KolibriOS – An OS on a Floppy!

KolibriOS is a piece of programming marvel. An entire Linux distribution Operating system, and not just a blinking cursor on a terminal, but with a graphical environment complete with text editors, system utilities, games, browser, media players and lots of other stuff. All neatly and impossibly stuffed inside a meager 1.44 MB floppy disk.

I tried KolibriOS on Virtual Box. The system boots in 2 to 3 seconds and shuts down instantly, like turning off a light bulb. The graphical UI is dated, reminds me of Windows 3.1 era, but I won’t be too critical. After all they have squeezed an entire distribution under one and a half Megabyte, for god’s sake. All I want to say is the graphics is non too bad and pretty usable if you don’t mind compromising.




Kolibri is coded in assembly language, which explains it’s small size to some extent, and forked off MenuetO – another tiny assembly language coded Linux distribution OS. 


The distribution comes in two version – a floppy image and a disk image. The disk image is slightly larger than the floppy version at 3MB, but still incredibly small. There is no mention of hardware requirement anywhere on the site, but I guess it would run any antique piece you can find.


- View Screenshot 1
- View Screenshot 2


Visit Official Site

Downloads

Floppy image to be used for various virtual machines, writing on diskette or putting to hard disk to boot from.
http://www.kolibrios.org/load.cgi?f/releases/kolibri_0.7.7.0_img_en.7z

Compact disk (LiveCD) image to be used for various virtual machines or burning to CDs to boot from.
http://www.kolibrios.org/load.cgi?f/releases/kolibri_0.7.7.0_iso_en.7z

Kernel, applications and libraries source code at the time of release.
http://www.kolibrios.org/load.cgi?f/releases/kolibri_0.7.7.0_src.7z

Software development kit (SDK) for people interested in developing applications for Kolibri.
http://www.kolibrios.org/load.cgi?f/releases/kolibri_0.7.7.0_sdk.7z





By: Ramkrishna Guchhait