New Freesco

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

Freesco 0.3 is out. It now has working PPPoE support, I understand. I don’t know what else it does just yet. But I intend to find out.
Freesco is easily my favorite single-floppy Linux distro, because once you get the hardware going, it’s easy to get running. Anyone familiar with computer networking can do it, without knowing a thing about Unix. And once it’s working, you can move it to the hard drive, which is good, since tiny hard drives are common as dirt and cheap and reliable (Freesco spins the drive down after it’s done booting, so a hard drive should work pretty much indefinitely, seeing as you’ll only reboot the thing when there’s a power failure), whereas floppy disks are anything but reliable.

That’s not to say that getting the hardware going isn’t a pain sometimes, but that’s not Freesco’s fault. Resolving a bunch of IRQ and I/O conflicts to get a 486 with a pile of ISA cards in it working perfectly is a pain no matter what OS you intend to run on it.

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4 thoughts on “New Freesco

  • November 2, 2002 at 12:14 pm
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    I’m a grab this as soon as I get home.

  • November 2, 2002 at 2:09 pm
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    Dave,

    I assume you’re thinking in terms of a firewall machine for Free-SCO? If you’re going to use a small HD and spin it down I can’t think of much else that you would be doing with it.

  • November 2, 2002 at 9:13 pm
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    Just got Freesco 0.3.0 up and running on my router. Just as easy as 0.2.7 was. I missed using it because of the lack of PPPoE, which caused me to use Coyote Linux.

    New features of 0.3.0 include support of up to 10 NIC’s now, and up to 5 printers. Some SCSI hard drive ability has been added, but not much.

    Here’s a link to all it can do:

    http://www.freesco.org/~lewis/manual/030p2.htm

  • November 2, 2002 at 10:17 pm
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    Gary,

    Right. A Freesco machine is basically a firewall and not much else (some people run a caching nameserver on it too). Freesco generally runs off a single floppy with no HD at all.

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