This is my punishment for not using Linux in the year of the Linux desktop smh. Special thanks to Chris Harringon!
You cannot build fluster on windows due to the fuser crate linking to unix stuff in libc, even if you install a compatibility library like WinFsp. Trust me, I tried.
You need to build/run from inside of WSL.
The default WSL kernels do not have the usb_storage module enabled, we will need to build our own.
Follow this up until the Windows USB-IP section.
sudo modprobe usb-storage should not fail. You can check if it was actually loaded with lsmod.
You will also need to pass through the floppy drive to WSL. This will not persist through a reboot, or restarting WSL.
You cannot mount a floppy drive normally with wsl --mount, so we will have to pass through the USB device.
This obviously assumes you have a USB floppy drive. If you have an internal drive you want to use, I cannot help you. Good luck!
On windows you will need the usbipd-win package
winget install --interactive --exact dorssel.usbipd-win
Then find your drive with usbipd list
For reference, my drive shows up like so:
> usbipd list
Connected:
BUSID VID:PID DEVICE STATE
...
6-11 0644:0000 TEAC USB Floppy Not shared
Now we will bind the floppy to WSL using the bus id from the above command. (This requires an elevated command prompt / powershell window)
usbipd bind --busid X-X
There will be no output.
Now we attatch it to WSL
usbipd attach --wsl --busid X-X
You will see some information about it finding your WSL distribution, and probably hear a USB discconect sound. The floppy drive will also (probably) spin up, assuming you have a disk inserted.
Double check that the floppy is there
$ lsblk
sde 8:64 1 1.4M 0 disk
Take note of which sdX device it is. Mine happens to be sde.
This will be the path that you use when starting Fluster.
A grain of salt This is SO unstable, you might also have to disable, then uninstall the floppy drive in device manager first. If your disk is spinning forever without seeming to do anything, you need to wait it out. Pulling out the disk (at least on my drive) in that state makes USBIPD give up and unmount the drive.
You need to allow other user mounting in fuse to let you access Fluster! from windows through WSL.
sudo nano /etc/fuse.conf
Uncomment #user_allow_other
Required dependancies (non exhaustive):
- build-essential
- libfuse3-dev
- rust (duh)
Open the Fluster! source code directory (the one that contains cargo.toml).
Build with cargo build --release
(You can also build with --profile floppy for a smaller binary. Using upx --best on it should make it fit on a floppy if you
really wanna have fun with it. Currently shrinks to under 800kb!)
Pick a folder to mount to, for this example I will mount in ~/mounted/.
Remember your floppy drive path (The SD one). For this example, my drive is at sde.
Fluster! WILL overwrite data on whatever block device you pass it. If you do not know what "block device" even means, this is your final warning. Do NOT continue further.
Since we will be writing directly to the floppy disk without a pre-existing filesystem (we are the file system!) we unfortunately need to escalate permissions.
So we'll just run it at sudo. Great idea I know.
There is probably a safer way to do this (Such as using udev rules), but I got bored reading the documentation.
Run fluster:
- Go to the output directory for the binary you built (./target/release/)
Run it as sudo with:
sudo ./fluster_fs --block-device-path "/dev/sdX" --mount-point "/home/(your username here)/mounted/fluster"
If you don't want to run as sudo/root, you're smart. Smart enough to figure out another solution. Good luck!
Be warned, this will consume the terminal window you started the program with.
Try using tmux to split your window if needed. (Must be installed ofc, Google it.)
You can also run with debug info by pre-pending RUST_LOG=debug to the command if you're a nerd.
This does add some performance overhead, which would only really matter if you're using the
secret --use-virtual-disks option.