PicoBSD is a discontinued single-

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...

version of

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

, one of the BSD

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

descendants. In its different variations, PicoBSD allows one to have secure

Dial-up Internet access Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...

, a small diskless router, or a dial-in server, all on one standard floppy disc. It runs on a minimum 386SX

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, a ...

with of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

(no

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with mag ...

required). PicoBSD is freely available under the BSD license. The main developer was Andrzej Bialecki, and the latest version is 0.42. Dinesh Nair had then backported the PicoBSD build scripts to FreeBSD 2.2.5, allowing the addition of a few more binaries in the dial-up flavor due to FreeBSD 2.2.5's smaller binary executable format. With flexibility that FreeBSD gives, along with the full

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

being available, one can build a small installation performing various tasks, including: * Diskless workstation *Portable dial-up access solution *Custom demo-disk *Embedded controller ( flash or

EEPROM EEPROM (also called E2PROM) stands for electrically erasable programmable read-only memory and is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers, usually integrated in microcontrollers such as smart cards and remote keyless systems, or ...

) *

Firewall Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts * Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...

*Communication server *Replacement for commercial router * Diskless

home automation Home automation or domotics is building automation for a home, called a smart home or smart house. A home automation system will monitor and/or control home attributes such as lighting, climate, entertainment systems, and appliances. It m ...

system *And many others PicoBSD is now included in the FreeBSD source files where it is used by embedded system developers to create their own system images. It can be used with recent versions of FreeBSD and it is located in /usr/src/release/picobsd/. In FreeBSD 5, it has been superseded by the NanoBSD framework

References

See also