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A comment on Linux on an 8-bit micro.

Re:Linux on an 8-bit micro by DanBC on Saturday April 20, 2013 @01:30PM (#5582141)
That's impressive!

I remember when "getting linux working on a laptop" was thought to be tricky.[1]

ELKS was a linux distribution for old small machines. It was supposed to run on an 8086, and use just 512 KB (not MB) for ram. (http://web.archive.org/web/19990117003949/http://www.uk.linu...)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subset)

Wow, still sort of live. (http://elks.sourceforge.net/)

[1] Here's a 2003 FAQ which gives some nice details of the problems people faced then. (http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Laptop-HOWTO.html)

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Re:Linux on an 8-bit micro by TheBoff on Saturday April 20, 2013 @02:31PM (#5582340)
Well, getting Linux working on a laptop was more a case of exciting driver wrangling, rather than performance limiting.
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Re:Linux on an 8-bit micro by iso8859-1 on Saturday April 20, 2013 @05:28PM (#5582878)
What does ELKS have in common with Linux? Will it emulate 32-bit for the user-land? If not, I guess it's not binary compatible. So ELKS is not Linux itself (FAQ says so) and it won't run Linux apps? I don't see how they're related...
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Re:Linux on an 8-bit micro by idupree on Saturday April 20, 2013 @02:16PM (#5582289)
The intro paragraph of that 2003 FAQ looks eerily like a comparison of smartphones/tablets to laptops might look today!
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Re:Linux on an 8-bit micro by joelhaasnoot on Saturday April 20, 2013 @01:58PM (#5582226)
Tried running this on a Toshiba T1100 Plus [1], never did get it working...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100

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Re:Linux on an 8-bit micro by tmzt on Monday April 22, 2013 @01:52PM (#5590714)
Does anybody have a copy of the original ELKS homepage with the quote from Linus about Linux not being portable?

It seems not to be in IA.

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