[iguessthislldo]

This isn't container-related like the article, but I recently came upon a specialized Linux in the wild. I bought a compact flash card off Amazon for to use as a drive in a Tandy 1000. I went to partition it and to my surprise it had a few partitions. One was an ext2 one that resembled some sort of root directory. Looking through the files, it appeared it was for a distro called AST Linux that was originally designed to run off compact flash and aimed at managing networked telephones. It also had firmware images for a Cisco SPA232D VOIP Adapter.

https://www.astlinux-project.org/about.html

[taylodl]

I'd love to learn more about how you're using that Tandy 1000!

[iguessthislldo]

I'm honestly still trying to figure out what I want to do with it. I got the compact flash to use with a XT-CF-Lite v4. I'm still trying to figure out what DOS I'd like to use. I can get the OEM MSDOS 3.22 installed onto the drive, but that version's max partition size is 32MB, which isn't ideal when the compact flash is 4GB. FreeDOS supports that size and pre-386, but it was a pain to get it on there and is a bit overkill for a computer this old. Right now I'm considering a later MSDOS, but haven't decided on which one.

As far as software goes I'm waiting on finalizing the DOS before exploring games and development, but it was fun was to be able to run this port of Wolfenstein 3D:

https://github.com/jhhoward/WolfensteinCGA

Besides all that I'm thinking of maxing out the RAM (it's 640k now, but can take an additional 128k for video), and maybe adding a real time clock and network card. I do have another Tandy 1000 TX, so I could see how 80's networking worked. That is probably another can of worms though.

[fsckboy]

if you have a working Windows 95 or 98 you can format /s a disk and copy the same DOS utilities over to it, and boot it just like a newer version of DOS. W95 is easy, W98 was a little trickier, or maybe I'm thinking of Me, I can't remember any more.

[iguessthislldo]

Yeah, I used format /s and copying the other files with the DOS 3.20 that came with the computer to install to that version the compact flash. So that would be an easy way to get a newer DOS installed as well, but I don't have a newer DOS or Windows 9x computer. I ended up installing standalone MS-DOS 6.22 on a VM image and writing that to the compact flash.