Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

https://krzysztofjankowski.com/floppinux/floppinux-2025.html

by GalaxySnail • 6 months ago

253 192 6 months ago

I miss the floppy disk sound and the anticipation then joy of finally loading into the OS.

szszrk2• 6 months ago

The omnipresent coil whine in almost every laptop I got in past 15 years, gives me at least that nostalgic noise that says "computer is working".

Whish coil whine was configurable :)

tensility3• 6 months ago

At a very low level, it is. I know the individual that made a "diagnostic" for the floppy drive while working as a tech on the Apple I and Apple II designs which caused the drive to whine in patterns that were distinctly ... orgasmic.

hn_throwaway_99• 6 months ago

What's a floppy?

mrbluecoat• 6 months ago

Floppy is a race of robotic jackalopes, known for their floppy ears. A "Single Floppy" is a rare subset of that species where only one ear flops down due to a random mutation of their hardware.

deafpolygon2• 6 months ago

Embedding Linux has the characteristic of making the single floppy highly territorial and aggressive.

vaylian• 6 months ago

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

It's basically what people used before USB sticks. But it was also the storage medium that software was sold on, before CD-ROMs became widespread.

GJim• 6 months ago

Its a real life 3D save icon.

hilti6• 6 months ago

I remember the QNX Demo on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. It booted straight into a full blown window manager and had a basic web browser. That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards.

throwup238• 6 months ago

Would that even fit the unicode tables today?

userbinator4• 6 months ago

MenuetOS/KolibriOS:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38059961

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27249075

That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards.

Now you have ;-)

hilti6• 6 months ago

Wow! I never heard of them. KolibriOS looks promising.

whalesalad• 6 months ago

The first time I booted menuet OS (2005? high school?) I was absolutely floored at how capable (and decent looking) an OS that lives entirely on a 1.44mb floppy could be.

xkriva11• 6 months ago

xwoaf-rebuild matches that

https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...

fix4fun• 6 months ago

I got the same feeling, whey I saw it first time. How they fit GUI, drivers all that stuff in 1.44MB.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn• 6 months ago

Did I misremember downloading Slackware to 12 floppies in 1997?

stackghost• 6 months ago

Probably not. Pretty sure it was Puppy Linux (among I'm sure others) that could be run on just two floppies. I used to have this old 933MHz Coppermine system that I took when a medical office was going to throw it out, some time in the early 00s.

The HDD was borked but it had a 3.5" bay that worked, so I got a floppy-based distro running on it. I later replaced the drive and then made the mistake of attempting to compile X11 on it. Results were... mixed.

gattilorenz• 6 months ago

MuLinux was also a floppy-based “live” distro, with optional floppy disks for X11, programming languages, etc.

UncleSlacky2• 6 months ago

There was also "Tom's Root Boot" distro that fitted on a floppy:

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

flomo4• 6 months ago

Before then, a local clone store had an 'insane deal' on floppy disks, and they came with Slackware. I had a Mac, and the floppies weren't very good so.

cricalix• 6 months ago

12‽ I'd swear the Slackware I downloaded was closer to 30+. On dialup. Via a VAX. Using FTP to go from internet to the VAX box, then Kermit from the VAX to the DOS PC using Procomm Plus. Write it all, start the install sequence, find out that the 18th disk was bad. Reboot. Rinse. Repeat.

X disks were X11. There were also the A,B, C etc disks.

Then there was the Coherent install, with massive manual on ultra thin paper with the shell on the front.

guenthert• 6 months ago

Iirc (it's been a while), Interactive Unix (full?) install required some 40 (forty!) 5 1/4" floppies (I believe 1.2MiB) anno 1992 or so. Linux (SLS) install was (a little later) so much smaller, even with X11 and TeX, as it had shared libraries (somewhat new in the *nix world then).

Ah, good times ;-)

ggm• 6 months ago

mgr on sun hardware probably could have come close

Fiveplus• 6 months ago

The persistence strategy described here (mount -t msdos -o rw /dev/fd0 /mnt) combined with a bind mount to home is a nice clever touch for saving space.

I don't know if that's also true for data integrity on physical magnetic media. FAT12 is not a journaling filesystem. On a modern drive, a crash during a write is at best, annoying while on a 3.5" floppy with a 33mhz CPU, a write operation blocks for a perceptible amount of time. If the user hits the power switch or the kernel panics while the heads are moving or the FAT is updating, that disk is gone. The article mentions sync, but sync on a floppy drive is an agonizingly slow operation that users might interrupt.

Given the 253KiB free space constraint, I wonder if a better approach would be treating the free space as a raw block device or a tiny appended partition using a log-structured filesystem designed for slow media (like a stripped down JFFS2 or something), though that might require too many kernel modules.

Has anyone out there experimented with appending a tar archive to the end of the initramfs image inplace for persistence, rather than mounting the raw FAT filesystem? It might be safer to serialize writes only on shutdown, would love more thoughts on this.

zx80802• 6 months ago

If the user hits the power switch or the kernel panics while the heads are moving or the FAT is updating, that disk is gone.

Makes sense, great point. I would rather use a second drive for the write disk space, if possible (I know how rare it's now to have two floppy drives, but still).

userbinator4• 6 months ago

Controversial position: journaling is not as beneficial as commonly believed. I have been using FAT for decades and never encountered much in the way of data corruption. It's probably found in far more embedded devices than PCs these days.

Skunkleton• 6 months ago

If you make structural changes to your filesystem without a journal, and you fail mid way, there is a 100% chance your filesystem is not in a known state, and a very good chance it is in a non-self-consistent state that will lead to some interesting surprises down the line.

ars2• 6 months ago

If the user hits the power switch or the kernel panics while the heads are moving or the FAT is updating, that disk is gone.

This isn't true, I commented lower in the thread, but FAT keeps a backup table, and you can use that to restore the disk.

iberator3• 6 months ago

Ps. On old good days there was not initrd and other ram disk stuff - you read entire system straight from the disk. Slackware 8 was that for sure and NetBSD (even newest one) is still doing it by default

anthk14• 6 months ago

Slackware has several kernels to choose from.

M95D6• 6 months ago

FAT can be made tolerant form the driver just like a journaled FS:

  1) mark blocks allocated in first FAT
  If a crash occurs here, then data written is incomplete, so write FAT1 with data from FAT2 discarding all changes.
  
  2) write data in sectors
  If a crash occurs here, same as before, keep old file size.
  
  3) update file size in the directory
  This step is atomic - it's just one sector to update. If a crash occurs here (file size matches FAT1), copy FAT1 to FAT2 and keep the new file size.
  
  4) mark blocks allocated in the second FAT
  If a crash occurs here, write is complete, just calculate and update free space.
  
  5) update free space

ale42• 6 months ago

Is this something the FAT driver is Linux can do?

M95D6• 6 months ago

OpenWrt on some devices such as Turris Omnia writes the squashfs (mounted as RO root fs) in the "root" partition and then, immediately after, in the same partition, it writes a jffs2 (mounted as RW overlayfs). So it can be done.

sockbot• 6 months ago

Over Christmas I tried to actually build a usable computer from the 32-bit era. Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer. Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years, excepting browser-based software.

The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies. Secondly, old video card drivers are being dropped from the kernel. This means all you have is basic VGA "safe-mode" level support, which isn't even fast enough to play an MPEG2. My final try was to install Debian 5, which was period correct and had support for my hardware, but the live CDs of the the time were not hybrid so the ISO could not boot from USB. I didn't have a burner so I finally gave up.

So I think these types of projects are fun for a proof of concept, but unfortunately are never going to give life to old computers.

tombert3• 6 months ago

Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years

It baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.

I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.

mikepurvis• 6 months ago

It's crazy too to realise how much of the multi-application interop vision was realized in Office 97 too. Visual Basic for Applications had rich hooks into all the apps, you could make macros and scripts and embed them into documents, you could embed documents into each other.

It's really astonishing how full-featured it all was, and it was running on those Pentium machines that had a "turbo" button to switch between 33 and 66 MHz and just a few MBs of RAM.

justapassenger• 6 months ago

Last true step change in computer performance for general home computing tasks was SSD.

flomo4• 6 months ago

I think MS Word was basically feature-complete with v4.0 which ran on a 1MB 68000 Macintosh. Obviously they have added lots of UI and geegaws, but the core word processing functionality hasn't really changed at all.

(edit to say I'm obviously ignoring i8n etc.)

MrGilbert• 6 months ago

It's wild to remember that I basically grew up with this type of software. I was there, when the MDI/SDI (Multi-Document Interface / Single-Document Interface) discussion was ongoing, and how much backlash the "Ribbon"-interface received. It also shows that writing documents hasn't really changed in the past 30 years. I wonder if that's a good or bad development.

With memory prices skyrocketing, I wonder if we will see a freeze in computer hardware requirements for software. Maybe it's time to optimize again.

blackhaz3• 6 months ago

I have MS Office 4.0 installed on my 386DX-40 with 4 MB of RAM and 210 MB HDD, running Windows 3.1, and it is good. Most of the common features are there, it's a perfectly working office setup. The major thing missing is font anti-aliasing. Office 95 and 97 are absolutely awesome.

deafpolygon2• 6 months ago

it’s also proof that Microsoft hasn’t done much with office in decades… except add bloat, tracking, spyware…

rkagerer• 6 months ago

The curse-ed ribbon was a huge productivity regression. I still use very old versions of Word and Excel (the latter at least until the odd spreadsheet exceeds size limits) because they're simply better than the newer drivel. Efficient UI, proper keyboard shortcuts with unintrusive habbit-reinforcing hints, better performance, not trying to siphon all my files up to their retarded cloud. There is almost nothing I miss in terms of newer features from later versions.

pjmlp5• 6 months ago

Except for Internet surfing, a plain Amiga 500 would be good enough for what many folks do at home, between gaming, writing letters, basic accounting and the occasional flyers for party invitations.

nxobject• 6 months ago

old Office UI to the ribbon

Truly, I do not miss the swamp of toolbar icons without any labels. I don't weep for the old interface.

dfex• 6 months ago

This! I have the 14-core M4 Macbook Pro with 48GB of RAM, and Word for Mac (Version 16 at this time) runs like absolute molasses on large documents, and pegs a single core between 70 and 90% for most of the time, even when I'm not typing.

I am now starting to wonder how much of it has to do with network access to Sharepoint and telemetry data that most likely didn't exist in the Office 97 dial-up era.

Features-wise - I doubt there is a single feature I use (deliberately) today in Excel or Word that wasn't available in Office 97.

I'd happily suffer Clippy over Co-Pilot.

goalieca• 6 months ago

but I think it was snappy even in 1998.

It definitely was snappy. I used it on school computers that were Pentium (1?) with about as much RAM as my current L2 cache (16MB). Dirty rectangles and win32 primitives. Very responsive. It also came with VB6 where you could write your own interpreted code very easily to do all kinds of stuff.

lproven8• 6 months ago

I was playing with it recently in a VM

With the small caveat that I only use Word, it runs perfectly in WINE and has done for over a decade. I use it on 64-bit Ubuntu, and it runs very well: it's also possible to install the 3 service releases that MS put out, and the app runs very quickly even on hardware that is 15+ years old.

The service packs are a good idea. They improve stability, and make export to legacy formats work.

WINE works better than a VM: it takes less memory, there's no VM startup/shutdown time, and host integration is better: e.g. host filesystem access and bidirectional cut and paste.

jama2112• 6 months ago

“Powerful enough for productivity tasks” is very variable depending on what you need to be productive in. Office sure. 3D modelling? CAD? Video editing? Ehhhhh not so sure.

boznz• 6 months ago

My crappy old 2018 Chromebook is still just about usable with 2GB but has gone from a snappy system to a lethargic snail.. and getting slower every update.. Yeah for progress!

nunobrito• 6 months ago

Office 97 was fantastic and the one that followed in 2000 was peak Microsoft quality all the way up to the 2003 edition.

Still remember it was possible to perfectly mimick existing documents that had long stopped being printed with such a quality in replication.

The introduction of ribbons was a cruel mistake. It gets harder and harder to know where anything is located nowadays because ribbons hide options too often.

1313ed01• 6 months ago

NetBSD is probably what would make most sense to run on that old hardware.

Alternatively you may have accidently built a great machine for installing FreeDOS to run old DOS games/applications. It does install from USB, but needs BIOS so can't run it on modern PC hardware.

iberator3• 6 months ago

NetBSD is the only 32bit modern Unix still running like a charm on 32 bit hardware. OpemBSD is second with great wifi support.

endgame• 6 months ago

You might have some luck applying isohybrid(1) to the period-correct .iso image, making it bootable by other means: https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/syslinux-utils/isohybrid...

zokier• 6 months ago

There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies

That seems odd? Debian 12 Bullseye (oldstable) has fully supported i386 port. I would expect it to run reasonably well on late 32 bit era systems (Pentium4/AthlonXP)

jabl3• 6 months ago

AFAIU the Debian i386 port has effectively required i686 level CPU's for quite a long time (CMOV etc.)? So if he has an older CPU like the Pentium it might not work?

But otherwise, yes, Debian 12 should work fine as you say. Not so long ago I installed it on an old Pentium M laptop I had lying around. Did take some tweaking, turned out that the wifi card didn't support WPA2/3 mixed mode which I had configured on my AP, so I had to downgrade security for the experiment. But video was hopeless, it couldn't even play 144p videos on youtube without stuttering. Maybe the video card (some Intel thing, used the i915 driver) didn't have HW decoding for whatever video encoder youtube uses nowadays (AV1?), or whatever.

littlecranky67• 6 months ago

I was on linux as my main driver in the early 2000s an we did watch movies back then, even DVDs. Of course, the formats where not HD and it was DivX or DVD ISOs. I remember running Gentoo and optimizing build flags for mplayer to get it working, at a time I had a 500Mhz Pentium III, later 850Mhz. And I also remember having to tweak the mplayer output driver params to get a good and smooth playback, but it was possible (mplayer -vo xv for Xvideo support). IIRC I got DVD .iso playback to run even on the framebuffer without X running at all (mplayer -vo fb). Also the "-framedrop" flag came in handy (you can do away with a bit less than 25fps when under load). Also, definitely you would need compile-time support for SSE/SSE2 in the CPU. I am not even sure I ever had a GPU that had video decoding support.

anthk14• 6 months ago

mpv and yt-dlp will fix that today.

iberator3• 6 months ago

You can always run Linux off the dos partition with vmlinux loader. Or Slackware DOS version (forgot it's name).

Don't lose hope. You can boot it one way or other :)

M95D6• 6 months ago

loadlin ?

https://youpibouh.thefreecat.org/loadlin/

jsdevrulethewr• 6 months ago

Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer.

Nope, that’s a modern problem. That’s what happens when the js-inmates run the asylum. We get shitty bloated software and 8300 copies of a browser running garage applications written by garbage developers.

I can’t wait to see what LLMs do with that being the bulk of their training.

Exciting!

dariosalvi78• 6 months ago

not gonna disagree with you, but, as a solo developer who needs to reach audiences of all sorts, from mobile to powerful servers, the most reasonable choice today is Javascript. JS, with its "running environments" (Chrome, Node, etc.), has done what Java was supposed to do in the 90s. It's a pity that Java didn't hold its promises, but the blame is to put all on the companies that ran the show back then (and running the show now).

2b3a513• 6 months ago

My 32 bit laptop is a Thinkpad T42 from 2005 which has a functioning CDROM, and which can run Slackware15 stable 32bit install OKish, so I haven't tried any of this but:

My first thought: How about using a current computer to run qemu then mounting the Lenny iso as an image and installing to a qemu hard drive? Then dd the hard drive image to your 32bit target. (That might need access to a hard drive caddy depending on how you can boot the 32bit target machine, so a 'hardware regress' I suppose).

My second thought: If target machine is bootable from a more recent live linux, try a debootstrap install of a minimal Lenny with networking (assuming you can connect target machine to a network, I'm guessing with a cable rather than wifi). Reboot and install more software as required.

wink• 6 months ago

I have OpenBSD running on my old 2004 Centrino notebook (I might be lagging 2-3 versions behind, I don't really use it, just play around with it) and it's fine until you start playing YouTube videos, that is kinda hard on the CPU.

anthk14• 6 months ago

The last release of NetBSD still has drivers.

amne• 6 months ago

I used to run a cs1.6 server on an amd 800mhz with 256mb of ram in the 2000s. I'm looking these days to get a mac mini and while thinking that 16gb will not be enough I remembered about that server. It was a NAT gateway too, had a webserver also with hitstats for the cs server. And it was a popular 16v16 type of server too. What happened? How did we get to 16gb minimum and 32gb will make you not sad.

genewitch• 6 months ago

i ran my whole house network off a laptop with the specs of a raspberry pi 2 for a really long time. I finally broke and moved it to a VM because the laptop's built in port and USB were finally too slow to route traffic, 11mbit USB! It took a decade+[1] of "innovation" in the US before i could finally buy internet faster than 11mbit. IIRC i switched to VM based IPCop in ~2007.

[1] My first broadband connection was in 1998 at 768/768 kbit symmetrical. My first megabit speed connection was in 2006 or 2007. in 2010 or 2011 we got VDSL and it was 16 whole megabits. Now i have 300mbit on a good day, and 150mbit on a bad day.

I literally wrote the guide on how to use old hardware with VM tech to route your house, first with ipcop[2], then generically[3], and just this week i wrote a guide on how to get ipv6 working with starlink and dd-wrt[4].

i've been in this a long time.

[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20220323223325/https://www.dslre...

[3]https://web.archive.org/web/20131214075417/https://www.dslre...

and the dd-wrt starlink one from this week:

[4]https://nextcloud.projectftm.com/index.php/s/4iScqZbrfYiNcKy

ETA: it is hilarious how much pushback i got about doing all of this in a VM, just scant years before "you should just use a VM for that" became the default answer, and a decade before "just put it in a k8s cluster and pay someone a quarter million a year to babysit it" became a thing...

also ipcop booted and installed off a single floppy forever

forinti• 6 months ago

I have a P166 under my desk and once in a blue moon I try to run something on it.

My biggest obstacles are that it doesn't have an ethernet port and that it doesn't have BIOS USB support (although it does have a card with two USB ports).

I've managed to run some small Linux distros on it (I'll definitely try this one), but, you're right, I haven't really found anything useful to run on it.

dosk• 6 months ago

Could you share motherboard vendor and model I will check your options

I have P1 90mhz P2 500mhz and typing from P4 just now :P

I think biggest limit will be missing SSE2 PAE POPCNT modern distros need this

mrighele• 6 months ago

It seems that both OpenBSD [1] and NetBSD [2] still support i386, for example here [3] you can find the image for a USB stick.

I expect at least the base system (including X) to work without big issues (if your hardware is supported), for extra packages you may need a bit of luck.

[1] https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html

[2] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/

[3] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/

leidenfrost• 6 months ago

Try Plop Boot Manager: https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

It can boot from a floppy or from a CD drive, and it lets you chainload into a live usb even on old computers.

I used it to boot from CD from a floppy in an old Pentium MMX and it worked great (although slow, of course)

svilen_dobrev• 6 months ago

i had an original 7" eeepc from 2007, running archlinux-32 from ~2017, with Xfce and all that, and few months ago updated it.. took me almost a day, going through various rabbit-holes, like 1-2 static-built pacmans and python and manually picking and combining various versions. The result was okay but somehow took more space than before (it has 4G ssd, from which i did have 2gb free, now only 1.5). But it maybe that is not old enough as machine..

b00ty4breakfast2• 6 months ago

Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years

Little known fact; before 2006 all we did was play Pong and make beep-boop noises on our computers.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 6 months ago

"There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source."

This statement must be Linux-only

Pre-compiled packages for i386 are still available for all versions of NetBSD including the current one

I still compile software for i386 from pkgsrc

https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/

NB. I'm not interested in graphical software, I prefer VGA textmode

fuzzfactor• 6 months ago

The way an ISO is supposed to be made to boot from USB (or HDD, SSD) is to set up the BIOS to boot to the proper type device (or let you select from a boot menu).

Start with a conventional MBR and active FAT32 partition, and make sure it will boot to MS-DOS, this only requires the 3 DOS OS files to be present when the bootsector is a DOS bootsector (which seeks IO.SYS).

Once that's done, then (optionally) copy the DOS bootsector to a file on that FAT32 volume, name the (512 byte) file BOOTSECT.DOS. A disk editor can do this, or carefully use dd in Linux.

I then boot to Windows and use its CLI to run SYSLINUX.EXE (v6.03 on virgin media), to "Syslinux" (verb) the FAT32 volume. You can alternatively do this from Linux. This replaces the DOS bootsector with a Syslinux bootsector that will seek a Syslinux folder instead of seeking IO.SYS. Also writes ldlinux.sys and ldlinux.c32 to the FAT volume.

You do have to be consistent with your Syslinux version, the .C32 files in use must be from the same version of Syslinux that you use to "Syslinux" the FAT volume. And must match the version of Isolinux used to make the ISO. To find out which version of Isolinux was originally used on the ISO, open the ISO in a disk editor and these have big sectors but about the third sector down will be some readable text with the Isolinux version number.

Then copy all the files & folders from the mounted ISO to the FAT volume, change the name of the isolinux folder to syslinux, in the syslinux folder change the name of isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg.

A properly prepared distro distributed in ISO form should then boot normally the way it is intended when stored on a FAT filesystem instead.

Show-stoppers can still arise when some live distros have .CFG bootstrings within their Isolinux folder that specify CDROM or other hardcoded deficiencies, for USB you can sometimes specify REMOVABLE after you change the foldername to Syslinux. You can also specify a chosen volume in case it's not picked up by default.

You may need to look at every .CFG file in the Syslinux folder, they are all usually linked, ideally there is only syslinux.cfg but some people make it more complicated than that. Back them up before editing but they are just text files.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 6 months ago

I thought Linux dropped driver support for real floppy drives. Did that not happen, or am I missing something?

madduci• 6 months ago

No but I find this line interesting:

The Linux kernel drops i486 support in 6.15 (released May 2025), so 6.14 (released March 2025) is the latest version with full compatibility.

zx80802• 6 months ago

Any chance of backporting changes to be able to run on older hardware?

creatonez• 6 months ago

Don't think so? Linux should still support almost all builtin motherboard floppy controllers, for the platforms it still runs on. ISA floppy controller support is probably not as comprehensive, but not because anything has been dropped.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 6 months ago

Huh, yeah looks like I misremembered.

jabl3• 6 months ago

Someone was still working on some minor cleanups in August 2025: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250825163545.39303-1-andriy.s...

(That mail also mentions the floppy driver is "basically orphaned" though. But evidently it's still there and builds.)

Maybe you're thinking of the floppy tape (ftape) driver, which was removed back in the 2.6.20 kernel. Though there's a project keeping an out-of-tree version of it working with recent kernels at https://github.com/dbrant/ftape

jdub• 6 months ago

After 5 minutes I got freshly burned floppy.

oh god

userbinator4• 6 months ago

That is an indication of someone who grew up in the CD-R/RW era.

dirkc3• 6 months ago

We used to call the 1.44MB (3.5inch) disk stiffies, since they are rigid, while the physically bigger disks we used to refer to as floppies.

And they used to fail all the time, especially when you had something that spanned more than a single disk.

urbandw311er2• 6 months ago

Is that name used with an eyebrow raised, or did that particular double entendre not make it out of the UK?

dirkc3• 6 months ago

My level of English was very basic during the age of stiffies, so that double entendre never occurred to me at the time

lproven8• 6 months ago

We used to call the 1.44MB (3.5inch) disk stiffies

Are you from South Africa? I understand it was the standard slang name there -- and nowhere else, because of the double entendre.

dirkc3• 6 months ago

I am indeed. Very specific knowledge of South Africa you have there :)

grewil2• 6 months ago

Since it’s an 1.44M image I assume they use 3.5” diskettes. The terms floppy and diskette are used as synonyms today, but the different names make sense since floppies are flexible and “floppy”. Diskettinux?

jstrebel2• 6 months ago

Ok, impressive, but - why? No current computer has a floppy disk drive anymore. The Web Page claims building such a disk is a learning exercise, but the knowledge offered is pretty arcane, even for regular Linux users. Is this pure nostalgia?

cbdevidal4• 6 months ago

If you have to ask why this is not for you. Why climb a mountain that’s already been climbed hundreds of times? For the challenge.

jstrebel2• 5 months ago

Well, in a world of finite resources, I think I would need a better reason to invest time into this topic than just "for the challenge". I mean I just think that I have ample opportunities to do something more sensible with my time. Climbing a mountain at least gives you bragging rights; I don't think a bootable floppy disk is impressing anyone these days.

mobilio• 6 months ago

25 years ago i used floppyfw

https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/

to setup small router on 486 with 12 MB ram and run flawless. Later i get Linksys WRT54GL and decommissioned that machine.

enricotr• 6 months ago

Me too, was CoyoteLinux.

Snoddas• 6 months ago

This brings back memories. I used CoyoteLinux to surreptitiously share my ADSL connection with my SO. This was against my provider's ToS at the time.

zoobab• 6 months ago

I was making routers our of old PCs (486 or early pentiums) with 2 network cards (3com or ne2000) back in 2000 with floppies and CoyoteLinux. Installed 10s of them in the students houses.

ThinkingGuy• 6 months ago

I was hoping someone would mention CoyoteLinux. It was my residential router for several years in the early 2000s. My 'disaster recovery plan' consisted of a second floppy disk (which fortunately I never had to use).

urbandw311er2• 6 months ago

There’s something really lovely about this project - especially as they’re using the last kernel from May 2025 before x486 support was removed. It feels like somebody lovingly mending their car for one last time or something similar. (I’m tired but you can probably find a cuter metaphor)

amelius• 6 months ago

I remember the days when Linux came on 50 floppies.

tensility3• 6 months ago

If I recall correctly, when you wanted all of the bells and whistles that Slackware had to offer, it required 72 floppy disks.

cbdevidal4• 6 months ago

It’s amazing to me that the floppy is still a relevant target unit. Just large enough to be useful, small enough to be a real challenge to use well. I don’t see the same passion for 700MB CDROM distributions, probably because the challenge just isn’t there.

tensility3• 6 months ago

Bring back Slackware?

ok123456• 6 months ago

It never went anywhere.

M95D6• 6 months ago

I wonder if formatting the floppy is necessary. Could syslinux or maybe lilo load the kernel directly from raw floppy sectors and have the initrd appended to it and the commad line directly inside the kernel via CONFIG_CMDLINE? I know u-boot can do it, but that's 8+ MB.

As an alternative, isn't ext2 smaller by having no FAT tables?

arthurfirst• 6 months ago

The original software for the ISS (space station) was stored on a single floppy disk. Not sure about density but one of the engineers told me.

kiriberty• 6 months ago

Ok now I need to buy a floppy drive and floppy disks in 2026? Hmm where should I go to buy those?

mlacks• 6 months ago

Reminds me of my first linux distro called damnsmall linux. I think this was used as a first attempt to port linux to the gamecube, but the main team driving the effort ended up going with Gentoo instead.

From the main page:

As with most things in the GNU/Linux community, this project continues to stand on the shoulders of giants. I am just one guy without a CS degree, so for now, this project is based on antiX 23 i386. AntiX is a fantastic distribution that I think shares much of the same spirit as the original DSL project. AntiX shares pedigree with MEPIS and also leans heavily on the geniuses at Debian. So, this project stands on the shoulders of giants. In other words, DSL 2024 is a humble little project!

Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002, I’ve done a lot of hunting to find small footprint applications, and I had to do some tricks to get a workable desktop into the 700MB limit. To get the size down the ISO currently reduced full language support for German, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese (de_DE, en_AU, en_GB, en_US, es_ES, fr_FR, es_ES, pt_PT, & pt_BR ). I had to strip the source codes, many man pages, and documentation out. I do provide a download script that will restore all the missing files, and so far, it seems to be working well.

https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

alsetmusic2• 6 months ago

I was just reacquainting myself with Puppy Linux, DSL, and TinyCoreLinux a couple weeks ago to sandbox an LLM agent in a VM. Good stuff.

For those who are curious, Alpine was the recommended distro as I went through various reviews. I don't know how reliable that advice is.

zamadatix• 6 months ago

Alpine is great, especially for anything single purposed and headless (be it physical, VM, or container) so long as that thing isn't too tied to glibc. Been around a long time with a stable community (who are mostly using it for containers). It also defaults to a typical versioned release scheme but has the ability to switch to rolling just by changing the repo if you know you need the latest versions.

I once tried to use it as a GUI daily driver on my work laptop (since I was already using it for containers and VMs at work) and found that stretched it a bit too far out of its speciality. It definitely had the necessary packages, just with a lot of rough edges and increased rate of problems (separate from glibc, systemd, or other expected compatibility angles). Plus the focus on having things be statically linked makes really wide (lots of packages) installs negated any space efficiency gains it had.

sudobash1• 6 months ago

Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002...

It really depends on what you are looking at. This is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, but OpenWrt happily works with 16MB of disk space, and can go down to 8MB if you squeeze it. It includes a modern Linux kernel, shell, networking stack, ssh server, package manager, text editor, web server with dynamic pages, etc...

Part of it's trick is that it aggressively pares down the hardware support, such that you normally download an OpenWrt image customized to your exact router. But of course the biggest difference is that it doesn't include a graphics stack or any GUI applications.

I work in embedded Linux, and its a whole different world here of trimming the fat on Linux to keep the BOM prices low. But you'd be surprised how lean we can get it.

alsetmusic2• 6 months ago

So, about twenty people still have hardware to run this? I respect the work regardless.

dspillett• 6 months ago

There is 264KB of space left for your newly created files.

This could be increased noticeably by using one of the common extended floppy formats. The 21-sectors-per-track format used by MS¹ for Windows 95's floppy distribution was widely supported enough by drives (and found to be reliable enough on standard disks) that they considered it safe for mass use, and gave 1680KB instead of the 1440Kb offered by the standard 18-sector layout. The standard floppy formatting tools for Linux support creating such layouts.

--------

[1] There was some suggestion² that MS invented the extended floppy format, they were sometimes called “windows format”, but it³ had been used elsewhere for some time before MS used them for Windows and Office.

[2] I'm not sure if this came from MS themselves, or was invented by the tech press.

[3] and even further extended formats, including 1720KByte by squeezing in two extra tracks as well as more data per track which IIRC was used for OS/2 install floppies.

incanus773• 6 months ago

My search continues for a Linux that will run on my 386SX 25MHz with 8MB RAM. So far I’ve only been able to use ELKS, which technically isn’t a Linux.

dmitrygr5• 6 months ago

in theory, 2.4-vintage mainline kernel should be buildable for your system. try it

incanus773• 6 months ago

I should've been more clear. Sure, I started my Linux days on 2.0.36, which booted by floppy, on a Pentium 2. But what I want is some semblance of a distro, with tools and a way to do things, not just rolling my own technically-bootable kernel.

anthk14• 6 months ago

http://delicate-linux.net/ This. add 8-16MB of RAM and you will happily run X.

st_goliath2• 6 months ago

Have you tested this on an actual 486?

Sadly, it does not seem to boot on my 486 DX2, I even stuffed 32M of RAM into the machine (8*4M, maximum the mainboard supports), more than the recommended 20M.

I have copied the floppy image from the site. It churns for about a minute and a half, loading kernel and initrd, then says "Booting kernel failed: Invalid Argument" and drops into SYSLINUX prompt.

EDIT: I tried a few more floppies to rule that out as the cause of the problem.

Here are some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/floppinux-0-3-1-Mdh1c0w

EDIT 2: I cloned SYSLINUX, checked out the specific commit and did some prodding around.

The function `bios_boot_linux` in `com32/lib/syslinux/load_linux.c` initializes errno to EINVAL. Besides sanity checking the header of the kernel image, there are a few other error paths that also `goto bail;` without changing errno.

Those other error paths all seem to be related to handling the memory map. I know that the BIOS in my machine does not support the E820h routine. I have a hunch that this might be the reason why it fails.

The website has an image gallery where people ran it on actual hardware: https://krzysztofjankowski.com/floppinux/floppinux-in-the-wi...

Most of those machines seem to be newer systems which probably support E820h, except for another 486 DX2 with a similar vintage as mine, that also failed to boot.

snac2• 6 months ago

What’s your board and BIOS? Syslinux 6.x COM32 Linux loader goes through the memmap layer syslinux_memmap_find() to place the kernel/initrd. If INT 15h E820 is missing and/or buggy on a 486 BIOS, it can surface as “invalid argument”.

For my 486 distro[see snacklinux.org], I use syslinux 4.07 due to similar issues. I never had any luck with syslinux 6.x, I’d recommend a similar path. It always seems funny to me when I see similar projects, claiming it runs on 486 hardware but rarely do I see people actually doing that, and just fire up qemu instead. Running Linux in a vacuum isn’t realistic, especially when we’re talking old hardware and configuring IRQs manually.

st_goliath2• 6 months ago

It's a DataExpert OPTI-495SX: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/dataexpert-opti-495sx

It is running some AMI BIOS variant with a copyright date of 1992, I currently don't have the exact version string around to compare with the ROM dumps on retroweb. vbindiff says the "F" and "M" images are identical and the "H" only has a few 1-byte differences, mostly typos in ASCII strings.

I've written a small boot sector program once that tries out memory and CPU information gathering techniques, so I know the INT 15h, E820h, E801h are not implemented but INT 12h and INT 15h AH=88h return something sane. When I have more than 16M installed, the later reports the full 31M of HIMEM, but I'm not sure how the ISA memory hole factors into this.

From what I saw glancing at the scanning code yesterday, syslinux 6.x should fall back onto AH=88h if AX=E820/E801 doesn't work. It's interesting to know that this worked in older SYSLINUX, I'm curious to check out what changed.

Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

Related Stories