August 4, 2004

There were 3 posts published on August 4, 2004 (this is page 1 of 1).

Windows 95 in less than 8 MB

Now that I’ve got the cool QEMU emulator running on my Linux box, I’ve been in the mood to experiment with different OSs. One of the first was Windows 95, which runs just fine inside QEMU.

I created a ~200MB disk image file for the Win95 install. After I confirmed it ran, I wanted to figure out how to reduce the size of that disk image. It was then that I remembered this very cool page telling how to whittle down Windows 95 to under 10 MB. I’ve followed the instructions to create a Windows 95 image just over 7 MB in size! Granted, it won’t run MFC apps nor do networking, but those pieces can be added in as needed.

One interesting hack I’ll try is copying my Win95 image over to my USB keychain drive. The combination of my USB drive and QEMU is like carrying a whole computer on my USB drive. I can take it to any host computer with QEMU installed (Windows, OS X, Linux) and boot it like it was its own machine.

I also discovered a Zaurus port of QEMU last night, but haven’t tried that yet. I can only imagine how glacial Windows would be running inside an i386 emulator on a PDA!

(Incidentally, if you wish to create your own “Micro95” disk image, you’ll need to ensure the msdos.sys file gets copied from the host installation to the micro installation. The creation script missed this file and my Micro 95 wouldn’t boot without it.)

Italian Basketball Team Smokes NBA Players In Exhibition Game

The Italian national basketball team crushed the American team in a pre-Olympic exhibition game, 95-78. The Italians, using the foreign concept of “defense,” thoroughly stunned our team of NBA players.

No word on whether defense will be outlawed at the Summer Games to give the American team a fighting chance. However, Olympic committee officials are considering awarding a seperate medal for SportsCenter-worthy dunks.

Consulting Business Picking Up

My phone is ringing a LOT more often these days. Most of my new work is dealing with Asterisk and VoIP, with some UNIX sysadmin stuff thrown in. It’s getting to the point where I’m going to have to add staff. Maybe the economy is picking up after all!

To my geek friends still looking for work, drop me a line. I may have some for ya.