I just watched a video where YouTuber Action Retro set up a web server on a floppy disk using ELKS (the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset). I thought, I have to try this for myself! Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵
So, first of all, what is ELKS? It's the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset, and it will run on a wide range of hardware, including 8088 systems. Pretty wild for a modern product! If you want to read more or try it out, GitHub repo is here: github.com/ghaerr/elks
Alright, let's go. I need to choose a system that will support the networking for ELKS. Turning to the Wiki, as of right now, the network cards supported are NE1000, NE2000, Western Digital 8003, Western Digital 8013, and 3com Ethernet III (3c509). My 486 DX4 has a 3Com 3c509!
Great. Now to find the media to use. Looking at the Wiki, there are a variety of options. We'll go with a MINIX 1.44MB disk. Using RawWrite for Windows, we can easily make a disk.
Oh, for the download links, that's covered in the main page of the GitHub, as is a link to where the Wiki is. Sorry, sometimes I get ahead of myself 😂
Alright, I need to figure out my network card settings. So I will load up the 3C5X9CFG utility. Purrfect. I/0 base of 300h, IRQ 10. Great!
Time to boot up! And, spoiler alert: this step threw me. Notice how the 3Com card gets detected and even says "HWconf: 300/10" (and gives a MAC address!) but also that it is configured to I/O base 330 with IRQ 11. Well, we still have to change the settings manually... ugh.
Alright, well on that note, let's get to configuring. First, we will use the VI editor to change settings in the network config (/etc/net.cfg). I changed the gateway, and later came along and changed the daemons to start to allow for an "httpd" server to run (netstart="httpd").
Now to change some settings in /bootopts. I set the "LOCALIP" for my IP address , the "3c0" settings for my 3Com card's I/O Port and IRQ, and set "net=3c0" to default our 3Com card for startup. This is all documented in the Wiki too!
And when we reboot (which we can do with a "shutdown -r"), we have success! The network card is detected right, the TCP config is loaded, and the httpd server is loaded!
Well, that was fun, and way cool! We could get fancy and configure a webpage with images, but I'll pass for now. Thanks for following along, this was a fun one!
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