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I've renewed my enjoyment of writing bash scripts, it's super fun. 🙂

Adam Williamson :fedora:

@maxamillion
It's okay. There are support groups for people like you.

@adamw pfft. I don't need a support group. I can quit anytime I want. I just don't want to.... >.>

@maxamillion don't worry, if it gets *really* bad you can get a job as a dracut maintainer.

@adamw you know what the messed up part of that proposal is? that actually sounds fun to me 🙃

@adamw @maxamillion Too bad you weren't at SCaLE this year. I gave out over a dozen qbsh 3.5" floppies that were compiled and working for Fedora 39.

@vwbusguy @adamw @maxamillion You kept forgetting to give me one. But you did scare me with your spec file!

@Conan_Kudo @adamw @maxamillion If I end up being able to go to Flock this year, I'll try to bring some more floppies with me. I'm hoping QBLOS will be a thing by then, too.

@Conan_Kudo @adamw @maxamillion If you have any ideas of how to boot a Fedora kernel off of 3.5" floppies, I would love to hear them.

@vwbusguy @adamw @maxamillion I don't think you can make a kernel small enough anymore. ZIP Disks sure, but classic floppy disks? Probably not.

@Conan_Kudo @adamw @maxamillion Absolutely not with with the traditional FAT12 1.44m sectoring, but some were telling me it was possible to get much more out of them with alternative sectoring.

@Conan_Kudo @adamw @maxamillion NEC PC-98 apparently had a 9.3MB 3 ½“ floppy format.

I wonder how much of the fs size I would save simply by not compiling GPU support - especially amdgpu.

@Conan_Kudo @vwbusguy @adamw I wonder what sort of gymnastics TinyCore is doing to make theirs to small ... still not floppy small but it's REALLY small by today's standards

@maxamillion @Conan_Kudo @adamw I wonder if there's some way to do some aggressive bzip2 style compression as well that grub could grok.

@maxamillion @Conan_Kudo @adamw And then there's this 120M "Super Disk" in the Linux floppy man page.

@vwbusguy @maxamillion @Conan_Kudo @adamw ooh!

Even my ecce!GNU/Linux used two floppies, one for the kernel and initrd, the other was a choice of two, one normal 3½″ HD or one overformatted with slightly more utilities. It had a wider array of drivers and tools though, no busybox back then (or, well, it existed since shortly but I didn’t know about it, this was when my internet access happened at school).