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Comment by ikari_pl | Hacker News Reader

This is what I've been looking for! Can you fit a workable version on a 1.44 floppy?

Around 1996/97 timeframe, you could fit a kernel and userspace. I remember building a 1.44 setup that booted a compressed kernel and had enough user space tooling to bring up telnet, ftp, and the radio stack to drive the long haul radio cards (we were replacing JNOS [0] IIRC at an ISP ). Even had writable space at the end of the floppy (the kernel etc were readonly) to write overrides of the config; poor man's overlay I think, but it is rather a long time ago.

Given we were working with 286 era hardware (maybe 386?), I'd be surprised if ELKS doesn't fit on a 1.44. Indeed, simply looking at the downloads page linked from the original link would have answered your question.. [1]

0 - https://www.langelaar.net/jnos2/documents/about.html

1 - https://github.com/ghaerr/elks/releases

I'm totally going to run it on an Amstrad PPC640 soon :)))

Well, for that you need to fit it on a 720k floppy :) Unless you modded it with a 1.44 drive

Yes it runs on that Amstrad. A funny story about the Amstrad, at one point we added divide-by-zero trap handler in the kernel for user space apps. When the Amstrad reboots via our 'shutdown', its gets a div zero exception in its own BIOS (which at the time prohibited the reboot, lol).

I'm having a play on the PPC640 with a Gotek running Flashfloppy with fd720-fat.img

It's erroring after the mount with panic:No init or sh found SYSTEM HALTED. BOOT:

The computer is unreponsive at the boot: prompt.

I've tried a few different settings in the ff.cfg, but no joy. Could it be a Gotek issue?

Open up an issue on GitHub and we can help you better. The usual reason for problems like this is the layout of the image is incorrect on GoTek, and/or the GoTek is set to the wrong CHS (cylinders/head/sector) for the image being used.

Also worth trying would be the 1440k image, as that's the later standard 3.5" floppy format.

Single-floppy router distributions were also in style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppyfw

I'm 99% sure the original kernel and thus the boot&root disk Linux (the original "distribution" I guess) only ran on the 386 & up as it required & used the memory management capabilities.

There were some forks that could run without the mmu (micro-Linux I think?) but as I recall it they came quite a bit later.

Edit: Ah, close, this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CClinux

We dropped all support for 286 or 386+ protected mode/paging etc, as well as produce only 8088/8086 instructions so it'll run on any x86 (including the PCjr with its peculiarities, remember that?) running in real mode only without MMU. Of course, that means any program can write anywhere, so more care is taken towards program correctness, which is kind of fun.

That's pretty cool about the radio stack!

We don't support a compressed kernel anymore but have a way to compress user executables which saves about 30%. Sadly, even with straightforward decompression, that process on ancient 8088's sometimes takes longer than reading an uncompressed executable. But we're finally at the point of having "too much stuff" to fit on a floppy. And of course everyone wants games. (Don't ask about Doom: yes we have it, no it doesn't fit on a floppy :)

Check NeHaBodi. Nethack 3.4.3 or Slashem 0.7f might compile under elks, slashem itself shouldn't need ncurses, but it would need some colour support to differentiate some mons (not as a requeriment, but it helps a lot on the gameplay).

Yes, one can actually boot and run a minimal system on 360k floppy, but if you want networking you need 720k. The native compiler might fit on 1440k but needs a lot more for any development if the C library header files etc are wanted.

With so little context in your question I'll reply with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project

I remember using this in the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). A linux distro designed to be a router, and to fit on (and run from) a single floppy.

Can you find a 1.44 floppy?

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