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I distinctly remember Tom's rootboot, which came on a single 1.44 floppy. I used it often to fix "sick" systems, it came with a number of useful tools. So, it is certainly feasible to strip a Linux system down quite far. Ah, here it is: http://www.toms.net/rb/

You are correct that there have been Linux-based operating systems that fit in a MiB or two. That is more than one hundred times the size claimed in this ridiculous article.

http://www.toms.net/rb/

I haven't used it in many years, but tomsrtbt (Tom's RootBoot) used to be the go-to linux-on-a-floppy system. Boots just as fast as DOS but also (usually) supports networking.

http://www.toms.net/rb/ Only one dl link (Ibibilio) still works... Seems to be abandoned, bur it's still interesting, as it provides a boor floppy with network support, wich opens a zillion other possibilities.

The specs seem more than sufficient for Debian. You will have to tune it after installing, obviously. I got X11 running on Debian using 10MB of RAM (on a laptop with 32MB).
  As you mention, the tricky part is installing. If you can plug the HDD in some other computer, you can format it to ext2 and copy the files no problem. Debootstrap is a very useful tool for this: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/426
  If you can't plug the HDD somewhere else, it's not really a big issue, just find a floppy distro that can see your HDD, can connect through FTP or HTTP to some other computer, and then just use it to boot and copy the files like the link above shows. It doesn't really need to be a distro, anything that can create ext2 partitions and do FTP/HTTP will work, but linux is probably the best bet when dealing with unknown hardware.
  This is a well known one diskette distro: http://www.toms.net/rb/

tomsroot http://www.toms.net/rb/

Those features may be new to ext3, but not to the real competitors. I see nothing that might grant an edge over JFS or XFS. The real justifications will come from performance tests.

This reminds me of the recent NTFS article here, which actually suggested that since Hans Reiser is in jail and reiser4 is dead, we should consider NTFS. WTF? The ludicrousness of using NTFS as the primary filesystem is further justified in this article by its similar performance to ZFS, but both run in user-space (and are thus horrible in performance), so neither is really an option. What the heck is wrong with JFS and XFS?

Here are some real comparisons: First, Wikipedia's Comparison of file systems gets you started with a nice mapping of features. Second, a benchmarking of filesystems from 2006 which is still quite applicable (though it doesn't yet cover ext4). What we need is a comparison of EXT4 to XFS and JFS (et al), with EXT2/3 in there for reference.

Recall that the biggest reason for using ext3 is that it is supported best of all the filesystems. If all hell breaks loose, even Tomsrtbt (an ancient rescue floppy pre-dating knoppix) can fix it. Ext4 breaks this backwards-compatibility to ext2. Therefore, I see no reason to use it. One might as well use something more stable and proven, especially while we lack numbers suggesting it performs as well or better.

Vista runs a video showing the user how to download tomsrtbt linux and burn it to a bootable CD.
Ends by saying, "Pretend it's Vista, stripped to the Bare Bone."

Or just use the old dd command (it's short for "donvert and dopy" -- the obvious "convert and copy" abbreviation was already taken), which is found on pretty much every live / system rescue CD. I mostly use DSL or Slax, because they're small, but Knoppix works. I can't really recommend tomsrtbt anymore (shame; Lua is such an interesting language) due to the demise of floppy drives. Boot from CD, plug in and mount a USB HDD (not included; this must be bigger than the partition you want to back up), # dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/sda1/windows_image & (if = input file = the drive partition you wish to backup, of = output file = a (new) file on the HDD. You'll get a response like [1] 1234 - note down the number after the square brackets. Typing # kill -USR1 1234 -- substitute the number you wrote down before in place of 1234 -- will give you a progress report.

Later, if you're into that sort of thing, you can compress the image using bzip2 (it'll shrink well, since most of it will just be freshly-formatted disk space) and save it onto a bootable DVD. Change the DVD's /etc/motd to show the instructions to unzip the file into its rightful place (it'll be something like # bunzip2 /windows_image.bz2 > /dev/hda1 but depends on where you got it from and where you put it; do not be tempted to skip this step, because you will forget in the meantime how it was done) and put away in a safe place.

IF one were to omit using X/startX & doing a GUI shell like KDE or GNOME, couldn't just about ANY Linux 'cut the mustard' for this task??

Oh certainly. It's just that it would be a lot of hard work cutting Ubuntu down to the 386/486 level, and what you'd have left, while it would certainly be Linux, it wouldn't be Ubuntu in any meaningful sense. Better to start from Debian, Slackware, or Linux From Scratch. TinyGentoo would be another contender.

If you want to get an idea of the minimum spec for a Linux system,have a look at tomsrtbt. It's a linux installation on a floppy disc - a "live floppy", if you will. It needs 8 meg of ram to boot, runs from a ramdisc, and doesn't have a minimum cpu requirement.

Aha, ok... something like SELinux gives you folks on Linux, that Windows has had on its filesystems via NTFS & the registry for years in ACL (access control lists): MAC (mandatory access control labels) - an analog of that which I note existed on NT-based OS' for years...

Well, to be fair, the Unix three level permission system is (as far as I can see) isomorphic to ACLs and MACs. That's been around since the seventies. It's just that the guy who wrote the security certification levels back in the 80s was a VMS head. So nothing got certified that didn't use VMS terminology. Windows NT got it because MS poached the chief architect of VMS, but Linux has has comparable features from the start.

That said, having a separate, orthogonal permission system can be useful; I believe the NSA have a Linux box online where they tell you what the root password is and give you a telnet prompt. You can't do anything once you're in, of course, but it makes a nice proof-of-concept.

Makes sense here: They "pre-harden" it for you, but how is THIS done? SELinux kernel hook addons (this is what I am assuming on this note)??

Pretty much. There are a whole pile of kernel compile time options to enable the subsystem, and to configure it. I can't remember too much beyond that - the last time I tried to set up SELinux by hand, I nearly locked myself out of my own box. So I can see the appeal of a distro where these things are set up for me.

OK. Hope that answers your questions. Let me know if I missed anything and I'll see if I can help :)

If they are all ok, then the problem is with FC6.
I have emelFM in my knoppix remaster, (see screenshots below), so I am able to take a look around, and easily mount/unmount all the partitions. Had to use it on a Windows XP box a few days ago, that had trouble booting, to copy some important files (to the owner, anyway) to a CD. I have all of the admin tools arranged in a menu so I can get to work quickly. Also, I would let QTParted look at the drives and see if that application can access them ok.
I did have a RHL 9 cd set that would not install on anything but a 686 box, so I have it running now on a dual 200 MMX (of all ancient things, mind you) box. RHL 9 can do Mozilla Firefox 2.0 just fine, makes a good combination. Only have a 2 MB graphics card, and on my Gateway EV900 (19") monitor, you wouldn't know the difference. Did have a 32 MB card here, but had to loan it out.
Strange thing about RHL9, the installer would not tell you about your computer not being a 686 box until way into the installation!, then you wasted a lot of time, and got no install. This has nothing to do with hard drive partitions, however. Your problem might have to do with the type of linux file system the SuSE install has, that you are overwriting. Perhaps you could completely remove those partitions, and let the FC6 installer set new ones up for you. It sure likes to get creative with those partitions, making new ones for /root, /, all sorts of things. Big change from the installer for RHL 6 (really old Red Hat). You could always set it up like you wanted if you knew how to do it.

Another alternative is tomsrtbt linux. I use it all the time to set up hard drives, partitions, etc. and it does a good job once you get used to using fdisk. You don't get a graphical display of your partitions, but if they are there, then tomsrtbt's fdisk will show them. And you can delete them and set up new ones. (Just have a notepad handy to keep track.)
it installs on a single floppy you can carry around from computer to computer.
You need to be handy on the command line with tomsrtbt linux, that's all you get, but you can do several consoles, I believe.

Hope this helps.

-- Rapidweather
 

Google returns about 24.8 billion results for the word "the". Keep in mind, that's four times the total number of people on the planet. It's 32 times the number of people online. So assuming all things were equal, that would mean that even if we wired up every person on the planet, they would each have four webpages, at least.

Sorry, but we're not there yet. You'd think it'd be time for some natural selection of the Internet. Who the fuck wants to read anything Jack Thompson has to say? Surely we could do without Heroic domain and typo squatters, couldn't we?

The problem is, even if no one clicks on typosquatter ads for quite awhile, these Heroic pages probably won't go away without a fight. They'll find other ways to make money, other places to hide, all without cancelling the ones that aren't working.

So what happens to all the old Linux distros? Oh, they might even still be available, but the unpopular ones won't be maintained. Remember tomsrtbt? That was my best recovery tool, before I had a cd burner, cheap CDs, and noticed how everyone had ubiquitous CD drives. Now I use RIP. Let's compare those -- tomsrtbt still works on the same computers it did before, but doesn't support the filesystems I need, and my main computer no longer has a floppy drive -- not to mention, it was last released in 2002. RIP probably takes less time to load, even though it pulls some 75 megs into RAM before you use it, versus tomsrtbt's 2 megs, because tomsrtbt is on a floppy (a slower floppy than usual), and RIP is on a CD. And let's not forget, RIP was last released four days ago.

So, why is tomsrtbt still online? It's still on DistroWatch, even.

The problem is, when a project is truly forgotten, you also forget to remove it, even if there's a natural replacement.

If you want a floppy distro, try Tom's rtbt
at http://www.toms.net/rb/

A lot of people also forget the one advantage of the dos kernel: it was absolutely TINY. Linux is so huge now, it won't even fit on a floppy.

Instead, we continue to have Microsoft ripoffs pushed in our face, while you're lucky to even hear about Elive in your lifetime, let alone get your hands on Elive in a timely fashion (they don't even have a server; it's bit-torrent or nothing!). So it boils down to that there are four - no wait - five things that have any affect at all on which system is the most used: marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, and last but not least: marketing.

If I had the money and I was *that* bored (and starved for sick amusement), I could launch a massive media campaign combined with legal-industrial blitz to convince all of you that Tom's root/boot floppy was the best/most desirable system to run with the best features. And it would be bundled with every sold machine! The Internet would move back to Usenet and FTP! People would heckle you if you used anything else! What the hell would all of you public people know any different?????

Tomsrtbt, http://www.toms.net/rb, fits on a floppy disk. (one of the ways he saves space is by taking out the extraneous Os and spaces in 'Tom's Root Boot'

you can boot from a software RAID setup

I don't see the problem with putting a 100MB partition for /boot on one of the drives.. It's a heck of a good idea anyway. Put grub, and your kernels on it. Put tomsrtbt on there too.

The car has a computer onboard. It takes one to know one, so to speak. You have to interface with the onboard diagnostic system to read the trouble codes it has stored. You can read the codes with a simple tool. According to the article, this has nothing to do with diagnostics, though; that was about the only thing the article didn't mention. Way to many buzzwords. The article did mention:

Call center services such as GM OnStar In-car navigation and guidance systems Car/cellphone integration (for example, for hands-free operation through the radio and a dash-mounted microphone) XM radio and Becker Online Pro Fleet management systems such as Qualcomm Omnitracs

... an embedded direct solution might function a little better by avoiding the overhead of simply running Linux.

If you're going to have a network interface and drive a terminal or a gui, you can either reinvent Linux, poorly, or you can use whatever portions of Linux help. Since you can fit the entire OS on a single floppy, I don't think it has to be any heavier than is really necessary.

That's a good kit, but what, no Tom's Root/Boot disk? It's the most GNU/Linux you can put on 1 floppy disk! I swear, this little sucker has saved my bacon so many times, and I learned a lot about Linux by using it. You wanna talk about good foo? It's got a freaking 67k version of emacs on it! This disk is stripped down to the wires and yet still kick-ass functional.

Go, Tom!

Cheers,
Richard

P.S. I love the Leatherman tool, too, but ever since 9/11 I have lost more of them than I would like to count to the *&%^# nice security people at airports. Sometimes it has been just stupidity on my part, other times I put it in my checked luggage, only to have the minimum wage baggage handling fuckos steal it from me. I'm finally going to give up on taking it with me travelling. If my laptop craps out while on business, I'll just go and buy anther one locally I guess.

Tom's Root Boot" is the only Linux boot CD needed to fix a Linux system. Although I use Knoppix occasionally to test hardware.

With a small drive, you might be able to squeeze an early edition of Windows 95 onto it (I've done this but it's painful). However, Windows 3.1 will comfortable fit on such a drive just fine.

• http://www.toms.net/rb/
• floppy fw

Even better to make a ghost image of a good install, and then restore it whenever you need to.

If it can't fit on a floppy(50mb,8mb..2mb etc), you might as well just use a live cd which is normally fully loaded.

Because if you have to boot from any media except a floppy, chances of you having to get into the bios and set the boot devices are high. So while you are at it, might as well get a full supported, fully loaded media right?

As for floppy sized distros, the only thing that comes to mind, is tomsroot

Not only do I love google, I love clickable hyperlinks as well.

tomsrtbt

Too bad you don't know enough about HTML to make a link... www.toms.net/rb/

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

Historically, in this situation I have used Tom's Root Boot Disk and had remarkable success at retreiving some data.

Case in question, a friend's Toshiba laptop with a hard drive falling over - couldn't boot off of the hard drive and so forth. Obviously I did not want to open the unit and void the warranty - but my friend needed some of the data (and to securely erase what was left...) Because, of course, we know what the service agents would do when they saw the drive was knackered...

I threw in Tom's Root Boot, chucked it on a crossover cable and copied it over the network. Problem Solvered.


Nowadays, I'd still use TRB myself, however I'd highly recommend a live distro like Knoppix to a Windows user that isn't prepared to play with the CLI.

Knoppix is great, but it's a ten-tonne anvil doing the job of a nut-cracker in this situation.

... is that they still do not manage to make installation take less than 5 hours.

If you know tomsrtbt, a rescue disk made (largely) by one person, one wonders why he alone can make PCMCIA support work out of the box while the 1000s of Debian developers are busy discussing if RFCs belong in main or non-free.

Not that there would be a better distribution than Debian, but tat does not mean there's no room for improvement.

Jeez, I screwed up the link there. It's supposed to be to tomsrtbt, the best damn floppy Linux distro anywhere.

1. Because it's there. While Linux is fairly easy to get a useful Linux distro under 2 MB, you can do things like strip the kernel to the bare essentials. Needless to say, you can't do that under Windows; there's a lot more challenge in getting Win 95 under 5 MB.
2. Also, making Win95 fit in small spaces may be of interest to people who want to run legacy Windows apps on embedded devices. I could see this put on an old Pentium with an all-in-one motherboard and a 16 MB solid state drive, with room for a small program or two. The only issue would be swap space. This might be useful in places looking for a small, simple pseudo-embedded PC that needs to run Windows apps. Linux might be better for 95% of these kinds of tasks, but if Windows is necessary to run legacy apps, then it would be best to run, well, Windows.

http://www.toms.net/rb/

• For installing a new operating system like Linux or *BSD. A floppy or two is used to boot the machine, the rest of the installation comes from the net. No need to burn CDs of something that becomes obsolete soon.
• For repairing systems with broken boot sector, etc. Any other use for tomsrtbt you can think of. Of course there are good CD alternatives like Knoppix, but not all machines have CD drives.

Both of the above points make use of the fact that floppies are (1) ubiquitous and (2) bootable. Not all USB-connected drives are bootable, for example. CDs would be good if they were truly rewritable like the magnetic media. I've never understood why people download and burn ISOs when they could, in most cases, do a network install.

http://www.toms.net/rb/

1). tomsrtbt Linux on a floppy - essential!
2). Windows 98SE boot floppy
3). Knoppix 3.2 bottable Linux on a CD.
4). Memtest86 bootable CD for testing RAM - excellent!
5). DOS freeware F-Prot and recent virus definitions
6). Norton's DOS utilities
7). Various HD setup utilities (eg: Western Digital, Seagate boot floppies)
8). Freesco Linux router/webserver on a floppy
9). Sample linux config files (eg: XFConfig-4, fstab, etc)
10). Frozen-Bubble bootable CD for times of stress

Also try these:

FreeSCO - great for routers

tomsrtbt

DemoLinux

RIP Linux Rescue System

SuperRescue CD

Morphix

For Windows software, take a look here

1. Dos 6.11 w/ 5 cdrom drivers (Generic IDE, SCSI, Hit-DVD, and 2 others I've never used) w/ rawrite.exe, debug.exe, fdisk.exe, format.exe, edit.com, and a few other utils
2. Linux install (currently debian, but I keep rewriting it w/ rawrite everytime I need to load linux w/ a floppy)
3. A fancy-pants one I picked up called Techw0rm... has some stuff that I hope I'll never need...TSRs, ramdisk support, etc
4. tomsrtbt - one disk loaded w/ tools, if you work w/ Linux boxes, especially old ones, you want this

1. O/S discs.
   • A few big linux distros like debian, redhat, mandrake, and slackware plus NetBSD. (I've honestly never played w/ that though)
   • Win95, win98, win2k, and xp (w/ WPA deactivated because it's a pain in the rear)
   • (I'm not a Mac user, but if I was I'd put OSX here)
2. System recovery/utilities
   • Norton Anti-Virus
   • Norton Utilities (these two are unbeatable on windows boxes IMHO)
   • One CD-RW of windows tools like PuTTY, DirectX, and an unofficial pack w/ batch file of nearly all the windows updates as of about two months ago
   • One CD-RW of a few linux rpms that aren't on the distro cds such as WineX and vmware as well as a tarball of the latest kernel source + prepatch.
3. Drivers -- For Linux all I have are some nVidia drivers, the rest seems to be built in. Then I have a pile of common Windows drivers and hardware configuration tools, especially for 95, including some 3com NICs (3c5x9cfg.exe has been very handy on a few occasions), most creative sound cards, most ATI *cringe* cards, and several diamond video cards.
4. The rest is just my junk-games, visual studio, and whatnaught -- now if you were actaully going to Africa for example, you'd definitely want to change a few things, and if it were me, I'd bring some hardware -- hard drives seem like the first things to go.

But it has saved my ass a million times...

While I was at ITT Tech (didn't learn anything but this) one of the instructors showed me this:

here

Very very helpful compliment for linux and dos(win) recovery. It should be at least one of the tools in your bag.

I wouldn't bother carrying any kind of Windows rescue disks. You should be able to fix whatever problems you can with their original Windows install CDs, and if they don't have the originals, they shouldn't be running Windows in the first place. In a pinch, the Linux CDs let you mount and fix most problems with Windows volumes. And with the RedHat install CDs, you can fix the most serious problem: the fact that these people are running Windows in the first place :-)

Debian is usually my preferred installation, but to run it, you probably want to have an Internet connection, and if you had that, you wouldn't be carrying all this stuff. For people without Internet connections, RedHat is probably a somewhat better choice.

Definately take GPart. I've used it in the past to fix corrupted partition tables. Combine this with Tomsrtbt (floppy disk linux).

Single-floppy linux boot with a tremendous array of rear-end saving utilities.

There's also a good summary page of rescue discs that are available. Didn't look at windows specifically but I have used this to mount and fix various FAT type partitions. NTFS may be a slightly different animal.

Linux Care Bootable ToolBox, Knoppix, and a dozen of small diskettes distros...

I keep a copy of TomsRTBT in my bag, just in case. Not being a 'hardcore Linux user' I rarely need anything else to clean up a friend's machine. Hey, it fits on a floppy and runs on anything with more than 4MB RAM, and does everything you seem to need (and then some).

=Smidge=

You can't boot from a USB device, can you?

I tend to carry a small collection of bootable media with me such as tomsrtbt on a floppy, LNX-BBC, White Glove, PLAC and a few others. (yes, even a DOS boot disk) They can be very helpful in cases such as upgrading a mobo for a Win98 machine, where the mobo can't see the CD-ROM until you install a driver... from a CD-ROM.

Since all the hard drive manufacturers that I've dealt with (Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, etc.) all make you jump through hoops to find the right utilities for various drives, there's an easy way to do a low-level and fix the problem:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX# bs=1k

Using this with Toms RTBT, you've got a very handy utility floppy.

• Get out your favorite Linux installer CD or download a copy of Tom's RTBT and write it to floppy or CD-R.
• Boot from the floppy or CD.
• Log in as root.
• Run dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda to erase the master drive on the primary IDE controller (/dev/hdb etc. for the remaining disks)

1. Build a Windows XP desktop for my father out of assorted spare parts and a Shuttle SV25. I'm getting tired of trying to figure out what is wrong with his old Win98 system, so this one is set up with Cygwin and VNC for remote administration.

2. Build a new Gentoo Linux server to replace my aged RedHat Linux server.

3. Fix a friend's computer after it crashed in the middle of installing SP1 for WinXP. It wouldn't reboot, and Sony's lame "system recovery" disk is actually a "system initializion" disk (losing all the files). I used tomsrtbt to boot the laptop and cpio/rsh all files to Linux server mentioned above. Then, recovered the laptop with a real Windows XP CD-ROM. Didn't need the backup, after all.

4. Deliver computer (above) to my father and fix the telephone wiring in his house so that DSL works a bit better (I hope).

5. Re-cable a couple of hard drives and use the Promise Raid controller on the Asus A7V333 in my Win2K desktop.

6. Clean house, as I've been out of town for three weeks and a friend is visiting New Year's Eve.

I too faced this dilemma when trying to make use of a batch of 486 machines donated to our computer lab. My solution required a bit of elbow grease, but ensured that my machines both ran acceptably and had the latest and most secure versions of software available to them:

• I built a Gentoo Linux system on the Athlon XP 2000+ machine in the lab, targetting all the software for 486 (gcc -O3 -m486 -march=486 -fomit-frame-pointer -s) and building a very stripped-down 2.4 kernel with only the bare necessities. I also replaced the standard GNU shell tools with BusyBox and GNU libc with uC-libc. On this fast machine, the compilation cycle didn't take long, and I was able to build and install everything into a temporary /install directory in less than four hours.
• Once that was done, i tarred up the /install directory I had built and burned it onto an ISO along with a bootimage from tomsrtbt mini-Linux distro.
• I then booted each 486 machine in turn from the CD, and used a shellscript I had written which created an ext2 partition, formatted it, and untarred the contents of my custom gentoo setup onto the disk, and set up grub to boot into it.

Great! but as tiny linuxes go, ramf has support for Reiserfs, and a lot of people I know rely on tomsrtbt . Almost all of the information in the IBM page submitted here is already available, but it's really nice to see IBM providing a stable home for this type of information -- while the original linux from scratch server flounders (was it those big bandwidth bills from being /.ed did it in?) and the first cool rescue thing I used, cclinux, has all but disappeared. sigh!

So thanks, IBM. This time.