heyho all, I will keep this brief. I want to roll my own linux distro to fit on a single floppy. This a little project that I really want to get into. I have little to nil experience but want to learn. What I need from you pros is to tell me what I need to learn to make me capable of doing this and any related material/suggestions you have. Any help and a place to start will be much appreciated. I may also need a helping hand but that comes later. Thanks in advance.

I found this link searching on Google (kind of relavant)

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Pocket-Linux...tml/index.html

But if you have nil experience its probably better to first try to create a distro on a normal Hard disk before trying to attempt to try and fit it on a 1.44 floppy.

Thank You! I searched google but my mind turned to mush with all the rubbish. This is great stuff thanks. Not too big a step at all, I think I will probably have it spanning multiple disks and then learn how to strip it. Thanks again, anything more you or anyone has to offer will be much appreciated.

I don't mean to be negative, but why would you do this? I mean, what good will it do? The Floppy is really antiquated at this point and it probably won't be long before they go away entirely. Personally, I couldn't even tell you the last time I used a Floppy. Between cheap jumpdrives and fast CDRW drives, why waste time with Floppys? Floppys are slow, unreliable, and have next to no room. Plus, unless my memory fails, the newer kernels don't even support booting from floppy anymore---you need a boot manager like Lilo or Grub.

Learning how to roll your own distro is certainly admirable, but why not learn how to make live CD or standard distro---that way if you solve any problems or think of something creative, then it will help the OSS community. Or, how about making a live distro for a CDRW that burns your settings when you exit? That would be cool (actually, I think this is being worked on).

The point was to start off small and also learn how to be minimalistic at the same time. Although I do totally agree I have thought this through. If you disagree please say so, I would hate to waste my time. Could I still start off small and pick up the minimalistic skill a better way?

If you want to be minimalist, have a look at:

http://busybox.net/

and

http://www.uclibc.org/

I still use my floppy drive. I installed grub to it instead of the MBR, so to boot Gentoo I just put the floppy in, to boot into Windows, I take the floppy out.

I know, it is more manual work, but I like it, and it gives me a reason to use my floppy drive.

...any news on this???

ooh, didn't know there would be any interest in this. Just getting together all the basics. If you are really interested when I have what I want I could pop it on the web for you to get your mits on.

i'd love that if you could. i plan on running out a base floppy system for myself to build on.

Some of the links on this page might come in useful http://people.jyu.fi/~tuma/home/nuclinux.php?lang=en

Now-a-days I believe the trick is to attempt to fit a kernel on one floppy and some kind of utilities on a second, probably a busy box set or sub-set of some sort possibly using uclib.

ai, i was planning on maybe putting it on a CD, but i would build as much as i could on floppy, and then do the necasery stuff to put it onto a bootable (mini) CD (that way i would keep it as tiny as possible, ideally under 10mb.)

My end plan was to ahve a bootable miniCD that could then mount a usb drive, giving you storage space for documents etc. That way, you could carry round the entire OS and all your documents on a mini CD in your wallet and a usb key.