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Posted by GalaxySnail 4 days ago

Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition(krzysztofjankowski.com)
252 points | 190 commentspage 2
urbandw311er 4 days 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)
cbdevidal 4 days 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.
mobilio 4 days 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 4 days ago|
Me too, was CoyoteLinux.
Snoddas 4 days 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.
dirkc 4 days 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.

urbandw311er 4 days ago||
Is that name used with an eyebrow raised, or did that particular double entendre not make it out of the UK?
dirkc 4 days ago||
My level of English was very basic during the age of stiffies, so that double entendre never occurred to me at the time
lproven 3 days 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.

dirkc 3 days ago||
I am indeed. Very specific knowledge of South Africa you have there :)
lproven 2 days ago||
I did grow up in Africa, but West not South.

But yeah, when that nickname was current, it was quite famous -- and nobody else dared use it, even the Aussies! :-D

grewil2 4 days 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?
zoobab 4 days 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 3 days 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).
incanus77 3 days 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.
anthk 3 days ago||
http://delicate-linux.net/ This. add 8-16MB of RAM and you will happily run X.
dmitrygr 3 days ago||
in theory, 2.4-vintage mainline kernel should be buildable for your system. try it
incanus77 3 days 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.
dmitrygr 3 days ago||
debian, a few releases back

or busybox (surprisingly useful)

incanus77 3 days ago||
Note that i386 does not mean that the 386 is supported. Distros have removed support for 386 for many years, and some for 486 for years as well.
dmitrygr 3 days ago||
https://web.archive.org/web/20151223083654/https://www.debia...

Sarge dropped i386, Squeeze i486

arthurfirst 4 days 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.
yjftsjthsd-h 4 days ago||
I thought Linux dropped driver support for real floppy drives. Did that not happen, or am I missing something?
jabl 4 days 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

creatonez 4 days 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-h 4 days ago||
Huh, yeah looks like I misremembered.
madduci 4 days 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.

zx8080 4 days ago||
Any chance of backporting changes to be able to run on older hardware?
yjftsjthsd-h 4 days ago||
https://kernel.org/ says 6.12 is still a supported LTS, so you could just run that.
alsetmusic 3 days ago|
So, about twenty people still have hardware to run this? I respect the work regardless.
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