I guess I made a floppy-based "distribution" of Linux back in the late 90s without even realizing it.
I built it to do network-based disk imaging of fleets of Windows 9X PCs in a K12 school district. I used udpcast[0] to receive the image of a FAT32 volume (as a raw dd of the filesystem gzip'd) and would stream it in realtime (decompressing and writing) to the hard disk drive on the PC. I could run the "server" on the "gold master" PC and stream it out to as many clients as I wanted (over 10Base-T Ethernet at the time, but later over faster networks). Since the sending PC CPU was mostly the bottleneck the receiving PCs never had problems falling on receiving and writing the stream.
I updated the "distribution" in the early 2000's to support NTFS using the various ntfsprogs tools (ntfsclone, ntfsresize) to support imaging Windows XP machines.
Finally, since you could make bootable CDs and later DVDs using floppy diskette images as the "boot media" I updated the "distribution" to support mounting a local optical disk and streaming the image off an bzip2'd ntfsclone image.
I remember around 2002 running my home router without any hdd on fli4l - a single floppy linux router distribution. I slept in the same room as the router was, hence I wanted a solution without a noisy hdd from that era.
At the same time, I was running a home router without any HDD on LRP, Linux Router Project, which was a distribution from Swansea Linux, and was a floppy image, that decompressed into RAM, and then chrood to the RAM image. Really nifty, except for the 486 machine had a Pentium Overdrive, which was vulnerable to F00F, and we got owned... only to reboot again, and back to our normal image.
Since it had no hard disk, and no monitor, it was quiet, and used little power.
When i was 12 or 13 in the very early 2000s i tried to download something called “coyote linux” (from sourceforge iirc) and boot it on an internet cafe pc because i really wanted to try this linux thing.
But i was very nooby and of course it mostly didn’t go anywhere. I have vague memories of maybe getting it to boot, getting a shell and then not know what to do with it.
I guess I made a floppy-based "distribution" of Linux back in the late 90s without even realizing it.
I built it to do network-based disk imaging of fleets of Windows 9X PCs in a K12 school district. I used udpcast[0] to receive the image of a FAT32 volume (as a raw dd of the filesystem gzip'd) and would stream it in realtime (decompressing and writing) to the hard disk drive on the PC. I could run the "server" on the "gold master" PC and stream it out to as many clients as I wanted (over 10Base-T Ethernet at the time, but later over faster networks). Since the sending PC CPU was mostly the bottleneck the receiving PCs never had problems falling on receiving and writing the stream.
I updated the "distribution" in the early 2000's to support NTFS using the various ntfsprogs tools (ntfsclone, ntfsresize) to support imaging Windows XP machines.
Finally, since you could make bootable CDs and later DVDs using floppy diskette images as the "boot media" I updated the "distribution" to support mounting a local optical disk and streaming the image off an bzip2'd ntfsclone image.
[0] http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/
I remember around 2002 running my home router without any hdd on fli4l - a single floppy linux router distribution. I slept in the same room as the router was, hence I wanted a solution without a noisy hdd from that era.
Was the floppy quieter than an HD?
Probably only used the floppy to boot into a ramdisk.
Exactly.
At the same time, I was running a home router without any HDD on LRP, Linux Router Project, which was a distribution from Swansea Linux, and was a floppy image, that decompressed into RAM, and then chrood to the RAM image. Really nifty, except for the 486 machine had a Pentium Overdrive, which was vulnerable to F00F, and we got owned... only to reboot again, and back to our normal image.
Since it had no hard disk, and no monitor, it was quiet, and used little power.
“Floppydistros” were a thing back in the day.
When i was 12 or 13 in the very early 2000s i tried to download something called “coyote linux” (from sourceforge iirc) and boot it on an internet cafe pc because i really wanted to try this linux thing.
But i was very nooby and of course it mostly didn’t go anywhere. I have vague memories of maybe getting it to boot, getting a shell and then not know what to do with it.
Fun times :)
I remember qnx
Full network stack and a web server on a 1.44MB floppy!