Nina Kalinina12h ago

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🧵

Show threadNina Kalinina12h ago

FiwixOS comes with quite a few ports, and will require close to 1GB on a disk. I suppose this is because the packages are not particularly optimised in size. The biggest packages beyond the base and GCC are Python3, Perl, ZX Spectrum emulator and Doom/Heretic.

Also, look at this Halt message, so cute!

The system is small, but functional. At the same time, there are quite a few sharp corners, unfinished and untested things.

The list of packages/ports is small, so I want to bring a few things in. Is it going to be easy? Let's find out!

🧵 cont

Show threadNina Kalinina12h ago

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

Show threadJérôme Petazzoni11h ago
@nina_kali_nina does that mean the TCP/IP stack isn't in a good enough state to transfer stuff over the network? (Either way, using mtools is a neat idea! My first thought would have been to cat some tar files on a block device like a savage 😂)
Show threadNina Kalinina
@jpetazzo on the TCP/IP stack: I had to use exactly the same technique to build a new kernel with the TCP/IP support. Afaik there's only PPP/SLIP available at the moment, so that would be a very authentic 1990s experience of exchanging patches between the networked computers.
3:06pmWeb
Show threadNina Kalinina11h ago
@jpetazzo on tar: I should've thought about that. XD it seems Fiwix uses non-weird tar, so it should have worked. The only danger is to accidentally overwrite your root partition by using wrong block device...
Show threadJérôme Petazzoni11h ago
@nina_kali_nina the docs say there is serial port support. Here's an opportunity to use xmodem and other protocols 😂 (last time I used that was about 30 years ago with HP calculators I think 🤔) - but it'll probably be slower than block device emulation. Keeping subscribed to your thread though, that looks fun! 🤓