Also the goal was to run LATEST kernel with no changes - just config. With other compression algorithms it was impossible to fit everything into a floppy. And I really wanted to have nano and some space to save few files. Without this it would be totally not usable OS.
Nice to read all of those comments. The project goal is more to learn how to make your own Linux distribution than to fit as much as possible on a floppy. It is fun to have a fully working OS at the end of this learning experience. Floppies are easy to use and just cool :)
There are a lot of better suited distributions for size and memory usage. What makes FLOPPINUX stand out is the complete tutorial to follow and then make your own changes on top of it. Learn and have fun!
I got obsessed with Stable Diffusion. I get past the honeymoon period generating everything I could imagine, and now I'm trying to actually incorporate it in my daily work. Furthermore, I'm sharing my experiments here https://bits-next.p1x.in/generating-perfect-grass-textures.h...
Another new and exciting thing for me is the Gemini protocol. The simple, low-tech internet. I started porting all my texts/websites to my own capsule at gemini://floppy.p1x.in (server from real 3.5" floppy!)
I got similar problems when I missmach 32bit and 64bit code. First try to run in qemu 64 bit system.
I ended up building the whole system on a 32bit old laptop and just don't care about the problems with installing missing 32bit libs on my 64bit system.
Barely. If you want to just run some compiled C app then you don't need as much tools. You can even skip the BusyBox part and instead of shell running your application only.
But I don't think it is what you want. For sane set of tools it was a little bit over 1MB. Mine is bigger as I still need more tools for fixing/experimenting on live system (I'm using shell scripts for my application). In the end I will be removing more and more tools.
I should see floppy drive as /dev/fd0. Just now as I double check everything I found out that external drives (USB) are shown as /dev/sd*. sdb in my computer.
Also the goal was to run LATEST kernel with no changes - just config. With other compression algorithms it was impossible to fit everything into a floppy. And I really wanted to have nano and some space to save few files. Without this it would be totally not usable OS.