PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

[Posted June 13, 2020 by jake]

Over at TechNewsWorld, Jack M. Germain reviews the rather ... different ... distribution, PsychOS Linux. Just taking a peek at the home page may be enough to cause flashbacks to a misspent youth, or perhaps that of one's parents at this point. Bucking the trend for modern distributions, PsychOS is only built for 32-bit systems; the main focus seems to be DOS-oriented: "Retro comes alive in PsychOS and is the main driving point in its development. The distro creator still uses DOS software, which is launched easily from the applications menu via emulators such as DOSBox. Anyone with PsychOS 3.4.6 and higher who uses RetroGrab to install older software can do the same, noted the developer. The corresponding emulators must be installed first. PsychOS lets you run more than one DOS program at a time, too. Other programming influences include BASIC and BBC BASIC, due to shortcomings that helped the PsychOS developer learn more about Python. Other BASIC flavors are FreeBASIC, QB45, and QB64."

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 13, 2020 1:24 UTC (Sat) by BirAdam (guest, #132170) [Link] (4 responses)

At last, a new distribution that is actually interesting!

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 13, 2020 2:21 UTC (Sat) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (3 responses)

that unfortunately is not as interesting as this: http://c64os.com/c64os/

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 13, 2020 12:30 UTC (Sat) by BirAdam (guest, #132170) [Link] (2 responses)

That is true, but C64 also isn’t really Linux. Linux is and always have been 32 bit. 8 bit and 16 bit computers are out of the running.

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 14, 2020 22:17 UTC (Sun) by MarkVandenBorre (subscriber, #26071) [Link]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subset comes close.

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 14, 2020 22:20 UTC (Sun) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

The 6502 is an absolutely terrible target for generic (rather than platform-targeted) C code anyway, due to the whole "fixed 256-byte stack page" thing.

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 13, 2020 11:24 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (4 responses)

Requires PAE‽ That's not retro at all! Next they'll claim it needs a hardware FPU too...

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 13, 2020 19:51 UTC (Sat) by jak90 (subscriber, #123821) [Link] (3 responses)

Also most of my retro computers still only have a CD-ROM or Iomega Zip 100 drive, so the full 3.8 GB release is kind of unwieldy to boot without a network connection. At least it features standard d-i NFS boot functionality.

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 13, 2020 21:27 UTC (Sat) by TheOuterLinux (guest, #139502) [Link] (2 responses)

Author of PsychOS here, if your computer does not have a DVD/CD-ROM drive, it probably wont run all that well anyway. However, I am currently working on an i486 version called PsychOS486 and that should help. Hopefully. It'll be a while though. You can read up on the development notes here: https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/documents/PsychOS486DevLog....

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 15, 2020 6:55 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

Note also that an old computer might have a CD drive, but it cannot boot from it! I have Toshiba Tecra laptop that is that way. A Pentium MMX CPU, 80mb of RAM. The last Linux distro I succesfully installed on it was CentOS 3, which still had floppy images. Today even supposedly retro hw distros require the capability to boot from a CD or USB.

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 15, 2020 9:17 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Very old laptop have a floppy disk drive and can boot from it.
They you can install a boot loader on a floppy disk that can boot from your CD.
This was a standard trick for installing Debian back in the day.

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 13, 2020 13:42 UTC (Sat) by gdiazlo (guest, #109792) [Link]

Their creativity and multimedia creations are awesome. It really has a lot of effort in it. I hope the best for this project.

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 13, 2020 21:27 UTC (Sat) by TheOuterLinux (guest, #139502) [Link] (1 responses)

This is the author of PsychOS. PsychOS is not DOS-oriented, but is very DOS-friendly because of RetroGrab and DOSBox. And to be fair, most of the sources obtainable using RetroGrab are DOS-related but they do not have to be as long as the system has the required emulator installed. You can have an applications launcher (.desktop) for just about any older software as long as the emulator is scriptable. The DOS software that it includes out-of-the-box is primarily there to extend its file format support.

PsychOS comes with 3000+ packages, 90+ python modules, 390+ supported file formats, DOS software to extend its functionality, Thunar Custom Actions, customized .bashrc, etc (see PsychOSReleaseNotes.txt link below).

People could just go to the website, but here are some links...
https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/documents/AptInstalledList...
https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/documents/PipInstalledList...
https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/documents/PsychOSReleaseNo...
https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/documents/Thunar/Descendin...
https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/documents/bashrc.txt
https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/downloads.html#OtherResources

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 16, 2020 19:25 UTC (Tue) by xorbe (guest, #3165) [Link]

Thanks! (10char)

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 16, 2020 2:14 UTC (Tue) by lucasvr (guest, #110284) [Link]

The promo video is something! It really makes me want to try the distro out. Keep up the good work, @TheOuterLinux

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Jun 16, 2020 2:18 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

My eyes! Ze goggles do nothing!

website…

Posted Jun 17, 2020 15:48 UTC (Wed) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (3 responses)

“puts lighter/older hardware first”

And on my Thinkpad, I can only see the left half of their website. (But scrolling to the right shows me I didn’t miss anything I’d miss…)

website…

Posted Jun 19, 2020 0:22 UTC (Fri) by TheOuterLinux (guest, #139502) [Link] (2 responses)

What is your screen's resolution? The "modern_index.html" version of the site, before I made changes a while back, used SVG for everything so it would always scale but is was a lot to keep up with and people kept posting that part of the URL instead of just https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io. I know you're not supposed to use tables for organizing, but oh well and w3m can't handle <div>.

I like to "Keep it simple stupid," especially when all of my sites are static sites with 95% plain HTML and CSS. And yeah, people may have to scroll around at certain resolutions, but it works on modern browsers, older browsers like Dillo (with ./configure --enable-ssl, or something like that...), and even text-based browsers like w3m and should style differently accordingly. Even the latest version of LINKS.EXE that has modern SSL support on FreeDOS works on my sites.

website…

Posted Jun 19, 2020 0:53 UTC (Fri) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (1 responses)

1024x768

It does render okay in lynx, except for the command line being broken by the link number.

Suggested fix:

mpv --vo=x11,drm,tct,caca --ao=pulse,alsa,jack https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/Video.mp4

Or click <a href="https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/Video.mp4">the URL</a> to download and play with

The “too wide” issue was Firefox.

website…

Posted Jun 22, 2020 20:03 UTC (Mon) by TheOuterLinux (guest, #139502) [Link]

Try it now. I just went ahead and changed width of 1280 or less (if you have JS support) to load the mobile version.

PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)

Posted Dec 23, 2020 19:44 UTC (Wed) by TheOuterLinux (guest, #139502) [Link]

PsychOS486 for i486DX/i586/i686 machines is now available at https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/486/index.html if interested. No PAE this time. Based off of Slacko Puppy 5.3.1 (Slackware 13.37) and fits on a CD-ROM. 32MB of RAM minimum for console use and 128MB of RAM is recommend for the customized JWM or XFCE it include; you could technically get away with 64MB of RAM for either one but they won't run as well. I also made sure to include an edited version of CLIMax for console users to sort of help make things easier and it also boots into the console instead of loading a desktop environment at the start to save as much RAM as possible. However, installation does currently require a GUI environment at the moment but because it is technically a "puppy linux" distro, you can just run it live.