DoomLinux: the Distro That Loads Only Enough Software to Play DOOM (hackaday.com) 40
Hackaday recently shared some thoughts on "purpose-built" distros:
Some examples are Kali for security testing, DragonOS for software-defined radio, or Hannah Montana Linux for certain music fans.
Anyone can roll their own Linux distribution with the right tools, including [Shadly], who recently created one which only loads enough software to launch the 1993 classic DOOM.... It loads the Linux kernel and the standard utilities via BusyBox, then runs fbDOOM, which is a port of the game specifically designed to run on the Linux framebuffer with minimal dependencies.
Their report includes video of the distro booting up and playing Doom.
"The entire distribution is placed into a bootable ISO file that can be placed on any bootable drive."
Anyone can roll their own Linux distribution with the right tools, including [Shadly], who recently created one which only loads enough software to launch the 1993 classic DOOM.... It loads the Linux kernel and the standard utilities via BusyBox, then runs fbDOOM, which is a port of the game specifically designed to run on the Linux framebuffer with minimal dependencies.
Their report includes video of the distro booting up and playing Doom.
"The entire distribution is placed into a bootable ISO file that can be placed on any bootable drive."
Re: You need a whole "distro" for that? (Score:2)
Yes but the floppy can't run Linux inside of doom.
Re:You need a whole "distro" for that? (Score:5, Funny)
Back in the day a bootable DOS floppy would do.
Okay Doomer.
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Back in the day, that was a whole "distro".
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NeHaBoDi, minimal Linux in a floppy to play Nethack.
I'd love this with Slashem.
The doppleganger monk would be better than running Doom.
https://nehabodi.sourceforge.n... [sourceforge.net]
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Back in the day you had NeHaBoDy, minimal Linux
in a floppy to play Nethack.
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Tanenbaum was right
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Or did you mean how much you can strip down the linux kernel and still have something that runs?
That's precisely what some game servers have been doing for nearly 20 years.
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How much linux is needed to run a linux shell...
Not much. I once worked on a game server that had a home-brew minimal Linux installation. Almost nothing that the server itself did not require was included. A shell was considered something necessary for maintenance/debugging. However most of user land was absent.
No ls? (Score:2)
So, no "ls" utility, as that would be useless? Busybox can be configured with only some applets, so I guess it's possible to exclude useless stuff.
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Why would you need ls? There are many ways around it if you have a shell. "echo *", for example, will list out all the files and directories.
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why would you need echo to play doom? Even the shell interpreter itself might not be required.
DOOM with no sound (Score:3)
No music, no sound of gunfire or explosions (nor the "ka-chunk" of the switch when you finish the episode) - it just seems weird to me.
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Good point, the sound design has always been a huge part of what makes Doom great. If that's missing, you're really only getting half of the experience.
Re: DOOM with no sound (Score:1)
Ehh... Not that weird for most Linux gamers.
Hackaday recently shared some thoughts.... (Score:2)
so - the editors consider June 2022 as recent?
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For Slashdot, that's not bad. We've seen "news" stories much older than that.
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2002, as I recall. There were a lot of reports about this sort of thing when I was middle-aged.
Circa 2002 some game servers were doing this. Minimal kernel with only what the game needed. Minimal user land with only a handful of utils necessary for maintenance and/or debugging. And by debugging were are talking about looking at logs, not running gdb. No development tools, even debuggers.
What Else Is There? (Score:2)
It's Doom. Now kindly fuck off.
Not yet Doom (Score:3)
It's not really Doom until there's music and sound effects. Audio is half of the experience for a game.
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It is really DOOM. Audio has always been optional. Blood and gore not so much.
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It is really DOOM. Audio has always been optional.
No. Audio has never been optional. Playing DOOM without audio is like eating Pizza without sauce. DOOM's soundtrack is infamous.
Has Potential (Score:1)
Missed opportunity to name it DOOS (Score:2)
Come on!
Cool, now generalize it (Score:2)
Next step: Generalize the distro-making scripts so that you can choose any Linux app you want (or any set of apps) and the scripts will create a Linux installer containing only those apps and the support code necessary to run them (well, okay, and also the functionality for a boot-menu that lets you choose at startup which included app to launch)
Not terribly impressive (Score:3)
Linux is a monolithic kernel, so even if there's "minimal dependencies", there's still an awful lot of stuff that's loaded.
Back in my Amiga days, the OS was used to read in the boot sector of the floppy, and then you disabled multitasking. Of course, every time you plugged in some extra RAM or upgraded your CPU, all of your games broke!
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> Linux is a monolithic kernel, so even if there's "minimal dependencies", there's still an awful lot of stuff that's loaded.
make config
What did you want left out that can't be?
Did this in 2001 and handed out the disks at Linux (Score:1)
Try Googling for doom-on-a-disk. Our good friends at the original SCO did this 20 years ago. Stateless, RAM disk based and running in 4mb. I authored it, as a promo, prototype for Smallfoot. Handed out about 50 of them on the first day. Still have an archive image somewhere.
Grr. Autocorrect Linuxworld 2001 NY (Score:1)
And at the palace de congress in Paris a bit later
A tenth of the size is all you need... (Score:1)
Mmm, 20 megs to do something which fits on two floppies with space to spare... (Back in the day, Doom used DOS/4GW - it even called itself the "Doom Operating System" as it loaded.)
Thinking back, it's absolutely amazing what they managed to do with the meager resources available at the time. I guess I just took it for granted back then!
Brings me back to childhood... (Score:2)
I can't believe people wasted spending so much time and energy doing what any 12-year old kid could do in the 1990's.
DOOM was big enough that you had to install it to a HDD, so you'd tuck it on C:\DOOM. If you wanted to boot straight into DOOM, you'd just stick a CD DOOM and DOOM.EXE in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. Back in DOS 5 or 6, they added the feature to enable you to show a menu in your CONFIG.SYS -- gamers back then would use this to start their computer with different options for where HIMEM.SYS or EMM3
What about WoW? (Score:2)
I pretty much use my PC for (1) browsing with Firefox, (2) email (Hotmail), (3) a few online cartoon sites, and (4) World of Warcraft. So I can't help but wonder if there'd be a Linux distro that just let me run WoW (with top video and sound of course). Just wondering, since I have no complaints about Windows really.