WTF?! NO floppy in Lucid or in Meerkat!

[Liam Proven]

On 25 September 2010 02:47, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:
> Hello Liam,

Hi!

> Friday, September 24, 2010, 5:39:19 PM, Liam wrote:
>
>>> If you want floppy support, you can perhaps donate a machine with a
>>> floppy drive to an Ubuntu developer willing to work on that.
>
> LP> I'd be very happy to. Any Ubuntu devs in London on this list who
> LP> want one, please speak up!
>
> I'd be willing to help too IF they are willing to make somewhat older
> non-laptops work well.
>
>>> I think you are not getting the point of the Linux *ecosystem*. There's
>>> plenty of Linux distributions that support all of this stuff and more.
>
> I'd be interested in distros that DO support somewhat older boxes
> well. Doesn't need to be very 'small', just run well. Any suggestions?

There are not that many left, I fear, and those that do still work are
the ones where you have to have a fair degree of expertise.

 * Debian, although recent versions will not run on 80486 and I
believe Pentium 1 support is going away soon.
 * Slackware, which I think runs on more or less anything still.
 * Vector Linux, which aims to be small & quick, but is not exactly
tiny any more. Based on Slackware.
 * ZenWalk is fairly small but neither terribly
legacy-hardware-focussed nor terribly easy to tweak, in my (fairly
minimal) experience.

Damn Small Linux is no longer being updated, sadly.

Of Ubuntu variants:
 * Xubuntu is not that small any more.
 * Lubuntu is looking promising. I have run it successfully on a P4 with 256MB.
 * As Lubuntu is gathering speed, the future of U-Lite is uncertain.
It may rise again in a new form - I chat to the maintainer regularly &
he is still deciding what to do.
 * The current version of Puppy, v5, is called "Lucid Puppy" and is
now Ubuntu-based as well.


-- 
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