Boot floppies rolling

Built on 29 September 2024, needs up to 384Mb of RAM

This floppy set will boot a SliTaz development version. You can write floppies with SliTaz bootfloppybox, Windows rawrite or simply dd:

# dd if=fd001.img of=/dev/fd0

If you have a CD-ROM, a USB port and a USB key or a network card, but you can't boot these devices directly, then try floppy-grub4dos first. This 1.44Mb floppy provides tiny programs to boot these devices without BIOS support and some other tools.

This floppy set uses the BIOS instead of the linux driver. You can boot SliTaz using unsupported floppy drives such as some PCMCIA devices.

You can start with one of the 4 following flavors:

• base needs 64MB of RAM and 10 floppies: fd001.img to fd010.img.
  base provides the minimum SliTaz distribution subset in text mode.
• justx needs 160MB of RAM and 18 floppies: fd001.img to fd107.img.
  justx provides the minimum SliTaz distribution subset with X11 support.
• gtkonly needs 240MB of RAM and 26 floppies: fd001.img to fd207.img.
  gtkonly provides the minimum SliTaz distribution subset with GTK+ support.
• core needs 384MB of RAM and 38 floppies: fd001.img to fd311.img.
  core provides the default SliTaz distribution.

Start your computer with fd001.img. It will show the kernel version string and the kernel cmdline line. You can edit the cmdline. Most users can just press Enter.

The floppy is then loaded into memory (one dot each 64KB) and you will be prompted to insert the next floppy, fd002.img. And so on up to last floppy.

You will be prompted to insert extra floppies for the next flavors. You can bypass this by using B to boot without loading extra floppies.

Each floppy set detects disk swaps and can be used without a keyboard.

Good luck.

ISO image floppy set

You can restore the ISO image on your hard disk using:

# dd if=/dev/fd0 of=fdiso01.img
# dd if=/dev/fd0 of=fdiso02.img
# ...
# cat fdiso*.img | cpio -i

Images generation

• All these floppy images are built from a core or a Nin1 ISO.
• The loram is preprocessed by tazlitobox (Low RAM tab) or tazlito build-loram.
• The versions 1.0 and 2.0 are built with bootfloppybox available since 3.0.
• The newer versions are built with taziso floppyset available since 5.0.
• You can extract the kernel, cmdline and rootfs* files with this tool.
• You can change the floppy format (to 2.88M, 1.2M ...) with this tool.