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OS/2 and Menuet OS

Format drive and install one of the following operating systems:

• BeOS
• Syllable
• AROS
• Plan 9
• Minix
• FreeDOS
• DR-DOS
• OpenVMS x86 port is coming!
• Visopsys
• SqueakNOS
• Haiku
• Kolibri
• ReactOS
• Tizen
• SkyOS
• MorphOS
• MenuetOS
• CP/M 86
• Multics, also see Multicians
• Erlang as an Operating System

There have been a large number of more or less obscure operating systems and not all have been ported to x86. Unfortunately the architecture has become a de facto standard even though it's not the best architecture or the most efficient but instead a patchwork of solutions to retain backwards compatibility. We have lost many interesting architectures over the years that would have deserved a better fate to the Intel bandwagon.

Don't forget MenuetOS

I'm pretty sure you want this: http://www.menuetos.net/

On the download page (hidden deeply behind a maze of links). I haven't found the 64 bit OS though, so maybe it's not open?

TBH the source code doesn't look very good to me.

From their own site:

Menuet isn't based on other operating system nor has it roots within UNIX or the POSIX standards. The design goal, since the first release in year 2000, has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs.

So, if you want to port your own application to it, you'll need to rewrite it too. And you may need to do it in assembly — although there is, apparently, a C-compiler for MenuetOS it is billed as "low-level", which, I gather, means no (or limited) libc, and other exciting and challenging limitations.

http://www.menuetos.net/m64l.t...

I might play with it, but if I can't use it for work, play is all it'll be.

I wonder what commercial uses they're thinking of.

Presumably they're thinking of some super-low footprint embedded devices, but still this seems like a lot more of a fun project than a viable product.

http://www.menuetos.net/m64l.t...

I might play with it, but if I can't use it for work, play is all it'll be.

As a programmer, I find systemd horrible. It breaks compatibility with Unix. It's a nightmare that will shrink the open source landscape to just linux. The rest of us must now reinvent basics like toolkits, web browsers, etc because Linux zealots want to take over the world.

Or you could just bang around on this.

Pre-emptive multitasking with 1000hz scheduler, multiprocessor, multithreading, ring-3 protection
Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1920x1080, 16 million colours
Free-form, transparent and skinnable application windows, drag'n drop
SMP multiprocessor support with currently up to 8 cpus
IDE: Editor/Assembler for applications
USB 2.0 HiSpeed Classes: Storage, Printer, Webcam Video and TV/Radio support
USB 1.1 Keyboard and Mouse support
TCP/IP stack with Loopback & Ethernet drivers
Email/ftp/http/chess clients and ftp/mp3/http servers
Hard real-time data fetch
Fits on a single floppy, boots also from CD and USB drives

Since the blurb was writtten, browser, digital tv, webcam, movies, etc. have been added.

Or you can play around with Plan9 - runs by itself or as an application atop linux, windows, etc.

Don't forget MenuetOS and its opensource derivative KolibriOS. They fit on a single floppy.

Nor does it mean "newsworthy".

For an article that you are not interested in, you sure are getting lot of highly rated comments. Which implies that you are interested in it; otherwise, why would you be commenting in an article that NOBODY FORCED YOU TO READ?

Damn dude. Lay off the negativity. The operating system actually works (which implies coherency). Would you bitch about an article on MenuetOS http://www.menuetos.net/ as well? Why does this particular article deserve your whining and moaning about irrelevancy? The angle on a MenuetOS article would be that it is written in assembly language. The angle on this one is that someone with a mental illness was able to create something complex and coherent. If you don't get it, I understand, but stop filling the comment section with your bullshit. Be positive or go home.

Kind regards,
Dave

Against the license:

Menuet64 Copyright (c) 2005-2013 Ville Turjanmaa

1) Free for personal and educational use.
2) Contact menuetos.net for commercial use.
3) Redistribution, reverse engineering, disassembly or decompilation
      prohibited without permission from the copyright holders.

[...]

From the license: http://www.menuetos.net/m64l.txt

1) Free for personal and educational use.
2) Contact menuetos.net for commercial use.
3) Redistribution, reverse engineering, disassembly or decompilation
      prohibited without permission from the copyright holders.

For an OpenSource OS written in assembly, that 3rd clause is a bit strange.

(yes, yes, I did notice that the 32bit version is more traditionally open-source-licensed...)

While it isn't Linux, MenuetOS is a completely usable OS. Extra things like Quake of course need more space. These days you can just use a CD or USB Flash Drive to test out and use alternative Operating Systems. I keep telling people, you don't need to throw away your old PC just because the newest version of Windows doesn't work on it. There are options to make that old box live again.

not all of us consider that tiny. There are still a few programmers out there who recognize that doing everything high-level using huge libraries isn't necessarily the only option for a modern os. My favorite are there guys: http://www.menuetos.net/ Not linux, but definitely cool.

Alright, here's my shtick... It's a great race between two open source software ecosystems: copyLEFT and copyFREE.

The copyFREE side is a more amicable pacifist bunch, with more freedoms and more choices, and it has been gaining ground in the last decade in all software categories but one - the kernels. The copyLEFT side was founded by a bunch of militant hippies trying to destroy capitalism, and it had several years' head start, so its viral licenses were grandfathered into some of the most important pieces of open source software. The OS projects within each team like to share code, and the copyLEFT team can also mooch copyFREE code as well, but not the other way around...

This race is contested on many fronts, and one obscure comparison (that I just came up with) is: while running the race forward, to still maintain support for the 80386 platform. Only UNIX systems (sorry, sorry, sorry) that can run on a 80386 PC (sorry, sorry) with actively maintained current versions (sorry) are to be included. Let's see how the two teams compare:

THE COPYLEFT TEAM:

(1) Linux - now i486, as mentioned in this article.

THE COPYFREE TEAM:

(1) FreeBSD - i486 since 2005.

(2) OpenBSD - i486 since 2007.

(3) NetBSD - i486, "80386 support removed" in 2007.

(4) MINIX 3 - i586, 32mb RAM, 635mb HD.

So it looks like the copyLEFT camp had this little "current UNIX on 80386" advantage, and now lost it...

--libman

It would probably be next to impossible to write an entire modern operating system, web browser, or word processor in assembly language.

Here you go. It's pretty impressive for something written entirely in assembly .

No, Linux is not tightly coded. I should know. The best you can say about it is, the other guys are worse.

Not MenuetOS. It's an operating system with a graphical UI, pre-emptive multitasking, and USB and TCP/IP stacks that boots from a single floppy.

Ah, you too ran OS9 on a CoCo3.

The 3-ring binder manual alone was a thing of beauty. And new drivers were as simple as editing a text file. Sure, the graphics were limited to 640x200x16 on an RGB monitor, but for its' time, it was miles ahead of both CGA and Hercules. (you *could* get 64 colors to display at once by swapping the palette repeatedly, for example, on each scan line, same as you could display multiple font sizes/colors and sort-of-graphics on a purely DOS text screen by playing with the character generator in real time a la the Clipper Toolkit 3.0).

Then again, there are still people putting out small usable operating systems written in assembler, such as menuetOS that fit on a single floppy.

is rumoured to have Flash, USB ports, AND a 3.5" floppy disk

Finally! I've been waiting for the day when one can run MenuetOS on a cellphone.

Well, that would depend upon what role this OS is going to play. Server? He did mention he liked OpenSolaris enterprise tools. Desktop? The Ports Collection opens up a lot of compatible linux software. Do you need a semi-truck or a motorcycle? But you also left out Syllable, a linux/BeOS hybrid, in server and desktop edition, FreeDOS for those nostalgic moments, or MenuetOS for when you really want to get your freak on.

Pre-emptive multitasking with 1000hz scheduler, multithreading, ring-3 protection
Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1280x1024, 16 million colours
Free-form, transparent and skinnable application windows, drag'n drop
IDE: Editor/Assembler for applications
USB 2.0 Hi-speed storage, webcam and printer support
TCP/IP stack with Loopback & Ethernet drivers
Email/ftp/http/chess clients and ftp/mp3/http servers
Hard real-time data fetch
Fits on a single floppy

I think we both agree it's dumb to write everything in assembler. Few people did with serious software in IBM PC days. This keyboard debouncing C code will run for less than a millisecond and let CPU sleep until the user does something. However, the CPU-intensive, battery guzzling code tends to be focused in video/audio/sensor processing and involve mathematical transformations of manageable complexity. This code will be especially vulnerable to compiler's inability to retain stuff in registers in multithreaded environment.

As for $5M/year, I suspect you can retain this guys services for somewhat less. But even that amount is trivial for the only mobile OS that can handle realtime facial recognition without a plutonium battery.

Start with LOGO. Turtle graphics all the way!

Then you choose your platform, and go with whatever version of BASIC runs on the 8-bit platform of choice: Apple ][, C64, Atari 800, TRS-80 or Coco, whatever.

Once you've mastered that, just jump to the future and go with 64-bit asm and contribute to Menuet OS .

THANK YOU!!! That was EXACTLY what I was trying to suggest! We are not talking about making an entire OS here. After all it is going to have only one job,which is to run the encrypted AV which will in turn look for bugs. Any kind of very basic DOS or Linux could be used for it. Hell if they wanted to get fancy and let the user have a way to work or goof off while it ran I'm sure the guy that wrote Menuet would let them use it cheap,or they could of course use BSD for free.

The point is we are seeing more and more bugs that can get around the traditional scanning,either by loading before boot,or even running virtual like the Blue Pill. And we know that malware is only going to get nastier. After all there is big money in botnets. And where there is big money,there are clever programmers willing to take the cash. So by giving the AV a way to scan outside the OS and HDD it should be able to detect even the nastiest forms of malware. So why hasn't anyone done this yet? With the amount of competition in the AV industry you'd think cooking something up like this would be a big selling point.

``Obviously, we must stop using using pansy C/C++/Java/Ruby/etc... languages and go back to writing everything in assembler. Then boot times will rock!''

Well, yeah. Most of the boot time of my machine, aside from the POST that the OS has no control over, is taken up by shell scripts. Switching to a faster shell improves boot time significantly. Of course, even that shell isn't very fast, compared to replacing the shell scripts by optimized machine code.

I am not saying that replacing the boot scripts by assembly code is a good idea, but as far as boot time goes, there is quite some room for improvement.

Also, I think I should mention MenuetOS here, as it's written in assembly and pretty efficient.

LFS? Really a lot of Linux distros will do. If Linux or another *nix is too much to understand, there are always smaller OSs like MenuetOS.

There's also MenuetOS.

http://www.menuetos.net/index.htm

Also a quite stable, with small footprint and nice-looking is MenuetOS.

http://www.menuetos.net/

- Pre-emptive multitasking with 1000hz scheduler, multithreading, ring-3 protection
- Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1280x1024, 16 million colours
- Free-form, transparent and skinnable application windows, drag'n drop
- IDE: Editor/Assembler for applications
- USB 2.0 Hi-speed storage, webcam and printer support
- TCP/IP stack with Loopback Ethernet drivers
- Email/ftp/http/chess clients and ftp/mp3/http servers
- Hard real-time data fetch
- Fits on a single floppy

Try MenuetOS then http://www.menuetos.net/ It's what Kolibri is based on. At least, Kolibri is based on the Free Software 32bit MenuetOS. The author has since switched to a 64bit version which isn't Free Software (hence Kolibri exists).

In that same vein, there's also MenuetOS, although I've never used it, so I can't vouch for how well it functions.

http://www.menuetos.net/ Please check out the MenuetOS page, download a disk image, and see if it's something you can use. Can't hurt to try it on one of the old machines. The hardware requirements are modest for the 32-bit version, plus it's Open Source.

MenuetOS Its a bit hardcore though, and you would probably have a hard time getting 'normal' applications to work, but its tiny and quick, although sort of a beta still.

But if you know ASM, its could be a miracle cure or something...

MenuetOS is an Operating System in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly language, and released under the License. It supports 32/64 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications.

Menuet has no roots within UNIX or the POSIX standards, nor is it based on any operating system. The design goal has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs.

Menuet's application structure is not specifically reserved for asm programming since the header can be produced with practically any other language. However, the overall application programming design is intended for easy 32/64 bit asm programming. Menuet's responsive GUI is easy to handle with assembly language.

Features:

- Pre-emptive multitasking with 1000hz scheduler, multithreading, ring-3 protection
- Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1280x1024, 16 million colours
- Free-form, transparent and skinnable application windows, drag'n drop
- IDE: Editor/Assembler for applications
- USB 2.0 Hi-speed storage support
- TCP/IP stack with Loopback & Ethernet drivers
- Email/ftp/http/chess clients and ftp/mp3/http servers
- Hard real-time data fetch
- Fits on a single floppy

Happens to be a favorite of mine (not mine as in created), although probably not suited to your needs judging by the brief summary.

Okay, is that link supposed to be an illustration of the truth of that statement, or a counter-example intended to disprove it? It could be read either way...

For the record, I consider it a given that in modern times, no one in their right mind would write an entire OS (regardless of language). And I this as someone who's written one. I certainly know I'm nuts...

Really, with C especially, just about every advantage it has over more modern languages are advantages that C itself has over assembly. Assembly is still needed, but no one in their right mind would, say, write an entire OS in assembly.

Yikes, that old myth again, and on Slashdot of all places. Get with it son, it's all ball-bearings now...errr, sorry, slipped into Fletch mode there.

To see the benefit of doing an OS and applications in assembly to PROVE you just spouted a myth, please to check out MenuetOS . C'mon, Slashnerds, let's kill this myth off already!

And no, I'm not talking about Linux or variants. Has anyone heard of this great little gem? http://www.menuetos.net/ - coded in 32/64 bit assembly, fits on a floppy disk, looks sleek as hell. I personally love the fact it's written in assembly and is not based on any particular OS. It's pretty much a clean slate which drew me to BeOS back in the day.

I wonder if anyone will wind up developing for this. It looks to be a gem in the rough, for sure. After seeing Vista's train wreck, it makes me very happy to see a team who understands exactly the kind of thing I'm (and possibly many others) are looking for.

That's still unix http://www.menuetos.net/ asm preferably.

Menuet is an operating system written entirely in assembly. It's free. You can't quite call it Open Source, though.

"So if the software industry got back to lean and mean OSs and small but very usable internet applications and put together a package that could be test run via CD (or floppy/cd combo for those old system that just can't boot from CD) there could possible be an extension to the usable life of systems that otherwise make it to the landfill or recycling mine."

You mean like this?

MenuetOS is an Operating System in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly language, and released under the License. It supports 32/64 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications.

Menuet has no roots within UNIX or the POSIX standards, nor is it based on any particular operating system. The design goal has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs.

Menuet's application structure is not specifically reserved for asm programming since the header can be produced with practically any other language. However, the overall application programming design is intended for easy 32/64 bit asm programming. Menuet's responsive GUI is easy to handle with assembly language.

Features

• Pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, ring-3 protection
• Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1280x1024, 16 million colours
• IDE: Editor/Macro Assembler for applications
• TCP/IP stack with Loopback & Ethernet drivers
• Email/ftp/http/chess clients and ftp/mp3/http servers
• Free-form application windows, drag'n drop
• Hard real-time data fetch
• Fits on a single floppy

Screen shots - web browsing, playing doom and quake, http and mp3 servers, etc.

"So if the software industry got back to lean and mean OSs and small but very usable internet applications and put together a package that could be test run via CD (or floppy/cd combo for those old system that just can't boot from CD) there could possible be an extension to the usable life of systems that otherwise make it to the landfill or recycling mine."

You mean like this?

MenuetOS is an Operating System in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly language, and released under the License. It supports 32/64 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications.

Menuet has no roots within UNIX or the POSIX standards, nor is it based on any particular operating system. The design goal has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs.

Menuet's application structure is not specifically reserved for asm programming since the header can be produced with practically any other language. However, the overall application programming design is intended for easy 32/64 bit asm programming. Menuet's responsive GUI is easy to handle with assembly language.

Features

• Pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, ring-3 protection
• Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1280x1024, 16 million colours
• IDE: Editor/Macro Assembler for applications
• TCP/IP stack with Loopback & Ethernet drivers
• Email/ftp/http/chess clients and ftp/mp3/http servers
• Free-form application windows, drag'n drop
• Hard real-time data fetch
• Fits on a single floppy

Screen shots - web browsing, playing doom and quake, http and mp3 servers, etc.

I still hate that BeOS went belly up. It was a great operating system but was crushed before it ever got very far. The hardware support was also amazing: it would run winmodems and other windows only hardware. I've never tried writing an operating system, but I hope some of the features from BeOS make it into linux/OSX. One interesting thing to note is Be was originally a mac alternative and was only later moved to x86.

Another cool operating system to check out is MenuetOS... it is written entirely in Assembly! Very fast boot times and the GUI and eevrything fits easily on a floppy!

http://www.menuetos.net/

http://www.menuetos.net/

Take a look at the "programming" section on this page.

Take a look at the "programming" section on this page.

...that learning assembly will teach you is that a libc is really a convenience, rather than a necessity. If you know what you're doing you can accomplish pretty much anything either via system calls directly to the kernel, or by writing your own asm functions for various things (print, etc) and then simply calling *them* via includes. If you end up writing your own asm includes for things you'll still get some bloat, but I can guarantee you that it will be an order of magnitude less than using glibc. There are times when that can be valuable...like if you're needing a system which will fit on a floppy or usb stick, or for an older system with less ram etc.

I strongly recommend checking out asmutils if you want examples of asm programs that actually do something useful. Some of these (such as ls and the basic httpd) are less than 1k in size.

You might also be interested in Menuet, which is an entire (small) OS including GUI written completely in either 32 or 64 bit asm.

MenuetOS can beat your 11seconds. grin. raw assembler gives it raw power.

http://www.menuetos.net/

Good stuff for routers and other miniboxes.