So, this weekend I'm playing with Fiwix.
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@nina_kali_nina I find all of your posts fascinating, though I don't understand any of it (like a language I have no idea about) But I love seeing people who are good at fixing things and are great at it (like The Repair Shop on BBC) and you really enjoy the challenge! I feel like a boring dinosaur in a tech world
@Aspiedan Thanks, I really appreciate the feedback! If you have any questions, feel free to leave comments with "Explaint to me Like I'm Five" (ELI5) and I'll do my best to explain
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@Aspiedan Thanks, I really appreciate the feedback! If you have any questions, feel free to leave comments with "Explaint to me Like I'm Five" (ELI5) and I'll do my best to explain
@nina_kali_nina I think you would spend more tine explaining than actually working on stuff
Its nice to have people doing things they enjoy in my feed. Reminds me people are all so different, and thats what makes life beautiful. Art would be boring if artists only used 1 colour or texture (ignoring some modern art here that doesn't fit my analogy)
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Thanks to help from the Fiwix devs, I have DosBox fully working (no sound, CD or network support yet). I got a bit upset that there's no windowing interface for the OS (yet), so I ported Bellcore MGR to Fiwix. It's half-baked, but it works.
If you never heard about MGR, it's an X competitor and a terminal multiplexer with graphics.
Here's my post about it: https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/mgr/@nina_kali_nina I am mildly curious to know if my nvi fork will work on fiwix. https://git.sr.ht/~drj/nvi2
I might give it a go on Tuesday (if you're not tempted by then).
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Thanks to help from the Fiwix devs, I have DosBox fully working (no sound, CD or network support yet). I got a bit upset that there's no windowing interface for the OS (yet), so I ported Bellcore MGR to Fiwix. It's half-baked, but it works.
If you never heard about MGR, it's an X competitor and a terminal multiplexer with graphics.
Here's my post about it: https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/mgr/@nina_kali_nina you utter madwoman.
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Thanks to help from the Fiwix devs, I have DosBox fully working (no sound, CD or network support yet). I got a bit upset that there's no windowing interface for the OS (yet), so I ported Bellcore MGR to Fiwix. It's half-baked, but it works.
If you never heard about MGR, it's an X competitor and a terminal multiplexer with graphics.
Here's my post about it: https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/mgr/MGR is *beautiful*. Back in 1996 on a machine with..not very much RAM…MGR was pleasantly usable.
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Thanks to help from the Fiwix devs, I have DosBox fully working (no sound, CD or network support yet). I got a bit upset that there's no windowing interface for the OS (yet), so I ported Bellcore MGR to Fiwix. It's half-baked, but it works.
If you never heard about MGR, it's an X competitor and a terminal multiplexer with graphics.
Here's my post about it: https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/mgr/@nina_kali_nina maybe it would also be possible to get twin going for something with windowing: https://github.com/cosmos72/twin
MGR seems a lot fancier though
How is the hardware support of Fiwix? I don't know if DOSBox can do any device pass-through, DOSEMU(2) does have some support for that so you could possibly use hardware that lacks Fiwix drivers but does have DOS drivers.
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@nina_kali_nina I am mildly curious to know if my nvi fork will work on fiwix. https://git.sr.ht/~drj/nvi2
I might give it a go on Tuesday (if you're not tempted by then).
@drj enjoy~ I'll plan to bring more desktop stuff to Fiwix and send a few PRs to the OS as my priority for now
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MGR is *beautiful*. Back in 1996 on a machine with..not very much RAM…MGR was pleasantly usable.
@rk I think here on Fiwix it should be useable on a 486 with 8 megs; gotta try it out
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@nina_kali_nina maybe it would also be possible to get twin going for something with windowing: https://github.com/cosmos72/twin
MGR seems a lot fancier though
How is the hardware support of Fiwix? I don't know if DOSBox can do any device pass-through, DOSEMU(2) does have some support for that so you could possibly use hardware that lacks Fiwix drivers but does have DOS drivers.
@jschwart I think twin should work with minimal changes. Thanks for sharing the link, I'll try it out if I have time
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@rk I think here on Fiwix it should be useable on a 486 with 8 megs; gotta try it out
The machine I was thinking of had...either 2MB or 4MB. Good times.
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So, this weekend I'm playing with Fiwix. Fiwix (https://fiwix.org/) is a small hobbyist operating system for i386 that aims to be Linux 2.0 compatible while being small enough that a single human could understand it as a whole (it's ~30k SLOC, self-hosted, and can be built with tcc).
A couple of years ago Fiwix was used in a fun project of "let's bootstrap a Linux system with only tiny tools that can be understood by a single person": https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst
My refreshed interest in it comes from multiple sources: first, there is now a TCP/IP stack (still WIP). Second, GNU/Linux is *gestures ambiguously* in a strange state, so it is interesting to see how far one could get with a completely non-BSD non-standard tiny, toy-like operating system.
The installation is quite straightforward. "Please keep in mind this kernel is not yet suited for production. Use at your own risk!" is, in itself, a proof of reliability.
This is a beginning of a slow-going🧵
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@Etch9 well, it is, to a large extent, controlled by corporations that do not have our best interests in mind.
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@nina_kali_nina Cool. I'm releasing in near future aoUT dos extender with toolchain support for modern gcc and clang. The name comes from the fact that the PM payload is relocatable a.out
As for Dosbox, this is AFAIK the best incarnation of it ATM: https://www.dosbox-staging.org/@jarkko @nina_kali_nina Hard agree on DOSBox Staging. Much improved over the "vanilla" version.
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@jarkko @nina_kali_nina Hard agree on DOSBox Staging. Much improved over the "vanilla" version.
@thelastpsion @jarkko it is going to be much more difficult to port, though. It won't be a two line patch for sure...
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@thelastpsion @jarkko it is going to be much more difficult to port, though. It won't be a two line patch for sure...
@nina_kali_nina @jarkko Ah, yeah, that's a good point. And it'd probably be just as painful to cherry-pick patches, too.
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@Etch9 well, it is, to a large extent, controlled by corporations that do not have our best interests in mind.
@nina_kali_nina
i see! well thats true but i do find myself more in the middle on these kinds of matters, i dont like the linux fundation at all and i hate the oss foundation for their stance on ai weights but i do trust torvalds and the companies are a big reason the linux kernel is this perfomant and the defacto standard -
@nina_kali_nina
i see! well thats true but i do find myself more in the middle on these kinds of matters, i dont like the linux fundation at all and i hate the oss foundation for their stance on ai weights but i do trust torvalds and the companies are a big reason the linux kernel is this perfomant and the defacto standard@Etch9 I think even if you're moderate on such issues, you could see benefit in having fun
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The first fun challenge is exchanging files with Fiwix. You see, Fiwix only supports ext2 (3?), Minix, and ISO9600 (CD drives).
My daily driver is (still) MacOS, so I cannot just mount the ext2 partition to send files over. I can create an ISO image with the files, but this is a one-way trip. Would be nice to add the support for FAT16/32 disks to Fiwix, right?
Well! First, I simply created a new CD image with mtools-4.0.49.tar.gz. Fiwix recognised the CD, and I was able to unpack mtools archive. Then I ran `configure`, and then edited a few things here and there (mostly mis-configurations in the config file). Then I ran `make`, and few minutes later I got myself a working set of tools to access FAT-formatted disks. Now I can copy files between Fiwix and MacOS, neat.
🧵 cont
@nina_kali_nina
Hmm, I wonder if Fiwix has 9P support. It would make working in a VM easier (QEMU supports 9P for shared folders) -
@Etch9 I think even if you're moderate on such issues, you could see benefit in having fun
@nina_kali_nina
yis thats true as well -
Thanks to help from the Fiwix devs, I have DosBox fully working (no sound, CD or network support yet). I got a bit upset that there's no windowing interface for the OS (yet), so I ported Bellcore MGR to Fiwix. It's half-baked, but it works.
If you never heard about MGR, it's an X competitor and a terminal multiplexer with graphics.
Here's my post about it: https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/mgr/@nina_kali_nina "Why does that look like Plan 9?"
*reads*
> made by the Bell Communications Research, and it looked like Plan 9's older sister.
You had my curiousity, now you have my interest :3
