The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies. Secondly, old video card drivers are being dropped from the kernel. This means all you have is basic VGA "safe-mode" level support, which isn't even fast enough to play an MPEG2. My final try was to install Debian 5, which was period correct and had support for my hardware, but the live CDs of the the time were not hybrid so the ISO could not boot from USB. I didn't have a burner so I finally gave up.
So I think these types of projects are fun for a proof of concept, but unfortunately are never going to give life to old computers.
How about using a current computer to run qemu then mounting the Lenny iso as an image and installing to a qemu hard drive? Then dd the hard drive image to your 32bit target. (That might need access to a hard drive caddy depending on how you can boot the 32bit target machine, so a 'hardware regress' I suppose).
It baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.
(edit to say I'm obviously ignoring i8n etc.)
With memory prices skyrocketing, I wonder if we will see a freeze in computer hardware requirements for software. Maybe it's time to optimize again.
Yeah you can get machines which are higher specced easily enough, but they’re usually at the upper end of the average consumers budget.
It's really astonishing how full-featured it all was, and it was running on those Pentium machines that had a "turbo" button to switch between 33 and 66 MHz and just a few MBs of RAM.
Nope, that’s a modern problem. That’s what happens when the js-inmates run the asylum. We get shitty bloated software and 8300 copies of a browser running garage applications written by garbage developers.
I can’t wait to see what LLMs do with that being the bulk of their training.
Exciting!
That seems odd? Debian 12 Bullseye (oldstable) has fully supported i386 port. I would expect it to run reasonably well on late 32 bit era systems (Pentium4/AthlonXP)
Don't lose hope. You can boot it one way or other :)
Alternatively you may have accidently built a great machine for installing FreeDOS to run old DOS games/applications. It does install from USB, but needs BIOS so can't run it on modern PC hardware.
https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
to setup small router on 486 with 12 MB ram and run flawless. Later i get Linksys WRT54GL and decommissioned that machine.
I don't know if that's also true for data integrity on physical magnetic media. FAT12 is not a journaling filesystem. On a modern drive, a crash during a write is at best, annoying while on a 3.5" floppy with a 33mhz CPU, a write operation blocks for a perceptible amount of time. If the user hits the power switch or the kernel panics while the heads are moving or the FAT is updating, that disk is gone. The article mentions sync, but sync on a floppy drive is an agonizingly slow operation that users might interrupt.
Given the 253KiB free space constraint, I wonder if a better approach would be treating the free space as a raw block device or a tiny appended partition using a log-structured filesystem designed for slow media (like a stripped down JFFS2 or something), though that might require too many kernel modules.
Has anyone out there experimented with appending a tar archive to the end of the initramfs image inplace for persistence, rather than mounting the raw FAT filesystem? It might be safer to serialize writes only on shutdown, would love more thoughts on this.
Makes sense, great point. I would rather use a second drive for the write disk space, if possible (I know how rare it's now to have two floppy drives, but still).
This isn't true, I commented lower in the thread, but FAT keeps a backup table, and you can use that to restore the disk.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38059961
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27249075
That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards.
Now you have ;-)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...
And they used to fail all the time, especially when you had something that spanned more than a single disk.
X disks were X11. There were also the A,B, C etc disks.
Then there was the Coherent install, with massive manual on ultra thin paper with the shell on the front.
The HDD was borked but it had a 3.5" bay that worked, so I got a floppy-based distro running on it. I later replaced the drive and then made the mistake of attempting to compile X11 on it. Results were... mixed.
The Linux kernel drops i486 support in 6.15 (released May 2025), so 6.14 (released March 2025) is the latest version with full compatibility.
It's basically what people used before USB sticks. But it was also the storage medium that software was sold on, before CD-ROMs became widespread.