"Installing this is super easy, you just need to code your own kernel driver." :D Awesome.

...and we have the "Ben Eater" for vintage Linux distros! Great job man!

It's funny to me that 250 subscribers felt like a surprise to you. These videos are superb! Kudos for growing the channel as big as you have, 30k is more like it!

Sadly when it comes to floppy disks it seems that the older the disk is, the more likely it will still be good. Disks made in the late 90s through the early 00s are complete junk. What used to be a great way to reliably store your data became a joke with a 30-40% failure rate right out of the package. Great video!

You are an absolute legend, over 1 hour of writing floppies.

You are legendary and an inspiration to me, a budding retro geek. I recently built my first retro computer, which was just a windows XP build. I have aspirations to do a 3.1 build

this is so amazing and fascinating. you are a wizard. casually modifying kernel code. Im a web dev with some prior experience with embedded and electronics but this is like magic

Impressive. Imma need to subscribe to you. Love me some classic *nix goodness.

Linux has come a long way since then!

Awesome videos! Congrats on your subscriber number, well earned!

Good job! I remember reading about GRUB and LILO ages ago, with the recommendation being "try to avoid LILO if you can" due to disk size and configuration issues. It was cool to see how that didn't deter you at all though lol.

An astonishingly accomplished achievement, great work.

My first install of Linux was Slackware 3.0 from 1995, on a Cyrix P150+, specfically built for running Linux. This means I selected the excellently supported S3 Vision 968 based Diamond Stealth 64Video VRAM graphics card. All floppies I needed was a Boot and a Root floppy, install was through the cdrom.

This is awesome! I'm SOO jealous of your knowledge! Did you ever post a video of the super card pro which you mention?

Great video! Keep 'em coming!

D'oh !!! I've been a linux user since 1997, beginning with an already antiquated Slackware 3.0 (the one I could grab at the time, little did I know), and I realise I never knew that SLS stands for Soft Landing Linux ! I feel really stupid. I had a Thinkpad 380 later on, and that NeoMagic chipset has been the bane of my existence for months before there was finally a driver able to make sense of it, I think it happened sometime during the kernel 2.0 timeframe. It didn't help that IBM being who they are used slightly different i/o ports than other vendors of the same chip, making the TP a corner case. The things we had to go through !

I've actually found that using a degausser/bulk eraser (the plug in kind that used to be sold by Radio Shack as a tape eraser) actually can bring those cheap marginal disks back into service, at least temporarily. A couple passes over the degausser and an unconditional format has made many of those bottom-barrel disks usable for me through the years. I wouldn't trust them with any important data (honestly, don't trust any floppy for long-term storage anymore) but for use cases like this it can definitely help. I suspect that the issue is that some of these disks have some "magnetic residue" on them for whatever reason, that the drive's relatively low power head can't overcome. A degausser actually truly cleans off all magnetic flux from the disk, making it usable. Of course later disks were built to a cost and were already never going to be that reliable, but I hope this can help anyone out there playing around with retro computing (assuming you can still even find a degausser). (Obligatory warning: be very careful when using a degausser, especially around retro media. It might resurrect a weak floppy, but it'll also happily erase any other magnetic media nearby. Floppies, cassettes, video tapes, hard disks and so on will all succumb to it. It'll even wreak havoc on CRT TVs and monitors. They're typically pretty well shielded and the field won't extend *too* far, but definitely take a couple steps away from any other magnetic media you care about when using your degausser.)

The hard disk size limit, was another issue I noticed that I NEVER experienced before not even in the early 2000s/late 90s! But upon trying to install SuSE Linux 5 or earlier, I did run into that issue. Also Mandrake 6.0 and OpenLinux 1.3, which only supported 8.4GB HDD max. I even had to buy some compatible IDE to CF card readers to use CF cards since 8GB HDDs are outlandishly priced on Ebay right now due to the whole Retro Computer Gaming thing. The only thing is the installers for SUSE 5 and earlier did NOT have disk partition utilities. I had to use other OS disks for that first, before installing.. Crazy stuff!

Great show commandar

2:53 Very old headache and others to Patrick Volkering, in forking SLS and create Slackware.

Softlanding is for wimps! Install Yggdrasil! :-D Seriously, you have more patience than I ever would have. I have an old Compaq laptop from the late '90s, but I stick to Windows 98 and use it for playing old DOS games.

Kudos to doing this with real floppy disks and not that ebay floppy drive emulator.

Ahh...memories. I did a lot of these installs in 1992-1995.

Wait... In july last year you had 250 subscribers? You went from 250 to 22k in 1.5 years? Holy... Dude!

Slackware still comes with XLander. God I love this distro.

CDROMs were such a godsend back then.

A very long time ago I installed an old slackware system using slattach and a serial port. So I basically made a serial TCP/IP link to a host server and copied over all the installation files using FTP. It took forever, but maybe and ancient tool like slattach would work for SLS Linux.

I have a suggestion for the 512 subscribers milestone: what about installing same Minix release used by Linus in 1991 in your Thinkpad then build the kernel 0.01 using same tools he used at that time?

This is amazing

liked and subscribed

"Circus Logic" LOL

13:52 I think you mean “Cirrus Logic”.

Back in the day we've installed Linux with just one floppy. Since I had all disk images on a borrowed machine, so always creating the next disk on that machine for the one I want to install. Or something like this, I almost forgot that "adventure" for now (though it was Slackware not SLS).

I remember installing SLS with kernel .97 or .98 on my 386 with 4MB of ram and I think a 40MB HD at the time.

Slackware, which was quite similar to SLS in *MANY* ways including installation, had funny boot+root disks. If memory serves (often it does not) you would tweak a bit in a compiled kernel -- with a utility that I think was in the kernel source tree -- that told the kernel that the ram disk followed immediately after the kernel on the boot+root combo disk. Then you would use dd to write the tweaked kernel to the start of the boot+root combo disk. Once that finished, you would take an archive, maybe an image of a root file system -- frequently Minix -- and write it to the boot+root combo disk starting at the next byte. The kernel would boot, see the bit / flag that the root file system started after the kernel finished and read it into memory. This was a ... PITA ... that only applied to boot+root disks. Separate boot and root disks were a little bit easier to work with. You wrote the kernel to one floppy and a normal file system -- typically Minix -- to the root disk. But boot+root combo disks were ... tricky. If you want to know more about this, check out the documentation that came with the kernel. I remember seeing this in 1.x and maybe early 2.x. I think this was completely abandoned by the time 2.6 came around as other boot loaders; LILO, were by far the normal mode of operation.

one hack that i would use back when i was running Slackware 3.0 on a 486, was to avoid putting any hard drive entries in the BIOS and let linux handle it. then i would configure the system to boot from floppy only, write a custom kernel to a floppy, and boot the system that way.

"My First BIOS" - lol

10:23 Sounds like: Touhou boss theme, without ZUNpets... xD

Ahh! FVWM. The best WM ever made. It´s the default in OpenBSD 2021 and that says a lot. And basically everything is based on it I think.

I "upgraded" from Coherent UNIX (~6 floppies) to to the very first version of SLS Linux (something between 10 and 20 floppies) mailed to me from somewhere in British Columbia. Linux kernel version was 0.98 or 0.99, I don't remember any longer. A long time ago...

floppies...Floppies..FLOPPIES!! I had similar recent issues with said floppies when trying to install old versions of Linux myself. At first I thought my UBS Floppy drive was bad. Nope, just as you stated here, once good floppies just up and fail, and NEW disks where failing! In the end it was some older OS disks and driver disks that I was able to reuse but I only had to make one or 3 disks for systems with no CDROM boot support. Ahh fun times no?

Having done system backups and Linux installations in the 90s, big packs of floppies are never trustworthy. Once managed to buy a 100 pack, at a store where I'd had to explain what a floppy was to the sales person, and 80 of them had bad sectors. The unreliability of disks, even when read-checked after writing, led to tools like PAR2 and ddrescue. Under Linux, we have a low level format tool called superformat in the package fdutils, and we can check for bad blocks with badblocks (-c for mke2fs or e2fsck); mbadblocks from mtools does so for FAT floppies. As a historical curiosity, the first release of the Linux kernel basically only worked with Linus' floppy drive. Side note, newer media aren't necessarily much more reliable at a media level. They do have more recovery logic integrated into the drives, such as forward error correction (sectors are larger than the data they store, for instance 2448 vs 2048 for CD-ROM) and sector remapping (including having spare sectors that aren't advertised). SSDs even require wear leveling. Linux has such layers too, in particular in the MTD system used for raw flash. We used to have raw access to hard disks, which was why an RLL controller could provide more capacity with the same disk than an MFM controller (which floppies use). All that is moved into the drive with IDE, SCSI etc.

Use one of the many shims to do the geometry translation for you. It defeats both the 504 meg limit and the 8gb limit I use ONTRAK Dynamic Disk Overlay to run a 160 gig IDE drive on my 380XD

SpinRite might have saved those floppy disks!

NCommander kinda resembles bolsheviks - set up a problems by itself so those can be heroically overcome. Like - instead of just taking another computer or smaller hard disk he rewrites ATA module :) Other videos on this channel is kinda similar - always choose the hardest possible path :)

If you want some real fun take a look at calculating X modelines for your card/monitor. I spent way too much time seeing just how far I could push my CRT when I first installed SLS. It might be a way to get your LCD looking a bit better as well. (Edit: I see you gave it a go in Part 1. Take a look at the monitor section of your xconfig if you fancy heading down a very deep rabbit hole.) Thanks for the blast from the past! But what happened to the old SLS "Darkstar" prompt?

That's how I remember my experience with floppy disks. Expensive, slow, not much space on it, often dead on arrival (new from the box) and could break from just looking at them the wrong way. I always wonder how is that even possible that any of them survived to this day.

I know this might be difficult for you being in America, but have you ever considered videos about the BBC Micro or the Acorn Archimedes?

Would running disk verification after writing have caught the delaminating disks, if that’s what it was? Or do you think the rot set in after that point? These cheap ‘00s disks are so flaky.

Very cool, I would call you a true hacker.

Thinking of doing this, would you recommend it as a daily driver?

14:06 and made a new distro... in 1993: Slackware, in 2023: Ehhhhhh?

How would Linux change if it was created in 2020?

Why is your thinkpad not using the whole screen while in bios or dos? I saw this on an old HP laptop running windows XP as well, but never knew the reason BTW: how is the (so good to the touch when new) and so sticky when its old coding holding?

What is this window manager? Fvwm2 or mwm?

You know I just realize this you pronounce Dos and QUEM you extremely funny.

9:30 formatting a floppy from DOS with just "format a:" does just check the floppy, not create a low level format. You should use "format a: /u" instead. But besides this short (negative) comment: please, keep going ;-).

Late 90s, was at a friend's doing school work, and then I realized when he saved the document, it was stored in a 3.5 floppy. I was horrified, and asked him why he was using that instead of the hard drive "we do it like this at the computer academy" loool, my eyes rolled so bad. The worse part is that, I explained that these were unreliable and when we tried copying it to the HD... It failed! Well, he learned that lesson, not from that "academy" (it was a ripoff)

wait is that just an awesome remix of the final fantasy vii battle theme

Why didn't you just use one of those multi floppy sd card readers? They simulate multiple floppies and I think they have a next button on them

Circus logic? Never heard of that company before. 🤣

Buy **USED** disks in bulk. Spend a couple hours checking them and for like 30 bucks you will be left with 50 or so functional floppy disks

Ah yes, time to rush 🅱️ on bad sectors.

Now install Debian 0.9 and upgrade it version by version up to Buster

Lilo

Sh!t... And my friend complained that time that it took 10 minutes to install Ubuntu on his machine, geez.🤣

maybe i'm missing the point but.. gotek?

He asked for 500 subscriber than he got 5.5K subscribers .

This video was uploaded on my 11th birthday, ON MY 11TH BIRTHDAY!

This is nothing. Try installing AIX on an ibm mini-mainframe from disk. 100 megabytes back in 1993 on crappy slow hard drives. Mission critical and had one night to do it.

i hate this style of floppys...... is exactly the type one that make a grind noise in the drive and die.

By the way, DOS is pronounced “doss”, not “dawz”.

Old hardware, constant problems, and obscure operating systems... Reminds me of another certain KZfaqr...