Linux on a Floppy: Intro to Mini Linux Distros

GonzoJohn writes: "If you've ever been stuck on the freeway with a flat tire and no jack, you know what it's like to have a Linux system crash and not have a boot disk. And although nearly every Linux distribution company asks you make a boot/recovery floppy when you install Linux for the first time, many users skip this important step. Out of the boot/recovery disk concept was born the Mini-Linux distribution." Read this article on Linux Orbit, with a brief intro to some of the mini-distros available.

Comments

What has Linux got that DOS 2.1 doesnt have ???

[The_Fire_Horse]

I mean, come on people - If its a bootable linux distro; what good is it, really!

The day I installed Windows 2.0 was the best day of my life - Me

Re:What has Linux got that DOS 2.1 doesnt have ???

[Dead_Smiley]

I recently had my Linux server filesystem go bonko for no known reason. I used Tom's Root Boot (TRB) floppy distribution.

What I did was take the hard drive out of my Linux box and stuck it in my Win98 machine. I booted with TRB, mounted both drives (yes one was obviously vfat) and got ALL my data back except for a quickie web site I did.

I discovered that /var was completely empty.

Still don't know why.

It would have been tough to get my data back (all 9GB of it) with a DOS 2.1 foppy, don't ya think?

I downloaded PowerMax from the Maxtor web site and did some testing on the disk. Everything was OK.

*shrugs*

Gateways

[NWT]

Yes, this is nice ... in case of a disk failure, simply flop in the floppy, reboot an your server is running again, at least for gateway services!

Floppy disks are so 1992

[red5]

When I want a boot disk I use SuperRescue. Nowa days every one has a cd burnner and CDRs are dirt cheap. Besides when was the last time you could find a blank floppy in less then 10 minutes?

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[claes]

Agreed. The days with resuce floppys are behind us. No matter how good they are, you can only fit very little on a floppy and it is a pain to work in a limited shell and not all the commands and utilities you are used to. Superrescue on the other hand gives you more than 1 GB on a compressed file system. If you have a bootable CDROM you really have no excuse for not using superrescue the next time you have problems.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[sinserve]

Yeah right.

*MY* development box consists of a floppy with the following:
1) io.sys
2) msdos.sys
3) 4dos.com (renamed command.com)
4) turboc 3.0 (with the IDE)
5) Nasm
6) symdeb

Ofcourse, I have a dedicated mp3 box, another with all sorts of "visual"
development crap, and yet another one running all the Unix desktop rivals out
there.

But I use my DOS box for meditation. Small is beautiful, small is good for
you. I know the exact size of occupied diskspace, and I am proud to say that
I can account for every byte of memory. How often do you do a memory grep to
search for in-core strings? I do that on a daily basis, and it is very reassuring.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[Rogerborg]

• Nowa days every one has a cd burnner and CDRs are dirt cheap. Besides when was the last time you could find a blank floppy in less then 10 minutes

Great! I'll just chuck my firewall and fileserver boxen on a landfill and buy some newer hardware then!

Thanks for the info, but some of us like to keep hardware in service until the magic smoke gets out (for environmental as well as cost reasons), and a decent boot floppy is an integral part of that. "Buy new hardware!" is a Microsoft strategy, and that's one of the reasons why I've given up on their upgrade-or-become-unsupported OS's.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[kryonD]

Actually, I keep a box of blank floppies right next to my dev machine for just such reasons. Because I do dev on both windows and linux and have been too cheap to buy a CD burner, OS boot disks are key.

For those who are still doubting their worth, I once tried tripple booting Win98SE, RH5.2, and BEOS 4.3...everything went great for the first day, but when I woke up the next morning my Master Boot Record was hammered beyond repair. I didn't know about SuperRescue back then (did it even exist?) so I ended up having to boot from a DOS 6.1 install disk and do a format /MBR and work from there. I've never had a repeat of losing the MBR, but I've also never been without the boot disks just in case.

BTW, MOD the parent post up as informative! I'll shamefully admit I had never even heard of SuperRescue until I read his post. I could have used it back then.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[red5]

Thanks for the info, but some of us like to keep hardware in service until the magic smoke gets out(for environmental as well as cost reasons), and a decent boot floppy is an integral part of that.

You shouldn't have to get all new hardware to read a cd even my OLD 486 sx/20 could do that.
Plus a cd is AFAIK a LOT more reliable then a floppy.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[red5]

For those who are still doubting their worth, I once tried tripple booting Win98SE, RH5.2, and BEOS 4.3...everything went great for the first day, but when I woke up the next morning my Master Boot Record was hammered beyond repair. I didn't know about SuperRescue back then (did it even exist?) so I ended up having to boot from a DOS 6.1 install disk and do a format /MBR and work from there. I've never had a repeat of losing the MBR, but I've also never been without the boot disks just in case.

If you had a redhat install floppy around you could have stuck that in and typed:
"vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1"
That would cause you to boot the kernel on the install floppy and use /dev/hda1asyou root partition.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[Anonymous Coward]

But this is going in the exact opposite direction that many people would prefer to go. I'm looking to build a machine without a floppy, hard disk, and CD-Rom and simply use a compactflash card to boot it to use it as a terminal server. (Why not just buy a terminal server? Because I'm bored and want a project. ;-) Now, in my case I wouldn't need a floppy disk, just a spare compactflash boot card for rescue cases. In some cases these machines are $20 from a garage sale.. why spend $40-$50 on a cdrom?

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[red5]

How often do you do a memory grep to search for in-core strings? I do that on a daily basis, and it is very reassuring.

You know there's help for people with OCD

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[red5]

In some cases these machines are $20 from a garage sale.. why spend $40-$50 on a cdrom?

If your spending $40-$50 on a cheep cdrom drive your getting ripped off.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[Anonymous Coward]

once I had exactly the same problem.

all my knowledge of linux was to no avail. My scant knowledge of DOS, and remembering someone telling me about a "hidden" feature of format - the /MBR switch, saved me.

I have never slagged of DOS since.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[President Chimp Toe]

Nowa days every one has a cd burnner and CDRs are
dirt cheap. Besides when was the last time you could find a blank floppy in less then 10 minutes?

I agree. I use LNX-BBC, which fits on a credit card sized CD. Meaning you can carry it round in your wallet or whatever, and have it at hand for all occasions.
It has an X window system, which even includes some games (to play when you are waiting for that fscking fsck!), and a full browser.

What is really useful, beyond the usual suite of maintanance/repair tools, is the comprehensive network tools. This is why it can be quite useful to carry around. It means you can put it into a windows box (e.g. on a windows only network) and use it for debugging a network problems. Or l337 activities.......

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[1%warren]

Nowa days every one has a cd burnner and CDRs are dirt cheap. Besides when was the last time you could find a blank floppy in less then 10 minutes?

1%warren looks at his box - gosh! no cd burner! Picks up blank floppy from pile under his monitor stand - gosh! took ~1 second! Sigh... I'm a decade behind the times.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[elmegil]

Besides when was the last time you could find a blank floppy in less then 10 minutes?

As opposed to trying to find a specific CDR in a huge pile of them, in less than 10 minutes?

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[elmegil]

The discussion is about "boot disks". Can't boot a CDROM on an OLD 486.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[the eric conspiracy]

As opposed to trying to find a specific CDR in a huge pile of them, in less than 10 minutes?

Eh.

You need to make two piles. A L1 cache of CDs for frequently used/important ones and a main pile fo the rest.

That way you will reduce your access times considerably.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[sydb]

that'll be fdisk /mbr, not format /mbr.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[PlaysWithMatches]

I work in a computer lab with around 30 Pentium systems that don't have CD-ROM drives at all, so boot floppies are the only way for us. And for a simple network troubleshooting disk, for example, why bother with a CD (and the potential for wasted space) when you can put your kernel and drivers all on one floppy?

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[jbmadsen]

So true. The Debian install CD no 1 is a rescue disk in itself, so there is no need to create an extra floppy. If you have a Debian cd you can always just boot from that and get back up and running.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a lier -- there was no such thing as Turbo C 3.0, the last version was 2.0, but there ware Turbo C++ 3.0 (juniour brother of Borland C++ 3.0)

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[binner1]

I just ordered a new machine last week (still waiting for it), and I decided to start a new trend. No floppy disk drive!!

The last time I actually personally _needed_ to use a floppy disk was installing Debian on a 486 with no cdrom. For older machines, you can' t beat the 3 disk net install. This, however, is 2002. We have cheap burners, media that costs no more, if not less than floppy disks, and BIOS's that boot from CD as a standard feature.

Why has the floppy survived this long? I work at a helpdesk position at my University between classes for extra cash...I've seen firsthand the horrors of the fragility of this ancient storage media. Ever lost your thesis due to lost clusters, bad sectors, etc? (But it worked at home this morning...)

Please: Consider abandoning the floppy!

-Ben

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, as soon as anyone brings up the point that Apple has not included a floppy drive on a Macintosh in several years, PC users across the board jump on the bandwagon of "attack Apple for not giving us ancient technology."

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[Spoing]

While SuperRescue is fantastic, it does not elimiate boot diskettes becuase quite a few machines can't boot a CD (disabled), and when the CD drive breaks, you've got to have a fall back.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[D_Gr8_BoB]

Indeed. I'm constantly surprised how much stuff the LNX-BBC guys can fit in ~50 megs. Except for emacs and man pages, the image has pretty much anything you could reasonably ask for.
Personally, I hacked the iso to boot to win95 dos rather than isolinux, then added loadlin and ntfsdos to the filesystem. All the same great Linux functionality, and now I can use it to fix win9x boxes and bypass security on NT/2k boxes. I never leave home without it.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[glitch!]

We have cheap burners, media that costs no more, if not less than floppy disks, and BIOS's that boot from CD as a standard feature.

It is still not common to find a motherboard with a BIOS that will boot from a SCSI CDROM. That is why I still need a floppy drive from time to time. Am I just choosing the wrong motherboards? Or are you just talking about IDE CDROM drives? (IDE? How vulgar!)

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[sanity_slipping]

You call IDE vulgar, but you use floppies?

Hehe.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[glitch!]

You call IDE vulgar, but you use floppies?

&lt politician&gt Well, uh... LOOK! OVER THERE! &lt/politician&gt

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[binner1]

Unfortunately, I can't remember the type of motherboard that we were using, but at my last co-op position, our scsi-based (intel) servers were able to boot from scsi-cdroms. They do exist.

Also, I hadn't considered scsi, but you make a good point. My post was mostly refering to home machines (I'm not lucky enough to be able to afford scsi at home)...so yes ide (very vulgar) is what I was mostly referring to. However, given that most people buying computers for home use (read: Joe Sixpack) don't know that they're using ide, let alone that scsi exists, I think that they could surely get away without a floppy drive.

-Ben

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[blang]

Don't worry about being vulgar.

For many purposes IDE drives are just as fast as SCSI, at a fraction of the cost. For hard disks, SCSI is faster for frequent small IOS, while IDE is faster for fewer larger IOS. So, unless you're running an OLTP database or similar, drooling for a SCSI based system is not in your interest, moneywise or otherwise. No matter what the boys who think they're l33t tell you.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[binner1]

In my experience, the benefit of scsi isn't the speed, it's the durability/reliability. I've found that scsi drives just last longer than ide drives. Example: The 486 I mentioned above has a 640 meg scsi drive (picked up for free) circa 1992 (what do you think that cost way back then??) that works just fine. I don't think there are many 10 year old ide drives that can say the same.

You're right though, for most intents, ide is just as good as scsi.

-Ben

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[red5]

As opposed to trying to find a specific CDR in a huge pile of them, in less than 10 minutes?

I was talking about BLANK media all of my blank cdr are in the packadge right next to my desk.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[Anonymous Coward]

When that 640 meg drive was new, it cost enough that it was built more reliably than the cheap IDE drives of the time.

Now, SCSI drives are either completely out of line cost-wise, (i.e. multiples of times more expensive per MB) than IDE, or they're the same cheap thing at the same level of reliability, but with the 'SCSI tax' of still being considerably more expensive.

SCSI drives are at least as obsolete as floppy drives except for certain niche applications. If you need SCSI speed, consider firewire.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about Apple hardware? It's effete salon hardware for the fashion nancies.

We're having a geek discussion here.

Prettyboys need not enter.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[Galvatron]

Why bother abandoning them? It costs maybe $6, and I wouldn't be using the room it takes up anyway. I rarely use it, but on the off chance that I need it, it's there.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[elmegil]

So are my blank floppies. There ya go.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[red5]

Fair enough I didn't even know you could still buy floppies. ;)

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[red5]

I wouldn't be using the room it takes up anyway.

Well you can. It's a standard 3.5 bay you could mount a harddisk in that.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[Galvatron]

No, I can't actually. My fairly standard mid-tower has 5 bays, plus an extra space on the side for a hard drive. At current, I have one dvd drive, one cd-rw drive, one floppy drive, one zip drive (which I'm seriously considering getting rid of, the media's just too expensive, and Mandrake's had some serious trouble with it), and one hard drive, and I still have one empty bay. I might get a second hard drive at some point, and put it in the spare bay, but what else would I get? A dvd writer maybe, but then I wouldn't need the dvd drive or the cd writer, resulting in a net reduction of bay usage.

The fact of the matter is, unless you've got a mini-tower, computer cases have room to spare. In my last computer I even stuck a 5.25" floppy drive, just because of how amusing it looked in a modern computer, and I never once needed the space it took up.

Re:Floppy disks are so 1992

[korgull]

Or use this : http://crashrecovery.org/

I agree on the floppy use. Some of my machines don't even have a floppy drive anymore.

Freesco

[popeydotcom]

Is what I use as my gateway. Boots off a floppy, runs on this crappy little 486, and firewalls me (to a certain degree) from a lot of crap out there.. Very useful for people with multiple PCs and a cable connection. Easy to setup and configure. Their website has a download of the floppy image, a manual and extras (e.g. drivers for network cards). Worth checking out.

Re:Freesco

[SignoffTheSourcerer]

If space is tight, give v7upgrade a try, the unix 7 binaries takes insanely little diskspace compared to other versions, i made a rootdisk about 150k (gziped) with almost all needed tools (some still need porting) had to write init from scratch and such but it looks promising for 386/486 systems as these binaries don't eat ram.

Lunix crashes

[pvera]

[lame windows weenie troll starts]
You mean that Linux crashes?

What is next? Blue screen's of death?
[/lame windows weenie troll ends]

The truth of the matter is that in a Windows NT or 2000 server you can boot the box off the install CD and run a repair utility. freeBSD can be installed off two floppies and over the network, and it cannot be that hard to add to the floppy images enough functionality to add a repair program.

Re:Lunix crashes

[Syre]

I've tried to use that Windows 2000 boot-off-the-CD repair utility and it has consistently failed to repair any problems I've had.

To fix problems, I've had to boot from a floppy... but wait... no generic floppy boot is possible with W2K. To get a boot disk that would work, so I could get into DOS, so I could fix the problems, I had to download one from here.

Being able to boot off a floppy can be really handy sometimes.

Re:Lunix crashes

[red5]

The truth of the matter is that in a Windows NT or 2000 server you can boot the box off the install CD and run a repair utility.

So can all the linux distros I've tried.

freeBSD can be installed off two floppies and over the network, and it cannot be that hard to add to the floppy images enough functionality to add a repair program.

Again nothing that's not possible under your standard Linux distro.
Just because you don't know how doesn't make it impossible

Re:Lunix crashes

[pvera]

Hell, the first thing I said is I am a windows weenie :-P

(actually I am losing my faith on Windows, and BSD is welcoming me with open arms)

Yeah, its one of those things that would be nice if they make them more visible.

Re:Lunix crashes

[red5]

It's all good.
I do get a lot of anti-Linux FUD from the BSD crowd (they just stole the code from BSD ...)
So I'm a little touchy.

Re:Lunix crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

well duh. lunix runs on a computer with no memory protection (though i think you can fake one with supercpu) so of course it crashes with buggy software.

Re:Lunix crashes

[Lumpy]

you got a +1 insightful for what?
every linux distro cince 1998 has been able to boot from the install CD and choose a rescue option.

Only those that know most nothing about linux would think you require a special "rescue or boot floppy" to recover from a hardware crash.

NT/2000 if you dont have an emergency recovery floppy then a rebuild is horribly painful. it's easier to format the partition/reinstall NT/ reinstall tape backup software/ restore from last backup. Linux? simply boot from the install CD, mount the hadr drive partition that is your root and then do a simple tar from your tape backup, or 99.997% of the time you have a linux "crash" tell lilo to use your backup kernel and reinstall it's self (if you had a head crash on the boot sector)

NT? you cant do any of the above. no way to boot to a minimal OS to do low lever rapairs... NT just isnt advanced enough to have this feature yet.

Re:Lunix crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

The Win2K/XP "repair" features on the boot disc are useless.. Is there even a regedit feature on it? I couldn't find that option when I needed it.

Re:Lunix crashes

[BrookHarty]

Have 2 paritions, First the OS, Second the software/home partition. Ghost your First OS, burn ghost image onto a CD. Then if you have to restore, boot off a dos floppy, cd driver loaded, and ghost your OS back onto your HD.

I have my main drive as a Win98/WinXP/Linux. After I update WinXP with all my software, updates patches, I ghost it. Then I have a perfect image of WinXP fresh with updates. Dont have to sit through a re-install every again.

Re:Lunix crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

A BSOD is a different type of crash. The only time I have ever needed a boot disk, other than when installing linux, is after installing windows. That's not a crash, that is windows screwing up the boot sector and can be fixed with 5 keystrokes - "lilo
".

Remember September 11th?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why anybody would want to use a foreign OS like Linux instead of supporting their country and using an American OS like Windows is beyond me. If Osama bin Laden knew anything about computers, you can bet he'd be a Linux user. Hint to the clueless: the terrorist attacks hit our economy hard. Boycotting a Godly, moral American company like Microsoft is pretty much a second wave of the 9/11 attacks. Don't be hateful. Support your country.

Re:Remember September 11th?

[The_Fire_Horse]

*sniff* - damn.. you made me cry with that beautiful speech.

I used to use Linux, but now I am going to buy Windows XP and install it on all my servers.

Thank you for showing me the light!!

Re:Remember September 11th?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad hangover ?

Re:Remember September 11th?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll, good topical form :-).

In response (sure, a good troll deserves an answer, especially if well-crafted): I prefer to support American companies like Red Hat, Lycoris or Lindows over a predatory company like Microsoft. Hell, I'd rather support good foreign companies like SuSE or Mandrake over a predatory American company like Microsoft.

As far as I'm concerned, MS can well afford to be cut down a few notches.

Re:Remember September 11th?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why anybody would want to use a foreign OS like Linux instead of supporting their country and using an American OS like Windows is beyond me.

Excuse me, but it may come as a surprise to you that the world does not consist of 'America' and 'dragons be here'.

> If Osama bin Laden knew anything about computers, you can bet he'd be a Linux user.

Nonsense, he'd never be able to do anything because Linux is all command line and he'd fail to even install it.

Now Windows is so easy to use that he would be hacking into the White House Windows system within a few minutes of loading the Windows install disk.

> Support your country.

I'll make a point of doing that by ripping out the foreign Microsoft stuff and installing a local distro of Linux, thank you for pointing that out.

signed somewhere _outside_ the 50 states.

Re:Remember September 11th?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am brazilian,

i say: its americans like you that make the rest of the world say "all americans are stupid, when they need inteligence they hire foreign help" damm moron, stupid troll.

Did you know many linux distros are american? you know that many linux developer are american? no problably not... my advice, dont let people like this procriate or america will soon be lost. If i was Osama Bin Laden i would send viagra to american trolls and see that bearing stupid sons, that would destroy america... just imagine father talking to son: "Hey kiddo, look, this is a bash, as all know bash is a afegani shell thats why we use windows..."

Re:Remember September 11th?

[Anonymous Coward]

:-) very droll

However as many people have already mentioned Microsoft is a predatory company. It exploits its monopolistic position to the detriment of the consumer and the economy in general. I was going to say whats American about that. But this is actually quite similar to the US govt's attitude to the rest of the world. You can do your bit as an American by choosing the OS which suits your needs best and not blindy using Microsoft's shoddy software like a lemming just because it is American.

Re:Remember September 11th?

[ImaLamer]

Please boycott the City of Cincinnati [Ohio] until they treat all races the same.

Thank you.

Support your fellow man.

Re:Remember September 11th?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we all remember. About Microsoft, we all use their products, but the high cost of XP keeps some of us out of the ball game. I see where Walmart is selling 9 machines without windows, or any os for that matter, installed, to keep the cost down. Could be that the high cost of XP pushed them over the edge.

not every computer has a CD

[Anonymous Coward]

CD drives are a waste of space on anything except desktop machines.

Re:not every computer has a CD

[red5]

CD drives are a waste of space on anything except desktop machines.

No Floppy drives are a wast eof space on every computer.
You can easly slip in a laptop style cd-rom drive onto a 1U server.
I't takes up so little space that it dosen't nead it's own drive bay.
A floppy OTOH neads it's own drive bay.

Re:not every computer has a CD

[_Laban_]

Actually there are quite a few servers using laptop style floppy drives too. We have a couple of Hewlett Packard servers in our server room which use that kind of drives.

Re:not every computer has a CD

[red5]

Cool I guess.
All I know is that the I can just beraly rember the last time I use a floppy for anything. What I do remember is swearing under my breath the whole time about how slow it was.

Re:not every computer has a CD

[mnordstr]

Not every computer has a floppy drive!

I've got several old cd drives around somewhere, but not a single floppy drive! I guess it's because floppies are floppies, they've stayed the same. CD drives, however, have constantly increased their reading speeds, therefore we have bought new drives every now and then. It is much more likely a computer has a CD than a floppy. I don't think I've used a floppy for several years! Except when installing Debian on my 486 laptop, but that's an exeption...

Re:not every computer has a CD

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Thats odd, because I've seen tens of thousands of £'s worth of kit which is intended for GPRS cell systems that contain a CD-Rom drive. Maybe you should tell Siemans, Motorola & Nokia a few things about hardware.

Re:not every computer has a CD

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, almost every computer has a cd, but count the times i've run into a computer that cannot fucking boot from one..

Best recovery disk!

[awptic]

The tomsrtbt boot disk. IMO, is by far the best rescue disk available. In 1.44 megs of space they've managed to pack over 160 common utilities, and that's not including the kernel modules! You can grab a copy of the boot image at http://www.toms.net/rb/
This thing has saved my ass several times.

Re:Best recovery disk!

[ibennetch]

[begin stupid anecdotal story]
Interesting how this topic came up; just yesterday i was resizing the partition on my RedHat box (BEFORE looking for a boot floppy) and had to use my Tom's Root Boot disk. Unfortunatly; I got an error trying to run chroot...
[end stupid anecdotal story]

Anyway; Tom's is great; (aside from the above-mentioned chroot problem) it does everything I ever needed in a boot floppy. awptic is right; those 160 utilities are handy! Seriously; give it a try!

Re:Best recovery disk!

[ibennetch]

whoops - forgot something; shoulda used preview. A lot of these other floppy distributions people are mentioning here are for routers or firewalls; Toms is a great all around repair disk with plenty of goodies to get your system running again.

Re:Best recovery disk!

[Pyrrus]

actually, tomsrtbt increases the number of tracks
on the floppy, so it's really 1722KB not 1440KB

Re:Best recovery disk!

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to the toms.net link, downloaded the tarball, and soon had my own Tom's Linux up and running.
I'm using Redhat 7 and now can make extra copies of tomsrtbt as needed. I went to /etc/man, and "more" some of the man pages, to read them.
I'll have to work with it a while to get some use out of it. This distro has been used to restore a partition table overwritten by a win98 install, so a linux installation on the same disk could be booted into!
(always write that table down somewhere...) When I get caught up I'll have to get a username and password at Slashdot!

fli4l - floppy router distro and more

[eMago]

In this context fli4l should be mentioned. It's an amzing single-floppy distribution and while primarily targeting on router/firewall tasks it is very extensible. The reason it is not so very well known is probably the fact that most of it's documentation is in German. But it's definitely worth a look. Also check this.

Re:fli4l - floppy router distro and more

[XRayX]

There is a side-project of the fli4l developers called Eisfair, which aims to become a "one-disk-server". It is still very Beta and not ready for everyday server-use, but it's the most extensible mini-distro around.

Eisfair Beta Download

The article does not mention fli4l

[NikWest]

I cannot believe that the article did not mention the fli4l project, which is a great isdn/dsl router on a single floppy. It additional features lots of additional packages. Great distribution! (I am just a happy user) http://www.fli4l.de NikWest

Hal 91

[Ch_Omega]

I have nearly allways with me a disk with Hal 91 so that if I talk to none-belivers or ppl that simply doesn't know about Linux, I can show them the power of Linux!

... Well, actually, most ppl seem to think I've booted into Dos anyway, and/or complain about the lack of a GUI and stuff, but I once in a while, there are actually ppl who think I'm some sort of über-hacker when I say to them with a monotone and mystical voice:

"No, it's not DOS.. It's Leenooks.. It's a superior operationsystem that have now taken over all your hardware.. resistance is futile.."

Try this

[sinserve]

If you've ever been stuck on the freeway with a flat tire and no jack, you
know what it's like to have a Linux system crash and not have a boot disk.

I know what it was like to have TWO flat tires on a country road, with nothing but
a $1500 Presario lap top. It was "Redneck Rampage", those fuckers even took my boots.

Linux Router Project

[slipgun]

For a firewall sitting between my LAN and my cable modem, I use LRP. Runs on anything from a 486 upwards, off a floppy. Once you've finished configuring the floppy (takes between 5 mins and 3 hours, depending on how experienced you are with Linux and networking), you can simply write-protect it, and you have a completely uncrackable system. If someone breaks into it, just reboot the computer and it'll load everything back into ramdisk. It can also act as a dhcp and dns server. Check hereand here for documentation.

Re:Linux Router Project

[Anonymous Coward]

LRP uses old 2.2 kernels. So no stateful firewalling, which means you are less secure.

Re:Linux Router Project

[posmon]

and after you've rebooted it i'll break in again using the exact same technique as last time. you fucking moron.

Re:Linux Router Project

[Anonymous Coward]

UMMM... that really depends on how you have setup
ipchains and/or iptables. Either one can be more
secure or less secure depending on how it is configured.

Actually ...

[belbo]

Most modern distributions come with a rescue system on the installation CD.
The trouble with floppies is that they are just too unreliable to make a decent rescue system.

b.

Custom disk

[mnordstr]

If you want to make your custom Linux disc, take a look at this step-by-step howto:
http://wam.umd.edu/~kefferb/floppy.html

Toms Root/Boot is configurable

[andyr]

I have been using Tomsrtbt for years now. It had some glitches when the ext2 filesystem was extended, but these were fixed a while back. However, I use ext3 as my filesystem because I can still use Toms Root/Boot. There is a whole collection of 'extras' - mostly kernel modules and so forth, that you can use to create a customised boot disk. You can even rebuild it under itself - no other installation necessary.

And lets not forget BusyBox - which makes most of these distributions possible. Even Red Hat boot disks use BusyBox these days.

Ra for Tom.

Cheers, Andy!

Ripped from my bookmarks: other distros

[Cally]

Some other fits-onna-floppy distros; many of these are security-focused, firewall-appliance type efforts. Disclaimer, this list is of stuff I /want; to check out when I get the time: I'vfe no idea how good or bad they are, beyond Theo's famous comment about entrusting the most important piece of one's network to the most unreliable piece of hardware in modern computers (approximately). Some of them may actually NOT be floppy-distros, I need to clean up these bookmarks... jesus where did the time go... *sigh*

• http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/
  
• http://ibiblio.org/vectorlinux/
  
• http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
  
• http://www.xandros.net/
  
• http://www.gentoo.org/
  
• Smoothwall ...
  
• http://www.ipcop.org/
  
• http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/snf
  
• http://www.freesco.org/
  
• http://www.coyotelinux.com/
  
• http://leaf.sourceforge.net/
  
• http://www.gnatbox.com/Pages/gblight.html
  (this ones based on BSD IIRC)
  
• http://www.bbiagent.com/
  
• http://www.clarkconnect.org/"
  
• http://www.linux-firewall-tools.com/
  

Re:Ripped from my bookmarks: other distros

[O2n]

See lwn.net and distrowatch for really long and uselessly comprehensive lists.

Oh, but nice try, anyway... ;)

Re:Ripped from my bookmarks: other distros

[Anonymous Coward]

why not QNX? I find the 1.44mb floppy version very useful for machines with trashed HD`s etc. It`ll give you internet access, and a graphical web browser. (so you can search the web for solutions to your problem :) )

http://www.qnx.com/demodisk/index.html

Re:Ripped from my bookmarks: other distros

[Cally]

Ooh, a meta-bookmark -- cheers ;)

Rescues more than Linux

[saihung]

I've used floppy distros to rescue Windows boxes for more often than I've used them for rescuing linux. NT password crackers, disk utils, tiny editors, you name it - I used to carry a syslinux disk around with me at our all-NT shop just in case, and by the time I left I wasn't the only one using them.

Re:Rescues more than Linux

[dasunt]

I work in a Windows shop myself, and am wondering, what single-floppy distro do you use that has NTFS support? I only have the magical NT password changer (great tool btw).

If I had time, I was going to try to hack NTFS into tomsrtbt, since I really like that distro myself.

Business Card CDR (30mb) Linux Distro

[Khopesh]

All the rave, those floppy disk linux distros. Over the past few years, I've learned to love tomsrtbt (Tom's RootBoot).

Then, last year, I found some Business Card CDRs, which hold 30-50mb and fit in your wallet.

Naturally, I wanted a super-utility boot disk. My ideal was high; mix tomsrtbt with a standard Win98 boot disk (essential for flashing) and a few other tools. Multiboot? Now there's a tough subject. Even with the best guide to making bootable cdroms I could find, it was hopelessly difficult.

When I saw this post on Slashdot, I knew I had to post this little story. In researching it, I actually found an answer to the question I wanted to pose to all of you; does anybody know of a linux distribution for these business card cdrs.

LNX-BBC is just that. Anybody tried it? Anybody know of another one? Anybody made a multi-boot linux/dos businesscard cdr? ...I want the iso!

Re:Business Card CDR (30mb) Linux Distro

[c_g_hills]

Wow you saved me having to write a post about this :) There is another great one i use called lbt (linuxcare bootable toolkit - which was the precursor of LNX-BBC) and you can find it here: http://lbt.linuxcare.com/. The other distribution is demolinux which needs a 700meg cd, but contains a whole operating system including KDE and Gnome that runs off the cd.

Re:Business Card CDR (30mb) Linux Distro

[Cyph]

Have you looked at the Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox? It's a distro that can be used on a credit-card sized CD. I only found out about it a couple of days ago, and I've been pretty impressed so far. Here's some linkage: http://lbt.linuxcare.com"

Re:Business Card CDR (30mb) Linux Distro

[Anonymous Coward]

> Anybody made a multi-boot linux/dos businesscard cdr?

I did. It's actually really simple; put LOADER.BIN, DISKEMU1X.BIN and DISKEMU.CMD into the root directory of your CD, create a directory BOOTDISK where you put all those floppy images (my CD contains those: W98 bootdisk, MemTest86, Grub, PXE flash disks for Intel and 3com, Recovery Is Possible, TECHW0RM, a DOS network bootdisk, a floppy to reset the NT admin password; the rest, about 35MB, are filled with lots of tools). You then have to adapt DISKEMU.CMD to show a menu where you can select those images and finally call

mkisofs -no-emul-boot -eltorito-boot LOADER.BIN -hide boot.catalog -v -N -l -no-iso-translate -relaxed-filenames -J -R . > /tmp/bootcd.iso

to create the actual ISO. I can't give you mine (well, perhaps a stripped-down version), as it contains non-free software, and a few of those disks contain a German DOS, but I can help you with creating your own.

Re:Business Card CDR (30mb) Linux Distro

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a network connection then you can install
gentoo linux from its 16MB build iso. The build iso makes
the base gentoo system and then you install the rest of the
system by d/l and compiling from source.
http://www.gentoo.org/

Re:Business Card CDR (30mb) Linux Distro

[mrhuman]

yes! i definately want a mult-boot iso that i can pick apart. one resource that may be valuable:

maragda (http://www.iti.upv.es/~maragda/doc/index.html)

it is a linux on/from cd. just put it in your drive and you have a linux system. when i have time i want to make a multi-boot version that features multiple mini-distros.

there is a good page of related links here: running linux from cd-rom (http://www.geocities.com/rlcomp_1999/procedures/l inux-cd.html)

Re:Business Card CDR (30mb) Linux Distro

[Anonymous Coward]

> yes! i definately want a mult-boot iso that i can pick apart.

If you want a working iso that is easy to adapt/extend, contact me at slashdot(at)pub.ganyme.de.

Re:Business Card CDR (30mb) Linux Distro

[pclminion]

A business card-sized CDR would be awesome, but I can't use it. My CDR tray doesn't have a spindle in the center, so how would I center the thing in the tray? Or is the disc the same size as a mini-disc? I just noticed this now, but my CDR tray has a smaller circular indentation that appears to be the same size as a mini-disc.

Re:Business Card CDR (30mb) Linux Distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Business card CDRs are 8cm at the largest diameter, and so should be
the indentation in your tray.

Unix is dying his hair.

[sinserve]

Who needs a floppy disk, when you can boot your machine off of PAPER?
Yes folks, my very own FSMOS is able to do just that.

To demonstrate the amount of hackishnes envolved, I used the following off
the shelf concepts -- so not to lock you guys into propierty stuff:

1) A finite set of input symbols (you can increase this all you want, but the clock
cycles are inversely proportional to it.)

2) A finite set of internal states (yes, you can have as many internal states as you want.
TIMTOWTDI, same problems as 1 though)

3) A finite set of out put symbols (it will "say" anything you want :-)

4) a highly polished initial state, s0 (the first one is on the house.)

5) a next-state function (so you can tell it where you want it to go today.)

6) your very own mouth piece, an output function (yay)

You just have to do a little configuration, and make sure you have balanced edges and you
are good to go.

{ the above lame joke was brought to you by, Star Fruit Brust, it is juuuuuuicy, and by
Ashcroft and Gereld, working for a bent over you }

Re:Unix is dying his hair.

[the eric conspiracy]

Who needs a floppy disk, when you can boot your machine off of PAPER?
Yes folks, my very own FSMOS is able to do just that.

Prior art man. 30 years ago I used to boot a PDP-8 off punched paper tape. Just load that tape into the reader and let it fly. 20 minutes later and the computer was ready to rip, all 4K of 12 bit work memory ripped to go.

Re:Unix is dying his hair.

[lamont116]

Prior art man. 30 years ago I used to boot a PDP-8 off punched paper tape. Just load that tape into the reader and let it fly. 20 minutes later and the computer was ready to rip, all 4K of 12 bit work memory ripped to go.

Don't say "rip" when you're talking about paper tape. ;)

linux boot disks

[56ker]

The vital thing is actually finding the disk in the first place after a system crash! When you have hundreds of disks in many boxes - where do people suggest would be the best place to keep your Linux boot disk?

Re:linux boot disks

[Anonymous Coward]

I loop the ring on my prince albert through the write-protect hole, thereby keeping the disk safe with me at all times.

Re:linux boot disks

[Mr Windows]

How about just sticking out of the floppy drive? As my machine's on a network, I very rarely use the floppy drive, so it seems ideal to keep a floppy in it :)

I used trinux

[Yarn]

for almost everything. It is designed as a security testing tool, but I found its "download and install into ram" abilities so useful I had it set up to ghost machines, repair stuff, set up an emergency mail server...

As well as stress test the IDS we were writing. Brilliant.

Re:I used trinux

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed, I would still be working on those problems where I simply booted my trusty trinux iso, fired up links(text browser, better and smaller then lynx) asked google about tools like "partition recover", downloaded the binary

I used it

-with partimage to do some quick cloning

- with gpart to recover partition of some guy who didnt

busybox

[Anonymous Coward]

Not mention of busybox anywhere

Where would any of these min-distro's be without busybox

Low quality floppies

[_Laban_]

...And they break too easily. I've wondered sometimes if the makers of floppy disks have lowered the quality of the disks over the last 10 years. I hardly remember any disks breaking back in the days when I used the Amiga 500 and 1200. Then I didn't even have a harddrive, just around a thousand floppies. Sure some disks broke, but nowadays every disk seem to break after just a couple of uses.

Re:Low quality floppies

[mgv]

've wondered sometimes if the makers of floppy disks have lowered the quality of the disks over the last 10 years.

Yes, quality has fallen because:

1) Who is going to pay a premium for a good floppy?

2) Data density has increased so each bit has a weaker field and smaller footprint than the old 720 Kb disks - easier to demagnetise or scratch.

Michael

Redhat 7.2 Professional

[Zapdos]

Comes with a business card sized Sysadmin CD. Pop it into your wallet, have it anywhere. You can buy blank business card CDs and burn your own.

linux on a whole disk, wow!

[tomstdenis]

format A: /s
copy edit.* A:
copy fdisk.* A:
copy format.* A:
copy scandisk.* A:

Wow... my very own MSDOS SDCRK [that's super-duper-crash-recovery-kit for you laymen].

Tom

Re:linux on a whole disk, wow!

[mark_lybarger]

how exactly are you mounting your cd-rom drive with these utilities? a floppy of this type is basically useless for anything other than formatting/changing partitions. this reminds me of the win95 recovery disk that doesn't have cdrom support. in order to re-install win95 on a machine i have to use a win98 boot floppy to get cdrom drivers loaded, then put in the win95 cdrom to install it. didn't every machine have cdrom when win95 was released?

Re:linux on a whole disk, wow!

[tomstdenis]

In my case I have my win2k installer on my second hard disk. So all I need is to be able to boot up.

In the old days I'd copy a couple of .SYS files along with MSCDEX.exe [is that what its called? its been a while...]. All in all I could have my mouse+cd+disk utils all on one 720kb disk.

Tom

Re:linux on a whole disk, wow!

[posmon]

nope. didn't you read this handy guide to decide whether you wanted the cd or floppy version? note that it is "less likely that a Windows 95 CD-ROM will become [...] infected with a virus".

Re:linux on a whole disk, wow!

[JatTDB]

When Win95 came out, the vast majority of people who installed it were migrating from DOS/Win3.1. If they had a CD-ROM drive, then they also had DOS drivers for the drive, and this was plenty to get the install going. There wasn't a pressing need for Microsoft to provide that support.

Hell, I didn't have a CD-ROM drive yet when Win95 came out, and I'm into all that fancy computer stuff. Tons of Joe Users didn't have one, unless they'd only recently bought a PC.

Re:linux on a whole disk, wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

...which doesn't even give you network or CDROM support.

A floppy/cd-bootable Linux gives you an extremely secure base for building a firewall, router, DNS server - you name it. I think they even mentioned a mail server up there.

Re:linux on a whole disk, wow!

[tomstdenis]

I'd rather just buy a 139$ 4port [plus an uplink and WAN connection for a total of 6 ports] router that also does port forwarding than use a whole dedicated computer for the task.

I dunno about you.....

Setting up the device?

1. Release your DHCP lease
2. Plug modem into it
3. Plug my comp into it
4. Use a new fixed IP
done.

The particular router I have is one of the lower ends LinkSYS routers. It sports a slim design [sitting on a shelf in the basement] as well as a HTTP based setup system.

The only reason for a boot disk is to rescue a dying PC. If you want todo minimal tasks dedicated hardware is the way to go.

Tom

Re:linux on a whole disk, wow!

[Just Swing It]

You'll also need qbasic.*

edit.com is pretty much a stripped-down frontend to qbasic

When will goatse.cx linux come out

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive been waiting for a version of linux to run in my anus for ages!

heh

[merauder]

whatever¦you¦used,¦its¦a¦horrible¦translation..

Bootable CD-ROM's are more useful

[PhotoGuy]

I find the bootable CD-ROM distributions more useful. They contain things like X with a window manager and web browser, net connectivity via ethernet or dialup, XFS and Reiser support, and other useful goodies that would never fit on a floppy distro. And CD-ROM drives are dirt cheap, and nearly as pervasive as floppy drives.

My two favorites are related branches, LNX-BBC, a spinoff from Linuxcare's bootable toolkit, found here. Both have advantages over the other, and will fit on credit-card sized CD's, so you can fit 'em in your wallet (try that with a floppy :-)

Another cool one, which also has the advantage of letting folks try a more full-bodied Linux without installing anything, is DemoLinux. It even contains StarOffice on a fully self-contained bootable CD-ROM. Very cool.

-me

SuSe LiveEval

[davids-world.com]

Suse has a bootable 'LiveEval' CD ROM (available as ISO). It has everything one needs; config is saved on some HD partition (this does not destroy anything). Of course, it won't boot as fast a floppy-based solution does.

muLinux

[RegVer]

http://sunsite.dk/mulinux/ - it says it all. Small, functional, can do really many things - and runs off a floppy (or several of them, to be exact). Give it a try...

Yet another...

[O2n]

Yet another BBC ("bootable business card") cd is maintained by redhat.de (german subsidiary).

Although aimed mainly at redhat users, it's pretty comprehensive and you can debug/fiddle with your other partitions (win32, ntfs). It's fairly up-to-date, also.

Grab it here

Ramfloppy

[1%warren]

My favorite. Kernel 2.2.17, support for ext3 & reiserfs (tomsrtbt doesn't support reiserfs, can be hacked to do ext3), & a customised Midnight Commander that can be used to extract rpms & debs. Includes mcedit, far more "intuitive" than vi/emacs.

Details
Contents
Self extracting archive - run unzip on it to extract it linux.

FloppyFW

[DangerTenor]

FloppyFW is a linux distribution on a floppy that acts as a packet filtering firewall. I have floppyfw machines set up both at home and at work--one's a 486-50, the other's a Pentium 60--that protect my machines. It's great for those of us that have old computers with floppy disk drives sitting in the basement, and have to protect a computer or two running Winblows. http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw

why?

[Anonymous Coward]

why aren't floppies dead? why? why must the pain go on?

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right! Floppies are dead just like Apple. That's why iMacs don't come with 3.5" slots.

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

because the industry has been incapable of making an equivalent open standard since.
i have wanted a large reliable standardized rw-disk with widespread support for 10 years and yet the closest thing to that is to carry a hd with you.

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple isn't dead yet. There are still uses, and there will be for a few more months.

Linux Floppies

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a ton of "rescue disks" and ISOs out there, but does anyone know of any Linux distros that install to a hard drive from a series of floppy disks besides the debian and slackware distros? I have an old laptop with out a cdrom drive. I don't have a null-modem cable or network access from my laptop either. Any suggestions?

This is semi-off-topic. Sorry.

Not any more!

[1%warren]

No support for Reiserfs! Tom says he will work on it sometime though. My favorite at the moment is Ramfloppy - has nowhere near the same amout of utilities, & no networking support though. To fit everything in these days, you'd need to go to two floppys. The author of Paud said that people preferred a single floppy & wouldn't use Paud if he moved to two.

Re:Not any more!

[dimator]

What a coincidence. Ramfloppy rescued my ass this weekend when the shit hit the fan with my system (*cough* hdparm *cough*).

PicoBSD

[Fweeky]

Don't forget the BSD's have things like this too. Tsk, anyone would think the BSD's and the Linux's aren't on speaking terms or something :)

/usr/src/release/picobsd/

PICOBSD(8) FreeBSD System Manager's Manual PICOBSD(8)

NAME

picobsd - floppy disk based FreeBSD system

DESCRIPTION

picobsd is a script which can be used to produce a minimal implementation
of FreeBSD (historically called PicoBSD) which typically fits on one
floppy disk, or can be downloaded as a single image file from some media
such as CDROM, flash memory, or through etherboot.

The boot media (typically a floppy disk) contains a boot loader and a
compressed kernel which includes a memory file system. Depending on the
media, it might also contain a number of additional files, which can be
updated at run time, and are used to override/update those in the memory
file system.

Re:PicoBSD

[TandyMasterControl]

Why do I have to "not forget" that the BSD's have something Linux has, in this case a floppy based version of bsd? Is there actually something in it for me or is it just so you don't feel bad about BSD?

I've looked into Pico BSD and the subject of floppy based BSD off and on for a couple of years. There's nothing going on there -or last I looked it was still dead.

Pico BSD is a defunct project and there were no surviving offspring. It's not being maintained, as the downloadable images all date from 1998. So it's unsafe in any setting you need a UNIX in, and pretty much useless unless you just get a thrill from loading a UNIX style OS from a bootable medium the rest of the world rememebers best as a vector for DOS viruses and typing 'ls' and marvelling at yourself. To handle and touch an OS this far fallen into decay and death has to be a kind of antiquarian's fetish. Before you sit down to type at the console, you should be sure to put on some harpsichord music and your favorite mauve satin smoking jacket. Atop your monitor should stand a seven armed silver candelabra and the room should be dark and cold as a tomb. Use a Ouija board to generate passwords.
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere -
As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: "It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed -I journeyed down here! -
That I brought a dread burden down here -
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber -
This misty mid region of Weir -
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

I've checked for a floppy version of OpenBSD. Mr. De Raadt has expressed an unwillingness for OBSD to be floppyized. Some people were talking about it anyway but there was nothing going on, nothing to use. Since you are into BSD and haven't mentioned it I will assume that the floppy based Open BSD is still sharing a bunk with OBSD .iso's on the Pullman car of sweet maybes rolling down track 29 to Ulalume Terminal.

With Linux on the other hand there are a number of robust open projects and commercial products that answer to the description of "floppy based UNIX router, that is actively maintained". I don't have to imagine them as still living, and harangue strangers about not forgetting them. They manage to attract a fair amount of attention to themselves without strident evangelizing.

Re:PicoBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually most of the Linux stuff is using old 2.2 kernels as well (um, Jan. 1999)... No stateful firewalling for you.

In fact, there are tons and tons of dead single-floppy Linux distros... whatever.

PicoBSD is in the same boat, but there is now ClosedBSD which is like PicoBSD except recent. Neither one supports DHCP though... :(

So what do I think? I think all the current single-floppy distros suck (Linux or BSD). I really need a good one but I don't have time to create one myself.

Re:PicoBSD

[TandyMasterControl]

Actually most of the Linux stuff is using old 2.2 kernels as well (um, Jan. 1999)...

Well, actually the 2.2 series kernel is very much alive and maintained. There are plenty of Linux floppy distros that are keeping up with revisions of the 2.2 kernel. If you visit their pages, as on leaf.sourceforge.net you can see that they are also responding to security concerns in secondary packages, like libz and openssh.

No stateful firewalling for you.

If you absolutely need stateful packet filtering you can use Bering, a floppy firewall based on Linux kernel series 2.4

In fact, there are tons and tons of dead single-floppy Linux distros... whatever.

Which is just what you would expect to see anywhere in free unix where there is abundant life and tons and tons of open projects. It's an ecology.

I am glad to see ClosedBSD. A few days ago was the first time I read that name anywhere and I didn't get an idea of what the project was about. I won't rag on the limited package options for CLosedBSD since it's clear that they're just starting out.

I think all the current single-floppy distros suck (Linux or BSD).

I have to disagree. Sometimes you have to look on the bright side. Our options are great compared to Microsoft-only users. There are floppy routers based on DOS (I think) but that is a technologically stunted backwater of the MS world and there's nothing the open or closed projects for DOS firewalls can do to improve that situation. We have many vital projects that are able to make use of the best possibilities of the IA32 architecture, a wide range of configuration choices including hybrid CDROM/Floppy distros, multifloppy distros, wireless gateway distros, options for all kinds of services -not just routing- and we have large user support communities. Working with floppies is never going to be painless but really with all the choice, flexibility and support that's out there, these are the good old days.
Instead of starting a whole new floppy UNIX why not join ClosedBSD as a contributor? The best Linux-on-Floppy distros are ones that attract lots of contributors and people offering specialized versions of the main tree.

Re:PicoBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the 2.2 kernels don't do stateful firewalling (you're just asking for a security breach). I have not seen any 2.4 single-floppy distro that worked. I tried Bering on two different computers and it would just reset the machine about half-way through the boot. I also couldn't tell if it had DHCP support. Overall it sounds good, I just wish it worked.

As for ClosedBSD, all I need is DHCP and stateful firewalling (ipf, nat). That's really all a firewall needs. I really wish they were using OpenBSD though... :(

True that I could contribute to something like ClosedBSD, but doing things like that have a serious time cost. I don't have time to learn how yet another thing works. Maybe some day, but I can't right now. I actually do write open-source software when I have time but I don't care to learn the details of setting up a distro (just not my thing).

Re:PicoBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Another thing I forgot... Bering (and many of the other LEAF distros) are using those damn 1.6 MB floppies. Anything more than 1.44 is a PITA to use because it hardly ever works and when it does it's very slow.

Re:PicoBSD

[TandyMasterControl]

Oh yeah I forgot one thing, Bering won't work for BSD users. Just everyone else. Nothing you can do about that.

Making 1680K floppies shouldn't be a problem for anyone. There are Windows tools that format the floppy and copy the image file in one go for those lacking UNIX skills. The other "difficulty" of floppies over the usual 1440K size is quality. Bad quality floppies will frequently fail to format at 1680 but all modern controllers BIOSes and floppy drives will handle 1680, even MSDOS understands it without trickery. I say bad quality floppies because experience tells me that these are the same brands that develop errors early on when left in 1440K format. If you're using floppies that often fail to format 1680K they are going to bite you in the ass at 1440K within a short while anyway, which is not desirable for a router or other embedded appliance type UNIX server. It's best to replace a batch of bad floppies than cherry pick the good ones from a batch of low quality diskettes and hope they will last.

Re:PicoBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

You aren't forced to use floppies. LEAF releases/branches support CD-ROM, CD-ROM+Floppy, hard drives (even RAID), flash devices (DOC, DOM, ADM, etc.). The media you decide to use and the tradeoffs associated with it are up to you.

They all suck.. here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been looking at single floppy distros for a while now for firewalling. Almost all of the "good" distros use 2.2 kernels. That means no stateful firewalling, which is not secure enough for what I need.

PicoBSD is cool, but doesn't support DHCP... (duh)

ClosedBSD is cool, but doesn't support DHCP... (why?!?)

I've never seen a single floppy OpenBSD, which would be the best IMHO.

All in all, I'm very disappointed with the state of things. I'm still running my (OpenBSD) firewall off of the HD. It wastes energy, is too loud, and is more likely to fail than if it was running off a ramdisk (booted from floppy).

DyneBolic, the multi-media mini-linux

[wundabread]

Speaking of mini-distros, check out dyne-bolic at http://lab.dyne.org/DyneBolic

Note that it is presently Alpha.

It's a distro that boots off of the CD and gives you access to tools for making cool visuals set to music using FreeJ, or running a webcam off of hasciicam.

Check it out, and I know they could use a hand getting some of the USB camera stuff going.

Sig

[Anonymous Coward]

This is ten words, three commas, one letter, and a dot.

Thats eleven words.

Bare metal recovery

[Colin Smith]

Would be handy actually.

Boot floppy, brings up network, contacts backup server, partitions disks, creates filesystems and begins restoring all the data from the backup server.

Re:Bare metal recovery

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to have a copy of a boot floppy with MS-DOS and the Microsoft LanMan DOS client installed on it, configured to connect to a SAMBA server. This was back when I could only afford a few 386+ machines to run Linux on and was coming up with interesting ways of using older 286 and 8088 machines. My Lan Manager boot floppy (made by installing DOS and the Lan Manager client onto a hard drive, then paring it down to just what was needed to boot up a system) was configured to install a SAMBA share as the C: drive. Then I used my 6 diskette Windows 3.1 floppy set to install Windows on the C: drive. It was pretty wild, because Windows 3 is so 'dumb' that it didn't know C: was a networked drive and it installed perfectly. With that floppy diskette and the appropriate NIC installed in any machine, that machine become a 'roaming host' for the Windows install and C: drive that was shared out from the SAMBA box.

People who've never been challanged by the ownership of lots of 3C501 and 3C503 Network cards, old '286 boxes, and only a few 386+ boxes haven't experienced all it was to be a tech in the early 90's when Linux was just getting started.

Images of the Microsoft Lan Manager client install disks are freely downloadable from somewhere on the Microsoft site, by the way. Dig around and you'll find them.

Nobody's mentioned zip disks

[swb]

I used to use Zip disks back in the day when you could reasonably do viable a viable installation (one with development tools, editors, networking, etc etc) on 100MB. The "rescue" disk and the drive wsas portable to whatever machine it was needed on, reasonably fast and was a writable medium for saving configs or other data if it was determined that the original disk was dead (yes, there was actually 10-20 MB of FREE disk space).

It seems like the last time I tried to make a boot disk this way I couldn't get a basic install to fit on 100MB.

Removable IDE sleds sound the ideal solution, but so many boxes don't have room for them. A bootable CD seems like the most portable, although it lacks a writable filesystem.

Linux Photo player boot????

[jlrowe]

Does anyone know how to accomplish this?

I am currently scanning very old (50-100 years)family photos for distribution to the family on CD. I want to create a CD that is bootable and will go from a cold machine to an X11 desktop and immediatly start doing a slide show of the photos on the CD.

As a bonus, it looks like to me that a CD like this would be a great way for Linux to get exposure running business slideshows or product demos.

Therefore, it would have to logon as root (?), autoconfigure X11, and start playing. In addition, I would also put a 'autorun.inf' and copy of 'iview32' (win32 viewer) on it for those who shove it in and use with Winddows.

The basic requirements I can think of are:

1. All opensource/freeware
2. Linux Autoboot, Configure, Play etc.
3. Smallest disk space requirement, saving CD space for the pictures.
4. Ease of use. Might be nice to break out of the slide show and view pictures under user control.

Any ideas on what to use?
Which of these distros being discussed to use?
What Linux program will do the slide show?
How to autoconfig X11 if the distro doesn't?
How to autologon?

Re:Linux Photo player boot????

[Lumpy]

Therefore, it would have to logon as root (?),

Why? what reason do you need to add the overhead of login and user systems? what do you even need a shell for?

autoconfigure X11, and start playing.

again why? do you really need X? why cant you use microwindows or PicoGui? both of which are 9000% smaller and easier to use in a small environment than any X11 release. they both use the Framebuffer interface so will work on 99.667% of all current hardware and 40% of the old junk.

In addition, I would also put a 'autorun.inf' and copy of 'iview32' (win32 viewer) on it for those who shove it in and use with Winddows.

Fair, that means your CD has to be iso9660 filesystem. (Yes you CAN have a EXT2 cdrom... I've made them) you cant use Joilet.. Why? because you need to keep your kernel small, and your ram filesystem small (your entire operating environment has to run in ram) a kernel,filesystem,busybox and picoGUI with a custom slideshow app is easy to stuff on a floppy let along in ram. use MicroWindows if you want that homey X11 look and feel. Or better yet screw the Gui... use a simple C app written with the SDL library.. There's no reason to bloat up your project with a useless GUI (Unless you want to add a fill in this form and click here to dial and send me your info.... bla bla bla...)

Reccomendation? learn C, learn SDL (only a little needed!) and not only show off something that is 100% impossible with any current microsoft product but you also can brag that you completely designed it.

finally, if you write it in SDL only, and write the C app correctly, you can ignore putting a silly viewer app on there, and run the C app under windows after you compiled it under the free windows Gcc... Same views under both linux AND winblows... Something else that cannot be done with any Microsoft product.

Some summaries of Linux floppy distros

[rtos]

Here's a quick list of some floppy distros that you may not have heard about (and some that you have) with summaries. Tom's Root Boot is definitely one to check out. I've heard Coyote is good too, but haven't tried it myself. Links and summaries are brought to you by Freshmeat.net. Enjoy.

Herbix : "Herbix is a Linux server that fits on a floppy. It supports ipchains and can serve FTP, HTTP, IRC, DHCP, SMTP, and IDENT."

Mike's Jukebox Distro : "Mike's Jukebox Distro is really just a floppy image that you add to a CD full of mp3's, using it as the El-Torito boot image. It has a complete Linux kernel and madplay, along with BusyBox. A simple shell script uses "find" to get a list of all mp3's on the CD, and it then plays each of them in order. tty3 is used for the player output, tty1, and tty2 have shells to allow the user to "play" while it's playing music."

RIMiRadio : "RIMiRadio is a floppy disk distro of Linux and an Icecast server."

floppyfw : "Floppyfw is a router and simple firewall on one single floppy. It uses Linux basic firewall capabilities, and has a very simple packaging system. It is perfect for masquerading and securing networks on ADSL and cable lines, using both static IP, DHCP, and PPPoE, and provides a simple installation, which usually involves editing of only one file on the floppy."

BBIagent Router : "BBIagent is a single floppy Linux-based router for sharing a broadband Internet connection. It also serves as a firewall to prohibit intruders from accessing your LAN. You can create your own BBIagent router software (a diskette file image) on our server based on your hardware configuration (NICs) and connection protocol (e.g. PPPoE, PPPoATM or DHCP). It is very easy to install and use."

Coyote Linux : "Coyote Linux is a single floppy distribution for people who have an Internet connection that they wish to share with other computers on a LAN. In addition to connection sharing, it also provides firewall services to help protect the internal network. The goal of the Coyote project is to make it as quick and easy as possible to share an Internet connection."

Tom's RootBoot : "rtbt is the most Linux on one floppy disk for rescue recovery panic and emergencies, contains tools to keep in your shirt pockets, is useful whenever you can't use a hard drive and contains about 100 rescue tools."

Pocket Linux : "Pocket Linux is an almost minimal, one floppy linux system designed to quickly convert PC workstation into secure linux-based workstation using ssh to connect to remote host (other networking clients are also supported). It supports bootp for determining host IP and other network parameters (there's also manual configuration possible, but bootp is recommended). In addition to workstations equipped with a network card (ethernet or arcnet), you can also use Pocket Linux on a PC equipped with a modem. Modem is automatically detected and then PPP connection is made."

Trinux : "Trinux is a minimal Linux distribution that boots from a single floppy or CD-ROM, loads its packages from an FTP/HTTP server, IDE filesystem, or additional floppies, and runs entirely in RAM. Trinux contains the latest versions of popular network security tools that can be used to conduct security research, analyze network traffic, and perform vulnerability testing."

Hopefully this list is helpful to those of you just starting to think about tiny distros.

Boot a fully fledged KDE from CD

[zeank]

Ok, it's not a mini-distro, but it's a Linux you can carry around with you and can start it without installation:Knoppix.
Knoppix boots from CD and brings up a complete KDE including Koffice, OpenOffice, Kdevelop, Mozilla, many tools for recovery and security. Last but not least your CDRW is supported too. All this is done by having a compressed image on CD with approximatly 2GB of size. As there are still about 20MB free space you can add some of your own stuff to the image - very call for, say, presentation and the like.
You can download a bootable disc-image here.
Unfortunately the whole site is german only and I'm afraid all of the documentation too. But as it is really easy to use just give it a try!

Re:Boot a fully fledged KDE from CD

[benjamindees]

For a distro in english, try DemoLinux. It has Gnome, KDE and StarOffice.

My instructions

[clasher]

Here is my web page detailing some of the steps I go through to create a linux on a disk. I am working on putting more details on soon but I think it still gives a good introduction.

/sbin/mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 2.4.18

[deaddeng]

this is not hard.

ps, substitue your running kernel version for "2.4.18" in the above.

Look Here

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.hrlug.org/cddistro.html

Linux? On a floppy?!

[NowIveSeenItAllGuy]

Now I've seen it all!

fd linux

[cjsteele]

I'm a little disappointed to see that fd linux didn't make it in to the review... fd linux (available from fdlinux.com) was created by a friend of mine (with a tidge of help from myself) to serve as a text-based replacement to any existing OS on a workstation -- it includes everything you need to work and play on-line. (in a text environment that is.)

Mindi

[dumb-nick-name]

Try Mindi. Build your own boot cd or floppy set using your own tools and kernel (option to use Mindi's own "Failsafe" kernel as well.) Uses ash and busybox for lightness. Minimal bullshit needed to use; edit a list of tools to include, then run mindi. A Debian package is available, be sure to edit your tools list (it's pretty lean by default - no fsck!)

Flash-disk distros?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to run linux on a small PC-104 card or something, and a 64MB flash disk or so, are there any distros available for that? It would be nice to have something to base it on, rather than copying file by file by hand...

Re:Flash-disk distros?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most LEAF releases/branches will run from flash devices (CompactFlash, DOM, ADM, DOC, etc.).

Learn by doing

[MadFarmAnimalz]

I was a little disappointed by the article; I've tried Mandrake, RedHat, and Debian but my current system is one I built from ground up from source. There's a lot of lip-service paid to the merits of really learning linux and its internals, through things like the Power-up to Bash prompt HOWTO, but I don't see many people actually doing it.

I've only been using linux since December, but I think building my own system has taught me a thing or three that someone who has used, for example Mandrake for a few years wouldn't know.

There's much to be said for learning by doing. I was expecting a little more than a listing of ready-made distros.

People have been predicting that it will take a dumbing down of some sort for linux to become a viable alternative on the desktop. Is this it?

Re:Learn by doing

[Anonymous Coward]

> There's much to be said for learning by doing. I was expecting a little more than a listing of ready-made distros.
> People have been predicting that it will take a dumbing down of some sort for linux to become a viable alternative on the desktop. Is this it?

There's "dumbing down Linux", whereby the basic system becomes less capable of doing things as time goes by (hasn't happened, has it?), and then there's making Linux more usable to those who aren't l33l hax0rs and don't care about bragging rights, they want to be able to use their system without being an OS mechanic. The ready-made craskdisks are for most of us, you can continue to do things your labor-intensive way - we won't try to prevent you from doing so.

Re:Learn by doing

[benjamindees]

I don't think this qualifies as "dumbing down", as in Windows/DOS, where configuration options are gradually "lost" and replaced with Wizards or automatic-configuration. This demonstrates the flexibility of the open-source model, whereby branches such as these can exist concurrently with the main Linux kernel. Heck, even distributions such as Debian and RedHat would qualify as "dumbing down" in such an interpretation. The fact that you started off building your own system from scratch is a testament to your computer knowledge/skill. Most people would rather start with a pre-made general-purpose distro and go up from there. Still others won't mess with RedHat, but would install Linux on a firewall or MP3 player in their car. Eventually, they will become curious enough to install a main distro on their PC and then maybe even build one from scratch, as you have done.

SuperRescue Inet2 mirror?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there an Internet2 (or Canet3/Geant/JaNet/etc.) mirror of SuperRescue? The /pub/dist directory isn't mirrored at any of the kernel.org mirrors I checked (my download is going at ~10 kbyte/s, but it would probably be over 600 kbyte/s from Inet2).

Why not recovery CDROMs?

[pclminion]

I'd make a boot floppy. Gladly. If only I had a floppy drive.

Why should I buy and install an archaic piece of hardware just for disaster recovery? The distributions should supply programs to help me make boot CDROMs.

Re:Why not recovery CDROMs?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why should I buy and install an archaic piece of hardware just for disaster recovery? The distributions should supply programs to help me make boot CDROMs.

The install disks of all major distro vendors are recovery disks as well, so no extra steps to make extra recovery CDs are needed.

Re:Why not recovery CDROMs?

[clare-ents]

RedHat 7.2 Professional.

Credit Card bootable recovery CD ROM.

Exactly what everybody needs.

MP3 player distros?

[cybergremlin]

Unlike those looking for a boot/repair or router distro I need something to play MP3s on minimal hardware. I have an embedded 486 ISA board that I want to stick in my car along with an old sound card, so I need it to run headless and on very littl CPU power. Any ideas?

Re:MP3 player distros?

[Anonymous Coward]

minimal cpu is 486dx 100MHZ i understand

check google for "mp3 linux distro floppy

http://www.michaelchaney.com/mjbd/

A few ideas for Linux distros...

[benjamindees]

These are great, and I use tomsrtbt regularly, but where is Linux Router Project?

Anyways, I have a few ideas for linux distros:

Web Terminal Linux: Requires 486 with 8mb RAM. Boots from a floppy, all files on CD (since 486's can't boot from CD). Runs Konqueror-embedded and a PPP/dialup program. Turns your old pc into a web terminal.

MP3 Player Linux: Requires 486/Pentium with minimal RAM. Comes with parts list from Radio Shack to add LCD screen and basic frontend. Runs MP3 player and NFS/Samba to access files over home network. Or, accesses files on CD-ROM for in-car use.

I know these (almost) already exist in one form or another. I just think the main advantage of using a floppy or cd distro is putting it on that old 486 in the closet and getting some use out of it.

Oxygen LEAF release/branch

[Anonymous Coward]

Oxygen is capable of being used as a rescue disk.

A CD-ROM ISO version is in development.

Re:Business Card (30mb) Linux Distro - PLAC

[ShmakDown]

PLAC is a business card cd iso for system auditing. It has a lot of nifty tools in it.

The project page at sourceforge has some info up, but I haven't seen a lot of documentation for it.

Jim

Don't forget Mondo Rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

Mondo Rescue creates a
very nice rescue system. You can choose to
use a special kernel or you can use your own
kernel and modules. Boot from floppy or
CD-ROM. Use Mondo Rescue to create a
a stock mini distro or your hand polished crash
recovery setup or create a backup of your
complete setup on CD-ROM.

It saved my ass more than one time. Since my
Mondo setup reads ReiserFs, I switched my
backup HDs to Reiser too: faster back ups,
better usage of disk space.

Blow Jobs told us floppy disks were obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are we discussing something as old and obsolete as floppy disks. Blow Jobs made sure they weren't designed into the newer Macintoshes and thus they are obsolete.

PicoBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

PicoBSD does all this and more and is more
stable too. If you don't know about PicoBSD,
it might be worth your while to take a look
at it.

Good page for floppy and CD distros

[chicks.net]

My favoriate pages for floppy and CD distros are hosted by a local user group.
Rescue Floppies: http://www.hrlug.org/rescuedisk.html
CD distros: http://www.hrlug.org/cddistro.html

What mini distros are really good for.

[jag164]

How many times have you adopted a PC and didn't know exactly what hardware it had. You need to put some version of Windows on it and the wonderful install and the wonderful PNP couldn't tell what the PC had. You then get that wonderful message pop-up "Located unkown device." and "Installing drivers for unknown device" (This has always cracked me up) Then the damn thing doesn't work perfectly. Well, pop in your Linux on Floppy disk, boot, cat /proc/pci/ among other tricks and and now you know. Go fix Winblows and make some poor shmoe happy.

And that my friends is what a mini distro can be used for.

All eggs in one basket but it broke

[goodie]

I put all my favourite tools on one 8cm CDR and kept it in my bag so I had it handy wherever I went. Until one day I found the CDR broken in two in the bottom of my bag...whoops

mini distro to boot from external firewire disk

[bowa]

Are there any of these distros that off the shelf support external firewire disks ? (with ohci compliant adapter cards), i am looking for a bootdisk or bootcdrom so i can run linux from my external hd on my laptop, work or home pc (all which have ieee1394).
any ideas?