Mastodawn

Nina Kalinina 1d 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🧵

Nina Kalinina 1d 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

Nina Kalinina 1d 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

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

Fiwix understandably misses a few important tools here and there. Having an emulator capable of running different systems would be nice, right?

Qemu is generally quite portable, but DosBox is smaller, and is good enough for running a large chunk of software I might want to run on my system.

FiwixOS has an SDL1.2 port, so compiling DosBox for it was not difficult at all (a couple of patches are still required). I've thrashed around the video card settings a little bit, until I got it mostly working. I need to figure out why the keyboard is buggy, but I can start Windows under Fiwix, and play a game of solitaire.

So, uh, viva FOSS? Great stuff, hobbyists! It is super duper awesome that I can just get a random toy-like OS, and simply compile the stuff I use regularly for it, and it would work. Extra kudos when the toy OS can boot with as little as 8 megs of RAM. Not gigs, megs.

🧵cont?

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 Kalinina 11h ago

I took a moment to package the binaries for MGR - https://github.com/mikaku/FiwixOS/issues/2

The port is dirty/incomplete because there's probably two people out there who would want to try it out, and both of us are better off starting it from scratch

Nina Kalinina 2h ago

Adding new software to Fiwix isn't all that difficult. Here's a PR I made for mtools, a userland FAT12/16/32 tooling: https://github.com/mikaku/FiwixOS/pull/4

The DOSBox 0.74 is merged already, so it should be there with the next release in November :) If you want staging or dosbox-x, you're free to take a stab at it~

yes it is still a 🧵

add 'mtools-4.0.49' by ninakali · Pull Request #4 · mikaku/FiwixOS

A handy tool for accessing FAT12/16/32 disks without mounting them. The configure patch is a bit ugly. For some reason llseek in Fiwix expects more arguments. GETTIMEOFDAY and TZSET are commented o...

GitHub

Nina Kalinina 2h ago

FiwixOS only has SDL1.2, and I wasn't sure whether new Grafx2 supports it, so I chose a release from definitely-pre-SDL2 and, well, simply compiled it. I had to tweak the makefile because some of the required libraries were not where the make expected them to be. It is great to have truly portable software. Great job, @pulkomandy and the Grafx2 team :)

Nina Kalinina 7m ago

So, did I mention that the developer of FiwixOS is currently working on bringing the networking to the OS? I am really looking forward to it, so in the meantime I'm doing what I can to help out.

Years ago I touched Netsurf browser (https://www.netsurf-browser.org/) and tangentially helped with its ports to obscure platforms. It was a pleasure to discover that it is still as snippy, powerful and portable as it was back then.

Yep, you're reading it right, I compiled a web browser to FiwixOS. Funny how Netsurf got to Fiwix before links2 did.

The networking part is still not working, but it should be easy to add when a port of libcurl will be completed.

(it is a part of a 🧵 about Fiwix OS, tiny UNIX-like OS made mostly by a single developer and so can be understood by a single person, too)

Nina Kalinina 4m ago

Speaking of Netsurf, it really is an under-appreciated browser. To me it feels kind of like Lagrange browser for Gemini, but for decent Web 1.0+ HTML with HTML5, CSS and SVG. This is a great browser for small web.

PulkoMandy 2h ago

@nina_kali_nina GrafX2 still supports SDL1.2 in the latest versions. You can configure that with a variable in the Makefile Let me know if there are any other problems with porting it!

Nina Kalinina 2h ago

@pulkomandy neat~ I'll try the latest version tomorrow, then! Thanks!

PulkoMandy 2h ago

@nina_kali_nina I plan to continue supporting it until SDL2 (or 3?) gets ported to all the platforms that have SDL1.2 (probably forever, because some of these platforms are dead)

Nina Kalinina 2h ago

@pulkomandy :D oh no

@nina_kali_nina @pulkomandy i was fairly sure grafx2 can compile with either sdl1.2 or sdl2

@nina_kali_nina @pulkomandy from doc/COMPILING.txt in current sources:
"By default GrafX2 is built for SDL 1.2.x. use API=x11 API=sdl2 or API=win32 to change that."

(🖬🖫). ₍^. .^₎⟆1h ago

@nina_kali_nina @pulkomandy

still my favorite drawing program =^_^=

David JONES 11h ago

@nina_kali_nina I would _want_ to try it out. Intrigued by MGR ever since a friend demo'd it to me on his Atari ST (1040, more powerful than mine) around 1989. Didn't know it was MGR until at least decade later.

Nina Kalinina 11h ago

@drj an easier to use distribution is Debian 0.93+MGR on 86Box with Mouse Systems driver. I've uploaded ready-to-use HDD image a while ago: https://archive.org/details/bellcore-mgr-debian0.93

It is superior in a way that I've compiled most of the clients there, including the ghostscript viewer

Bellcore MGR installed on Debian 0.93 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Debian 0.93 with Bellcore MGR installed as seen in https://ninakalinina.com/notes/mgr/The hard disk image works in Qemu and 86Box, but the MGR is configured to...

Internet Archive

@nina_kali_nina i love it.

Erik Play2Learn 4h ago

@nina_kali_nina Thanks for another deep dive into a new rabbit hole.

Jarkko Sakkinen 1d ago

@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/

DOSBox Staging

DOSBox Staging is a modern continuation of DOSBox with advanced features and current development practices.

Jarkko Sakkinen 1d ago

@nina_kali_nina The inspiration came from when I noticed that people I know who are doing demoscene productions for MS-DOS still use old compilers and really antique tools to generate MS-DOS binaries.

An associated project is to create mxmplay20 of https://www.cubic.org/source/mxmplay-1.6.zip, which is portable implementation of the original and buildable also for Linux (with Pipewire instead of GUS playback routine).

There is a new GUS fork of ao486 that has gained my interested so I guess that it is the main target platform: https://github.com/xolod79/ao486_MiSTer/tree/GUS

Has been nice to hear the awesome sound of Gravis Ultrasound first time in 20 years :-)

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@jarkko Thanks for sharing! Well, tbh, old compilers produce predictable code :) But it is really neat to have something that isn't GCC 3.3 or OW for DOS.

Jarkko Sakkinen 1d ago

@nina_kali_nina I'll publish the links in this site once I release them: https://jarkkojs.github.io/

Thus, the 486 esque mode 13h fixed point graphics goodness with VGA's rectangular pixels :-)

3AB05486C7752FE1

Jarkko Sakkinen 23h ago

@nina_kali_nina I've actually done aoUT type of stuff also professionally back in 2012 when I implemented this in collaboration with Peter Anvin:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/x86/realmode

Basically just applied learnings from this :-)

realmode « x86 « arch - kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git - Linux kernel source tree

Nina Kalinina 23h ago

@jarkko neat :) booting up from real mode is a special, fun exercise in a certain meaning of the word

The Last Psion | Alex 1d ago

@jarkko @nina_kali_nina Hard agree on DOSBox Staging. Much improved over the "vanilla" version.

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@thelastpsion @jarkko it is going to be much more difficult to port, though. It won't be a two line patch for sure...

The Last Psion | Alex 1d ago

@nina_kali_nina @jarkko Ah, yeah, that's a good point. And it'd probably be just as painful to cherry-pick patches, too.

@nina_kali_nina Do I read your article to see that the software in the screenshot is from 1984? If so, fascinating to see it even includes the “root weave” X Window System stipple (I did some detective work on this visual design and thought it arrived somewhat later in the 1980s).

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@matt well, the MGR was created in the early 80s, but this particular distribution is based on a version from Usenet from 1989. It is possible that it was back-ported from X by then

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)22h ago

@nina_kali_nina @matt
Very cool!

I was useneting and windowing in 1989, I don't know why I didn't port and play with this back then.

Well, I was probably dealing with a relationship complication or breakup at the time; c'est la vie.

Mind Shambles 1d ago

@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

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@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 :)

Mind Shambles 1d ago

@nina_kali_nina I think you would spend more tine explaining than actually working on stuff

blob_cat_innocent

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)

blob_cat_coffee

David JONES 1d ago

@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).

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@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

DefaultKevin 1d ago

@nina_kali_nina you utter madwoman. :)

rk: it’s hyphen-minus actually 1d ago

@nina_kali_nina

MGR is *beautiful*. Back in 1996 on a machine with..not very much RAM…MGR was pleasantly usable.

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@rk I think here on Fiwix it should be useable on a 486 with 8 megs; gotta try it out

rk: it’s hyphen-minus actually 1d ago

@nina_kali_nina

The machine I was thinking of had...either 2MB or 4MB. Good times.

Julius Schwartzenberg - Юліус 1d ago

@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.

GitHub - cosmos72/twin: Text mode window environment. A terminal emulator and multiplexer with mouse support, overlapped windows and networked clients. Text-mode equivalent of X11 server + VNC server

Text mode window environment. A terminal emulator and multiplexer with mouse support, overlapped windows and networked clients. Text-mode equivalent of X11 server + VNC server - cosmos72/twin

GitHub

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@jschwart I think twin should work with minimal changes. Thanks for sharing the link, I'll try it out if I have time

@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

HP van Braam 11m ago

@nina_kali_nina Absolutely deranged

5/5 stars.

Nina Kalinina 6m ago

@hp mwehehe :3 you've seen nothing yet