-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 2
A Short TLVC Q&A
It depends on where you're coming from and where you're heading. If you're a DOS/Windows person, DOS and FreeDOS are probably great for you. If you're a Linux/Unix person, TLVC provides a familiar and open platform without restrictions. If what you need is missing, you can fix/add it - and/or get help from the community to do so.
A bare bones single floppy system can be configured to run in 256K RAM off of a 360K floppy on a 4MHz 8088 based system. This may not be possible with the default kernel configuration and certainly not with the default bootopts file, but it's doable and works well. With a XT_IDE CF-based disk drive (or similar), such as system is actually quite workable. 360k floppy-only is limited because many of the tools and programs you need won't fit on the floppy. Refer to the Configure and Build TLVC document for details.
It should, but this has not been tested. Serial console is supported and recoomended, much easier to work with than the PC console for the simple reason you can collect the console output all the time. Even when running on QEMU, serial console is preferable (refer to the TLVC and Emulators document for details).
Please refer to the Wiki document Configure and Build TLVC. There are two main steps: Getting or creating a bootable floppy image, and transferring the image to physical media. Both are discussed on the docs, contact the group if you need more info or help.
You should collect as much data about your system as possible: Is it a fully PC compatible system? XT or AT class? How much RAM? Standard Keyboard? What type of mass storage etc. Incidentally, just booting a standard TLVC floppy image with the default kernel will answer many of these questions via the boot messages. Even if booting eventually fails, the messages may provide what you need for the next step. Then again, there may be situations where TLVC fails to recognize some of the hardware because the hardware settings don't match the kernel config or the bootopts settings, and some boot messages may be misleading or incomplete. Or the console doesn't work. Again refer to the Configure and Build TLVC document for guidance.
Create a boot floppy, boot it and see what happens. That will hopefully tell you at least the basics.
TLVC includes a reasonably complete TCP/IP implementation without UDP and supports several type of ethernet cards plus SLIP (serial line IP). Servers and client programs for telnet, ftp and http are included and work well. Refer to the TLVC Networking Guide for details.
No, TLVC is completely open, no security whatsoever. You're on your own. The system has basic Unix/Linux login and file access protection mechanisms, but they're not used. It's assumed you are root, you're always unprotected. Be careful.
TLVC is reasonably well documented. Many commands, libraries, file formats and drivers have man-pages (some of them out of date though), and the GitHub wiki files are decent. Contributions solicited.
That depends on what you compare it to - and of course the hardware configuration. An XT class system running off of floppies is slow, but more RAM always helps. 640k RAM allows for caches and buffers that make even the slowest hardware workable. UMB memory helps even more. AT+ class systems running off of 1.44M floppies or hard disk are quite fast. XMS memory makes it faster. A lot of work has been put into optimizing even floppy speed and it's reasonable to expect TLVC to be as fast or faster than any other OS on the same hardware.
TLVC: Tiny Linux for Vintage Computers