LWN: Comments on "PsychOS: A Crazy Cool Distro That Pushes Linux Limits (TechNewsWorld)"

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

TheOuterLinux — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 19:44:44 +0000

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.

website…

TheOuterLinux — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 20:03:38 +0000

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

website…

mirabilos — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 00:53:00 +0000

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…

TheOuterLinux — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 00:22:52 +0000

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…

mirabilos — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:48:48 +0000

“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…)

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

xorbe — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 19:25:46 +0000

Thanks! (10char)

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

Cyberax — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 02:18:36 +0000

My eyes! Ze goggles do nothing!

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

lucasvr — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 02:14:00 +0000

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)

ballombe — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 09:17:30 +0000

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)

eru — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 06:55:22 +0000

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)

mpr22 — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 22:20:19 +0000

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)

MarkVandenBorre — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 22:17:26 +0000

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

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

TheOuterLinux — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 21:27:17 +0000

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)

TheOuterLinux — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 21:27:08 +0000

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)

jak90 — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 19:51:59 +0000

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)

gdiazlo — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:42:41 +0000

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)

BirAdam — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:30:41 +0000

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)

flussence — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 11:24:10 +0000

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)

atai — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 02:21:11 +0000

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

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

BirAdam — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 01:24:02 +0000

At last, a new distribution that is actually interesting!