elks VS rpi-clone

ELKS supported MMU-less operation on 8088 and 80286 machines, but I don't think an ARM port exists: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks

Roughly in the mid-90s I bought at a local surplus store a "Carry 1" industrial 8088 computer which to my surprise I later discovered it could run Linux (ELKS: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks). I ultimately sold it on Ebay because although it was a beautiful piece of old tech, I was struggling to find more space for other things.

Here's one. I had only the central unit, mine had two floppy drives.

I don't think you can replace the OS on these. Unless there is a way to boot them from DOS, but you are looking at 8c086 machine so the choice is limited. Linux or BSD won't work. But ELKS might if it can be made to boot from DOS. Minix 2.02 seems to work.

Yet ELKS works on 16 bit computers with 640k of RAM.

Some small size Linux-like OSes do exist though: one commenter suggested Lunix (which I didn't know, thanks for the link), and a slightly bigger one is ELKS which runs on old MMU-less x86 CPUs. I managed to run it on a 8088 industrial PC ages ago.

https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

I should have a Furby buried somewhere; now that I think of it, it may be the right platform to stick a bigger brain into, make it wireless so that it could be connected to the home IoT network then signal events or alerts.

I've been running a bunch of Pi's for years now, and the biggest problem I've had is the Pi itself dying: 24/7 usage is hard on a small device. I've also found that stable power is essential, and to that end I've always used 5v 3a branded power cubes, plugged into a pure sine wave UPS. Choice of micro-SDHC cards is important and I ended up getting ATP industrial cards (https://www.atpinc.com/products/industrial-sd-cards) - expensive but really long-lived. Finally, using RPi-clone (https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone) on a regular basis has been a life-saver. I clone to Sandisk Extreme micro-SDHCs and can recover from an outage in minutes.

I would normally use the Pi SD-Card copier to duplicate the SD-Card to an SSD but I'm unsure if this is available on the Ubuntu image - you could possibly use this program [Github] if you are not keen on using dd with a running system.

Then you will need to clone the SD to the SSD, you can use many tools that are available from your desktop computer or you can try with rpi-clone, just connect the SSD with Pi booted from SD, stop any possible service/docker to prevent any copy error and run, adapting device naming but usually will be (check device with dmesg):

I used rpi-clone, it was super easy. Whole process took 10 minutes. https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone

rpi-clone