0xcde4c3db 6 months ago

An interesting quirk of the ISO 9660 standard is that the first sector of the disc is explicitly undefined, in order to accommodate a platform-specific boot sector. I sometimes wonder how many platforms could be accommodated by a single "polyglot" disc image.

  • bpye 6 months ago

    That feels like the ISO equivalent of Cosmopolitan libc [0].

    [0] - https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

    • hulitu 6 months ago

      > The Makefile will download cosmocc automatically.

      What can go wrong ?

      > It's recommended that you install a systemwide APE Loader. This command requires sudo access to copy the ape command to a system folder and register with binfmt_misc on Linux, for even more performance.

      A security nightmare.

      • necovek 6 months ago

        How is this different from all the other installation instructions asking to `curl https://foo/install.sh | sh` or even add a custom apt/rpm repo or just install a deb or rpm locally?

        They all might get sudo access.

        I do agree, but the same holds for the above methods too.

snvzz 6 months ago

m68k (68020 specifically) seems supported.

Yet I cannot find any platform specific install instructions (For amiga, atari, mac, x68k, etc).

It would be nice, as the state of most distributions in this architecture is quite sad.

  • yjftsjthsd-h 6 months ago

    I suspect that the m68k that it targets is weird embedded systems that need some custom hand-holding to target, rather than "normal" consumer hardware like you're thinking of. Not that you couldn't make it do that, just that I suspect the code is mostly maintained by and for folks who use it to run very specific hardware.

    • snvzz 6 months ago

      Since classic computer platforms are very different to each other (e.g. an Amiga has nothing to do with a 68k Mac), they absolutely need platform-specific instructions, like these embedded systems.

      But there do not seem to be instructions for either.

      I have no clue where to even start in order to use this on my 030@50 w/FPU A1200.

devops99 6 months ago

The web page for this project comes off as an LLM-generated troll.

  • lproven 6 months ago

    I don't think so at all, no.

    I think it's a very typical sort of in-group nerd communication: "here is the cool stuff that we do" with zero thought or consideration for explaining what the common assumptions are for a non-initiate.

    The first time I encountered the project, I spent a while reading, baffled, then joined the mailing list and asked WTF it was.

    It's a Linux distro, with a focus on build tools rather than apps, which aims at extreme portability between different CPU architectures and support for a wide variety of CPU types now generally considered as obsolete.

    It's an offshoot and continuation of Rock Linux, which had a much better explanation on its old homepage:

    https://www.rocklinux.net/

    • devops99 6 months ago

      The use of SVN tells me everything I need to know.