MenuetOS – a GUI OS that boots from a single floppy disk

Posted by pjerem 2 days ago

MenuetOS – a GUI OS that boots from a single floppy disk(www.menuetos.net)

102 points | 15 comments

nine_k 24 minutes ago|

I suppose it's relatively easy to make a compact OS which has barebone hardware capabilities: VGA / VESA framebuffer graphics, SATA, 1-2 NICs, USB2, x64 only. Early versions of Unix were tiny by modern standards. NeXT's GUI worked well on hardware which would be considered a toy today. They all already contained the key features which MenuetOS has. I suppose it's the support of a large number of advanced features (many CPUs, various filesystems, virtual memory + page cache, advanced IP stack, a ton of drivers) that makes a modern Linux kernel large.

reconnecting 4 hours ago||

Interview With Ville Turjanmaa, the Creator of MenuetOS (2001) (1)

Ville Turjanmaa: The current distribution fits to a single floppy and I plan to keep the basic OS functions that way.

— Man of his word!

1. https://www.osnews.com/story/93/interview-with-ville-turjanm...

notepad0x90 29 minutes ago||

Interesting license: https://www.menuetos.net/m64l.txt

But this is how you distribute source without accepting contributions! :)

reconnecting 5 hours ago||

I believe I run MenuetOS once over decade years ago. Now it's 26 years old since its first release. I can only be jealous of such stamina and wish it prosperous years ahead.

Has it had any commercial success?

Elfener 5 hours ago||

Note that the 64-bit version is not open source.

KolibriOS (https://kolibrios.org/en) is an active fork of the open source 32-bit version.

Tiberium 4 hours ago||

To be honest, while KolibriOS is open-source, I wouldn't call it "active" that much. MenuetOS has progressed much further than KolibriOS over the years in both performance (it has SMP support!) and being 64-bit.

You can check the commit activity: https://git.kolibrios.org/KolibriOS/kolibrios/commits/branch... - last commit on the first page is already 10 months ago.

And compare it to "News" on the MenuetOS page: - 22.01.2026 M64 1.58.10 released - Improvements, bugfixes, additions

- 26.08.2024 M64 1.53.60 released - MPlayer included to disk image

- 24.07.2024 M64 1.52.00 released - Partial Linux layer (X-Window/Posix/Elf)

- 12.07.2024 M64 1.51.50 released - New graphics designs by Yamen Nasr

- 08.05.2024 M64 1.50.80 released - Fasm-G, many 32 bit apps & sources

b00ty4breakfast 2 hours ago||

last commit was a week ago https://git.kolibrios.org/KolibriOS/kolibrios/commit/dd9a7b9...

0x1ch 3 hours ago||

I wonder why that is. I imagine there's a number between 0 and 1 that reflects how many people have an interest in stealing and commercializing this project.

genewitch 2 hours ago||

it's okay to want to be paid for effort.

if one doesn't want to pay, one can use 32 bit (with all that entails, which, really, isn't much on the sort of machine you'd want to boot from floppy); if one wants 64 bit, one can pay?

i don't see a problem.

II2II 1 hour ago||

The license says it's free for personal or educational use. The only real restrictions prohibit commercial use, redistributing, reverse engineering, disassembling, and decompiling without permission. While that is a a lot less restrictive than most licenses, most of those restrictions are also rather curious. It pretty much negates the value of the software as an educational tool, reducing it to a technology demo.

p4bl0 5 hours ago||

I remember stumbling uppon Menuet when it was still 32 bits only, (probably around 2006?). I tried it, booting from an actual floppy disk at the time. Nowadays, I don't even know where I would find a computer that still has a floppy disk drive. Time flies.

alnwlsn 5 hours ago||

I remember doing this too, a little bit later. It would churn on the disk for minutes on end, and usually fail. I think I got it to work once or twice.

Floppy disks and drives were plentiful, but scrap in those days. So of course those were the machines I got to play with as a kid at that time. Many of my disks were not in the best condition, or they were some of the post-2000s ones that were low quality to begin with.

I remember people were making various editions of "mini windows" 3.11 on a floppy disk around that time also.

Cordiali 1 hour ago|||

I'd assume you can get USB floppy drives for 3½" disks pretty cheaply. I think I might've even seen that in my BIOS settings as an option.

genewitch 2 hours ago||

i would say that some cd burning software has the ability to make the cd bootable by copying syslinux and whatever else you need - or a floppy image. So you could just use the boot part of the CD-R.

however, only one of my machines has a permanent optical drive, so even this is going by the wayside.

now-a-days if i'd personally use this sort of thing for thin clients, with bootp/etc https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/nfs/nfsro... unsure if that guide is correct, i just skimmed it. I've done this before, but not for GUI, for compiler farms (distcc-pump, et al)

mrbluecoat 5 hours ago|

A similar project discussed a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866544