather than apps, which aims at extreme portability between different CPU architectures and support for a wide variety of CPU types now generally considered as obsolete.

It's an offshoot and continuation of Rock Linux, which had a much better explanation on its old homepage:

https://www.rocklinux.net/

The use of SVN tells me everything I need to know.

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