Single Floppy Unix Clones For Mac?

tangsoodo asks: "It's easy to find 1 floppy Linux distributions like Tomsrtbt or Trinux, but they seem to only run on PC's... are there any 1 or few floppy distributions of Linux or even a BSD that run on 68k or PPC Macs? Yes, I know new Macs don't have floppy drives, but there are tons of older Macs still being used in schools and libraries, and running off a floppy is probably the easiest way to experiment with the Unices without messing with the hard drive."

What about a bootable cd?

[rottcodd]

It seems that something like demolinux would be better to try out than tomsrtb. I believe I've also seen something about putting MkLinux on a zip disk. One thing to note, though-- early powermacs (the ones with nubus) need to use MkLinux.

Re:What macs?

[prog-guru]

FWIW, my 68030 came with a "disk tools" foppy, to use for setting up partitions and stuff. It is one floppy, but has a few programs and a simplified MAC OS on it.

And all of Mac OS7 only came to about 4 MB.

What macs?

[milgram]

I don't think the PPC could do this, but maybe the older ones?

Re:What macs?

[ShawnD]

Last time I check Linux on the 68k macs didn't have a working floppy driver.

It also needs MacOS to run the booter. There probably isn't room for MacOS, the booter and the kernel on a disk.

Not to hard -Single Floppy Unix Clones For Mac?

[zezum]

The LInux ROuter Project has a one floppy distribution that works for PPC. I've seen PPC LInux as small as 800K.

MacMinix

[DrewE]

It's possible to fit MacMinix + an old version of the system software on a floppy; this works pretty well for those systems which can support MacMinix.

Unfortunately, MacMinix currently only works with 68K Macs which use 24 bit addressing (or which have no more than 16 MB of ram), due to some nasties in the memory management system.

telnet

[laslo2]

this is a little off topic for what you asked, but it might help anyway...

couldn't you just set up an old 486 or early pentium system (or a single powerpc mac running linux) and let the macs telnet to that? seems like that would be easier to keep track of than rebooting a lab full of machines whenever you want to do linux stuff. you really only need a shell, after all. ;)