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Welcome to the basiclinux-lcars wiki!

BasicLinux-LCARS is a Linux LiveCD based on BasicLinux 3.5 and designed to boot on 386-class systems with as little as 3MB of RAM.

BasicLinux

BasicLinux is (was?) a Slackware-based Linux distribution which replaced the Slackware kernel and core utilities with a custom stripped-down kernel and a small BusyBox binary. The last release, BasicLinux 3.5, from around 2007, was based on Slackware 4.0 and shipped a 2.2.26 kernel with a BusyBox 1.01 binary. It was compatible with old libc5 and glibc-2.3.1 libraries. The compressed system root image could fit on a pair of 1.44MB floppy disks, and could be booted from an MS-DOS hard drive on any PC with at least a 386 and 3MB of RAM.

BasicLinux-LCARS

BasicLinux-LCARS originated as BasicLinux 3.5 packaged in such a way as to run from a CD-ROM.

While BasicLinux-LCARS extends BasicLinux versioning, it is an independent fork and unaffiliated with the original project. BL-LCARS v4 is not in any way an "official" version 4 of the original BasicLinux project.

v3.5.1

Versions 3.5.1-beta1rev1 to 3.5.1-beta1rev6 are based directly on BasicLinux 3.5, with modifications to the initrd, /etc/rc, startx, and profile scripts as well as the WM configuration files. They use the same kernel, utilities, libraries, etc as BL3.5, with rare exceptions:

Tcl/Tk 8.6 (from vintage BL3 contribs)
glibc-2.3.1 (from Slackware 9.0, though officially supported with BL3.5)
A small selection of newly built contrib packages

v4.0.0

Versions 4.0.0 and up (including all beta-tagged versions) are still loosely based on BasicLinux 3.5, but with a new kernel, upgraded GCC, and some other updated utilities.

About the Wiki

[this is a shameless plug]

The Wiki uses jinji, my customized GitHub-compatible Markdown wiki engine specifically designed to work well with very old browsers. Using the simplest (minimally secure) login method, you can log in even from text-mode Links and edit pages. It works quite well with most old IE versions, is mostly usable in old Netscape versions, and has some nice features in anything newer than IE11. It can be configured to sync with a GitHub wiki, thus letting me mirror the main GitHub wiki automatically, and I am able to edit it from either location. It will sync every 30 seconds, so as long as you don't edit it in both places within the same 30 seconds, the mirrors should work just groovy (you can set a custom timeout for the sync, but I just choose one or the other to be the source of truth). It also powers my "retro computing logbook" of sorts, http://wiki.queenkjuul.xyz, where I keep notes on project details I don't want to lose, and upload copies of rare files.