water cooler :: My two-floppy distro

In January this year I got an old laptop with no usb nor cd. It was empty. Had a floppy drive though.

Of course I wanted Linux on it. And I didn't want to buy an adapter for the HD. So what's left? Figure a way to move files to it.
Without buying anything.

I succeeded.

Since none of the existing floppy distros have infrared support, I made my own. It has a recent 2.6 kernel, runs fully in ram, needs a 586 and 8mb ram. It can also be used as some kind of resque system, but it's whole purpose of life is moving files over IR.

It works with all laptops, but only in SIR speeds (115.2 kbps). It was my lappy's max speed, so no use for any better.
The main protocol is IrLan. PPP was too big to be included, but irComm is supported anyway (no apps to use it ).

"Resque"-type apps: cfdisk, mkswap, mke2fs
File-moving apps: irxfer (moves one file at a time over OpenObex; compatible with all mobile phones and pda's as well as Windoze native IR file mover (2000 or later)), bftpd (a ftp server, for main usage)
Apps for playing around: telnetd; I had never used a telnet server, so I of course wanted to use it and to see if IR had decent speeds for terminal use. It did. For security, the only networking supported is IR, and you will notice if someone is snooping on your heat waves, lol.
Also some basic apps from busybox, ls echo ash etc..
(irattach for using IR connections is of course in! duh)

Even if you don't have IR, you can use a normal null modem cable and it will look like an IR link with perfect sight.


I made this for myself, in January. It works for me, and it did what I wanted it to do (I have Linux on the beastie now!). So I won't be fixing bugs.

I'll just post this here in case anyone would have a need for this.

Boot floppy: http://rapidshare.com/files/60035834/boot.disk.html
Root floppy: http://rapidshare.com/files/60036402/root.disk.html


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For those who don't know how to install, use dd, or in windows, rawrite, or in DSL, the floppy tool (select "install image")