Even the Linux 5.10.260 kernel with make tinyconfig (which lacks a lot of very important features such as support for PCI or hard drives or displaying text to a screen instead of a serial port) is already taking up nearly an entire floppy by itself... Not a good sign...

Perhaps the entire "make a modern Linux that can boot from floppy" idea is doomed and I should give up and use CDs

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@vaporeon_ i think it should be pawsible but you’d need some serious compurression

@vaporeon_ i’m pretty sure there is (was?) a distro that fit on a floppy but only with serious compurression. and maybe also a much older kernel

@aescling The name might've been something like muLinux? And yes, I remember that having a significantly older kernel...

@aescling I'll just give up for now and try to get it to work from a CD first, entire 700MB of space... Because the goal is to have a working Linux live system on that computer at all, when Debian 5 refuses to boot because of lack of some modern instructions and Gentoo just crashes... Floppy would've been easier because the CD drive is broken, but I can simply bring a working CD drive and connect that instead.

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