adamw, 1 month ago

@maxamillion
It's okay. There are support groups for people like you.

maxamillion, 1 month ago

@adamw pfft. I don't need a support group. I can quit anytime I want. I just don't want to.... >.>

adamw, 1 month ago

@maxamillion don't worry, if it gets really bad you can get a job as a dracut maintainer.

maxamillion, 1 month ago

@adamw you know what the messed up part of that proposal is? that actually sounds fun to me 🙃

adamw, 1 month ago

@maxamillion backs away slowly

vwbusguy, 1 month ago

@adamw @maxamillion I love writing bash scripts. You know what's even more fun though? Writing qbsh scripts!

https://github.com/vwbusguy/qbsh?tab=readme-ov-file#scripting

vwbusguy, 1 month ago

@adamw @maxamillion Just look at all the fun possibilities!

https://github.com/vwbusguy/qbsh/blob/main/tests/test.qsh

adamw, 1 month ago

@vwbusguy @maxamillion aaaaaaaaaahhhh make it stop

vwbusguy, 1 month ago

@adamw @maxamillion Too bad you weren't at SCaLE this year. I gave out over a dozen qbsh 3.5" floppies that were compiled and working for Fedora 39.

Conan_Kudo, 1 month ago

@vwbusguy @adamw @maxamillion You kept forgetting to give me one. But you did scare me with your spec file!

vwbusguy, 1 month ago

@Conan_Kudo @adamw @maxamillion The spec file was for qb64 itself and it is quite unfortunate. qbsh would be absolute cake to compile for RPM apart from compiling qb64.

https://github.com/vwbusguy/qbsh/blob/main/Containerfile

vwbusguy, 1 month ago

@Conan_Kudo @adamw @maxamillion If I end up being able to go to Flock this year, I'll try to bring some more floppies with me. I'm hoping QBLOS will be a thing by then, too.

vwbusguy, 1 month ago

@Conan_Kudo @adamw @maxamillion If you have any ideas of how to boot a Fedora kernel off of 3.5" floppies, I would love to hear them.

Conan_Kudo, 1 month ago

@vwbusguy @adamw @maxamillion I don't think you can make a kernel small enough anymore. ZIP Disks sure, but classic floppy disks? Probably not.

vwbusguy, 1 month ago

@Conan_Kudo @adamw @maxamillion Absolutely not with with the traditional FAT12 1.44m sectoring, but some were telling me it was possible to get much more out of them with alternative sectoring.

vwbusguy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

@Conan_Kudo @adamw @maxamillion NEC PC-98 apparently had a 9.3MB 3 ½“ floppy format.

I wonder how much of the fs size I would save simply by not compiling GPU support - especially amdgpu.

maxamillion, 1 month ago

@Conan_Kudo @vwbusguy @adamw I wonder what sort of gymnastics TinyCore is doing to make theirs to small ... still not floppy small but it's REALLY small by today's standards

vwbusguy, 1 month ago

@maxamillion @Conan_Kudo @adamw I wonder if there's some way to do some aggressive bzip2 style compression as well that grub could grok.

vwbusguy, 1 month ago

@maxamillion @Conan_Kudo @adamw And then there's this 120M "Super Disk" in the Linux floppy man page.

vwbusguy, 1 month ago

@maxamillion @Conan_Kudo @adamw There's also this, but limiting to i486 might be a bit much 😬. I don't think qb64 supports i486, let alone recompiling the dependencies in Fedora for it.

https://hackaday.com/2021/05/24/running-modern-linux-from-a-single-floppy-disk/