Linux on vinyl

[shigawire]

So someone on Reddit was talking about elitism in the Linux community, and titled the post "I had Linux when it was on vinyl"I'm now trying to figure out if I can get a minimal kernel (maybe one of the 0.9 ones?) stripped down enough that I could actually digitally encode it onto vinyl

Comments

[unfoldedreality]

For bonus points and generally PC hackery, hack Grub to work via a PC cassette port.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Cassette_tape

[shigawire]

Oooo. Shiny.

I we had an Atari 600XL when I was a kid, and it turns out there is a project to encode and decode the audio, which was a nice quick solution.

To test it out, I'm just going to quickly encode some early kernel sources to a wav file. I'm having a hard time building ancient kernels with modern toolchains. The obvious solution is to install an ancient distro in a VM and use a toolchain from that to make a boot disk.

[shigawire]

Thinking about it more, booting a PC should indeed emulate an IBM casette :) It might be easier to hack support into qemu for a virtual cassette controller which takes an input from a sound source... That way could end up feeding an input from a turntable straight into an audio-in port maybe?

[talmor]

I had a copy of the Sinclair Spectrum 'Thompson Twins Adventure' from a magazine - it was a '45 format 'single' mastered onto thin plastic and inserted into the pages of the magazine - the 1986 version of a cover-CD. I only got it to actually load once, and it was pretty crap...

[shigawire]

Wow.

And thanks to the wonders of the internet you can play it online