2025-12-26 08:00:00
Last Linkdump of 2025! And maybe last post of this year too, I don't know yet. I just checked, and this is the 108th blog post I'm writing this year. I'm too lazy to do it now, but if I stitched them all together I would get at least a small book out of it. Which means I've written a book this year! Granted, a very confusing and disjointed book, but still. I always wondered how people write books, because it takes so long to write anything and a book is a lot of text. Well, this is how. Write consistently over a long period of time. In fact, this is how you do anything worthwhile, isn't it? Do it consistently over a long period of time. Wait, did I just learn a life lesson here?
Anyway, I think this is a good opportunity to say a big thank you to you all for reading my ramblings week after week, and for getting in touch with me via e-mail or Mastodon. Writing this blog has become one of my favourite hobbies, and this is in no small part thanks to the community of fellow bloggers, readers and online friends that has developed around it. Thinking about it, this year I received messages from people in both North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia/New Zealand, which is absolutely mind-blowing!
I hope you're all having a great holiday season wherever you are in the world, and I'm looking forward to continuing this in 2026.
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2025-12-22 08:00:00
A few weeks ago a copy of Unix V4 which was thought to be lost was discovered on a storage tape at the University of Utah. It was then sent to the Home Computer Museum in California, and well, they managed to read it out and put its contents on the Internet Archive.
I haven't seen any news articles about this yet, but fellow Mastodonian Flexion gave it a try and posted about it, which is how I came across this. So I had to try it, too.
Thankfully someone put up a tutorial with the necessary files here. All that's needed is a pdp11 emulator. I'm using the one from the Open SIMH project which I could easily download on Arch Linux from the repos, it's just called simh.
And from there it was just a matter of following the tutorial. I had to get four files:
I put them all in the same folder and started the pdp11 emulator with the ini script:
$ simh-pdp11 install.ini
Then I followed the tutorial by typing out the following commands:
=mcopy
'p' for rp; 'k' for rk
k
disk offset
0
tape offset
75
count
4000
=uboot
k
unix
mem = 64530
login: root
# sync
# sync
# sync
# ^E ; end emulation
After Ctrl+E the emulator can be quit with Ctrl+C and then restarted with the boot script:
$ simh-pdp11 boot.ini
After typing k and unix I got the login prompt and could log in as root:
k
unix
mem = 64530
login: root
#
And there we go, Unix V4 from 1974!
So what can we do with that?
Honestly, I have no idea. Not too much probably, but it's really cool to explore and just to see it running. This system is almost a decade older than I am, and it feels kind of alien and still familiar at the same time. It was made at a time when computers were the size of refrigerators and often didn't even have monitors yet but instead printed their output on a piece of paper. And yet It's the ancestor to all modern day Unix systems (including MacOS) and also at least the spiritual ancestor to Linux, and that's exacty what it feels like using it. Like an early version of these systems. Relatively primitive and missing a lot of features that make using the modern systems easy, but definitely familiar.
It's fascinating to see how much it has changed in the last 50 years, but also how much has stayed the same. It's a bit like driving in a car from the 60s or 70s. They are incredibly barebones by today's standards, but still unmistakably just an earlier version of what we have today and if you know how to drive a modern car, you will also be able to drive one from 1974, just like you are able to navigate around a Unix system from 1974 if you're familiar with it's modern descendants.
2025-12-19 08:00:00
In 1981, a new TV station dedicated to playing music videos appeared in the US. It famously started its programme by playing The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star. In 1987, MTV Europe began its broadcast with an equally fitting video: the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing, which opens with the line "I want my MTV", sung by Sting. I was too young to have been around for this, but I remember watching MTV and its German counterpart VIVA a lot when they were at their peak during my teenage years in the 90s.
I also remember them playing less and less music and more and more "reality TV" shows in the 2000s, which caused me (and everybody else) to lose interest in watching them. Today, VIVA has been dead for years, and now MTV at least over here will stop playing music altogether, which means its spirit is also gone. Nothing lasts forever I guess, and since YouTube appeared on the scene this development was probably inevitable, but it's still kind of sad to see. Today of course you can see any music video you like at any time online, but it's just not the same, is it? Rest In Peace, MTV!
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2025-12-14 08:00:00
I'm currently trying to get a little deeper into Linux and understand more what actually makes the OS tick under the hood. I've been using Linux for almost 20 years at this point, but how the Kernel works and how everything is put together so that a functioning operating system comes out of it is still somewhat of a mystery to me.
There is a project called "Linux From Scratch", which is essentially a tutorial that does a great job describing the process of compiling a working Linux system, well, from scratch. I'm currently working through it, but it's pretty extensive and it takes a while to get through if you're really trying to understand what you're doing and aren't just blindly copying commands.
Thanks to a recent YouTube video by Action Retro I found the perfect project to get into this sort of thing: Floppinux, a tutorial to create a working Linux distro of sorts that can boot from a single floppy disk and can run on hardware as low spec as a 33 MHz 486 CPU.
The tutorial does a great job guiding you through all the steps necessary to build a bootable Linux installation from scratch that is so tiny that it fits on a 1.44MB floppy disk.
You start by downloading the kernel sources and configuring the kernel with a bare minimum config that is just enough to make the system work, but as a result it's also super lightweight with the compiled kernel only taking up around 830KB of space.
Booting just the kernel is kind of useless though, so some utilities are needed to turn this into a working system (utilities like ls, rm, echo, vi, cat and so on). For this, Busybox is used which is a collection of lightweight utilities compiled into a single binary. Busybox is primarily meant to be used in embedded devices where there's a limited amount of storage and memory available and as such is perfect for this project. You also need a cross compiler to build Busybox for the target architecture (32 bit 486) on your modern 64 bit system.
After compiling the kernel and the Busybox utilities you create a floppy disk image, install a filesystem and bootloader (syslinux, another very lightweight tool) inside this image, copy the kernel and the Busybox utilities into the image, configure a few things and then you're done. You just created a minimal Linux system that fits on a single floppy disk.
This image can then be tested inside an emulator like qemu or 86Box, or written to a floppy disk and be booted on real hardware. And so that's what I did. I happen to have a USB floppy drive lying around that I bought on Ebay years ago, along with a few floppy disks, and so I dumped the image to a floppy disk, connected it to my Eee PC, set it to boot from the floppy drive, and... nothing.
The image booted fine in qemu and 86Box, but it didn't get past the syslinux boot prompt on real hardware. I tried it on a different PC,wrote the floppy again, but the same thing happened every time. Maybe booting from a USB floppy drive doesn't work the same as booting from an internally connected floppy drive? I don't have a PC with an internal floppy drive anymore, so I thought I was out of luck here, until I decided to try a different floppy disk, and then it worked! Turns out 30 year old floppy disks can go bad. Who could have known.
And there is, a netbook booted from a floppy disk and running a Linux distro I created myself (following a tutorial of course). I have to say, that feels pretty satisfying! There's still an error mounting the floppy disk itself, probably because it's connected via USB and doesn't show up under /dev/fd0 as expected. I'd probably have to compile the kernel with USB or SATA support enabled, but then I think I would run out of space pretty quickly, so I didn't bother.
Is it useful? Probably not... you'd need a bit more software to make this into a system that can actually do anything, at least drivers for some external storage and maybe network access, but there's only so much space on a single floppy disk. Booting from floppy is also insanely slow. I had forgotten how slow floppy disks are, but let me remind you: they're very slow! Booting a system that's just a bit over a megabyte in size takes almost a minute. When it's booted however it's perfectly responsive because it runs from ram and never needs to access the floppy again.
So even if the usefulness is pretty limited, at least if you stick to the utilities that are mentioned in the tutorial, it's still a great learning exercise and a great demonstration of how much (or how little) is really needed to get a functioning Linux system. And of course it's a good starting point if you want to flesh it out and install some actually useful software in there. You might be better off booting from a USB drive then, obviously. If you're looking to understand Linux a bit better, I highly recommend having a look at Floppinux.
I have to mention though that I came across a few errors in the tutorial, which causes the system to be mostly functional, but a few things aren't working right that have to do with mounting the proc and sys filesystems of the Kernel. I spent a bit of time figuring out why it wasn't working and wrote a bug report on the project's Github page. I'm also going to reproduce what I wrote here. Hopefully this will be included in the tutorial in the future.
So if you want to follow the tutorial and build the system yourself, make the following changes:
git clone --depth=1 --branch v6.14.y https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git
git clone --depth=1 --branch v6.14.11 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git
sed -i "s|.*CONFIG_CROSS_COMPILER_PREFIX.*|CONFIG_CROSS_COMPILER_PREFIX="\"${BASE}"i486-linux-musl-cross/bin/i486-linux-musl-\"|" .config
sed -i "s|.*CONFIG_CROSS_COMPILER_PREFIX.*|CONFIG_CROSS_COMPILER_PREFIX="\"${BASE}"/i486-linux-musl-cross/bin/i486-linux-musl-\"|" .config
sed -i "s|.*CONFIG_SYSROOT.*|CONFIG_SYSROOT=\""${BASE}"i486-linux-musl-cross\"|" .config
sed -i "s|.*CONFIG_SYSROOT.*|CONFIG_SYSROOT=\""${BASE}"/i486-linux-musl-cross\"|" .config
I also added /proc file system support in the kernel menuconfig under File systems -> Pseudo file systems. Not sure if this is really necessary though.
2025-12-12 08:00:00
Sometimes, the intros to these linkdumps almost write themselves; there is something in the links that gives me an idea or just a random thought that comes into my head and that I feel is worth writing down. Other times, nothing comes to my mind, no matter how hard I try. Today is one of those times. And you know what? Rather than waste more time trying to come up with something witty, I think it's okay if we go straight to the links today.
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2025-12-05 08:00:00
Have you ever heard of Whamageddon? I hadn't, until the hashtag recently showed up in my Mastodon feed. According to the wiki site, it's a tongue-in-cheek survival game in which the player must avoid hearing Wham!'s Last Christmas from December 1st all the way through Christmas Eve. Unbeknownst to me, I've been playing this game for years, and not just with Last Christmas but also with Mariah Carey's All I want for Christmas is you (though I have to admit that I try to avoid hearing anything by Mariah Carey pretty much all year round). When I first heard these songs as a child they were nice, but after hearing them dozens, if not hundreds of times over the decades, they've kind of turned into the equivalent of the sound of fingernails scraping across a chalkboard for me. Which I also try to avoid having to listen to. Anyway, I'm happy that so far this year I haven't been Wham'd or Mariah'd yet, and I hope it stays this way. Wish me luck!
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