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Another Free Operating System: NewOS
JigSaw writes: "Is the world ready for yet another Operating System? Travis Geiselbrecht, an ex-BeOS kernel engineer, seems to think so. (He is actually the one who wrote the Linux ext2 filesystem add-on for BeOS). He recently put up on his web site his personal Operating System, NewOS, with full source code. The OS was written from scratch and it is very modern and powerful as you can see from its feature set. It currently runs on x86 and... Sega Dreamcast but he is planning ports for Alpha, SGI and Sun Blade machines in the near future."
Why port to Sega Dreamcast? Why run linux on a Sparc? Why do this? Why do that?
I'm sick and tired of questions like these. For the love of God, can't someone do something for fun? Obviously, this guy has fun doing it or he wouldn't. So why not port your personal operating system to a Dreamcast?
Heck, my pc came with its own OS already. Why did I dump it in favor of Debian? Because I like Linux and I don't like Windows. Linux is fun.
"Anytime I see a booyah! in source code I know it's quality."
:-)
To conform to mil-spec, that line would have to be changed to "hooah!"...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
>in no way competing against linux/*bsd/hurd/etc.
hawk
It gets worse. Microsoft would proclaim that they invented the BLT years before anybody else did but forgot to tell anybody. They would then lobby the government to have sandwich-hacking tools declared illegal. Suddenly anyone in possession of a butter knife is guilty until proven innocent. Microsoft then bundles a donut inside every BLT, claiming that this increases consumer choice because every consumer likes to eat donuts. Customers found removing the donut from their sandwich are cut-off from future BLT supplies because they have "ruined the Microsoft BLT experience".
The DVD CCA then wraps their own sandwich (a ham and baloney) in cling wrap and announces that this is an anti sandwich hacking device. They then take out a patent on cling wrap, claim that anybody opening the cling wrap to eat the sandwich is doing so to steal the intellectual property of the sandwich, and have cling wrap circumvention devices (such as fingers) outlawed with the government's blessing. Instead you need to hire the services of a DVD CCA employed Cling Wrap Removal Expert whenever you want to unwrap the sandwich. Naive customers who unwrap their own sandwich are sued by the DVD CCA. The customer claims that they did so only to eat the sandwich but the judge slaps the customer silly anyway.
Maybe we should all be glad that sandwiches have heaps of prior art.
I think it's more likely that the toolsets are simply better now. 30 years ago if you wanted to build an OS, first you wrote the cross-assembler, then the boot strap, then the drivers, then the kernel, then the libraries, and then if you had any more steam left you wrote something useful like a text editor.
These days - mostly thanks to GNU - you get a cross-assembler and compiler for free. There are plenty of libraries already written (GNU and BSD at least). In the case of AtheOS you get most of the difficult device drivers via the BIOS. And once you're done, if you wrote a POSIX alike OS, you can fully populate user space in a day with some quick compilations.
And keep in mind that computers today compile 10000 lines of code faster than you can fart. 30 years ago you punched paper tape and waited for a week while the compiler chugged.
And the documentation! You can buy excellent books discussing in excruciating detail the exact workings of an OS. 30 years ago you probably had to invent half the concepts yourself!
It's simply so much easier to write an OS - in fact any software - these days.
The basics that he has now, while amazing, are pretty much still basic. 32bit OS's have been done to death - there is a lot of reference material...many books on OS design, 386 architechure, etc...
Now...the Win32 API is HUGE. There are so many minor compatability things between this and that revision (WindowOpen, WindowOpenEx). And while the function calls are documented (though sometimes not well) it's figuring out what is done behind the scenes that is taking time.
If you want to do something for the open source community right now, the last thing you would want to do is write another OS. Linux, and all other open source OS:es, lacks a good graphical user environment. Notice "good", which rules out X immediately. A completely new, OOUI environment with standard libs for widgets would help out incredibly much. It would remove most of the arcane design choices that were taken with X.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
...right =) CIPA is the "Children's Inline Protection Act" - proposed to protect our children from the perils of Inline Skates, which, as everone knows, can cause severe, lasting trauma in children, considered worse, even, than pr0n by some prominent physicians and psychologists that I will conveniently fail to mention by name. We must make sure it passes, so that we can protect the children from being scarred for life. We must outlaw the use of Inline Skates in public places, such as libraries, and schools! We must prevent the unauthorized sale of Inline Skates to those under the age of 30, by severely punishing those evil, EVIL storeowners who push their wares on our unsuspecting, innocent children!
;P by me, for poor humor and sarcasm.
This post has been rated
Isin't newOS the default folder name Microsoft Operating System Creator uses for a new project?
...something as familiar and well-defined as an OS...
MSDOS, QNX, BeOS, Windows 2000, Linux kernel, Redhat Linux distro, Kallisti OS and many others are all described by their creators as an "OS". They all offer very different 'levels of service' and facilities to their client processes.
It's not well-defined.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
> Amiga (it's dead, face it!)
So what better use for it than playing around with his OS?
His page says "Also, I seemed to have collected a bunch of old non-x86 machines that need something running on them. I figure, "Hey, why dont I just port my OS over?" The rest is history."
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rant
No. It just crashed VMWare for me.
Could this be the next bandwagon? Anyone's Jon Katz detector buzzing yet?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Isn't it funny how many developers can write their own unix-like-OS, yet a whole team of developers haven't yet fully implement the windows 32 bit libraries of top of linux?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
No, the machine as such only has a booter and some basic tools (memory pack management, play CD) - the "real" OS ships on the game/GD-ROM/whatever, most often this is Sega's OS, sometimes it's Windows CE - and smetimes it's apparently NetBSD or NewOS. :-)
And that's too bad, because it means while there is lots of OS which are currently written very few are usefull..
For me an OS is an interface between applications and the hardware.
Having applications for a new OS is easy: implement POSIX.
But at the lower level, there is no standard for the device drivers, so usually these new OS works on very few hardware..
GGI seems quite dead, that is too bad..
If this person can create a new OS kernel that is faster than BSD, Solaris, Linux, Windows, etc, and can replace lets say the Linux kernel .. then he has a big chance at success. The fact is that if you can create a new kernel like what the hurd is doing and to have it work as a drop in replacement into lets say the Linux kernel then he can have success. Ideally if he had a micro kernel that could actually run some of linux drivers with little modification he could go somewhere.
I doubt it, I think Linux is having enough trouble surviving and I think that the effort of the hurd, atheos, beos, and him could be better spent in improving an existing system, like Linux, (one of the BSD's), or any other Open Source OS.
just my opinion though.
good luck guy..............
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
The guy's homepage makes it sound like this is
his effort to explore OS design not to design
yet another OS for mass consumption, which may
be why he is not looking for help.
Do remember that a lot of those links are dead. Not too surprising, but since the commentary on the OS isn't marked with a date one has no idea of how recently a "quite active" project actually was at all active.
That said, most of them are active, and it's a good source of information on where to get system code.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Is Open Source getting too scattered? No. That's the point of it. Consider the hill-climbing problem. If you want to avoid a local maximum, what you do is start your hill-climber at several different points. Lots of climbers is better than a few smart ones. Each one just heads up-hill, and then when it reaches a point where every direction is down-hill, it says "I'm at the top."
To find the highest point you can reach, you survey the climbers, and choose the highest. If you don't think that he's at the top, you take all of the lower ones (that have finished climbing) and randomly redistribute them.
This can be fine tuned, but that's the idea. And that' open source development. Lots of developers starting in lots of different places, and heading uphill. (Well, you can see that it's really a bit more complex, but that's one valid abstraction of the process.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It isn't based on the BSD license. It is the BSD license!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Oh, open source sandwiches definitely make sense!
If there's a roach in a proprietary Microsoft BLT, you won't know about it until you've swallowed it and contracted some horrible disease. With open source sandwiches, you can send your changes back to the developer.
Of course, you could just reverse-engineer your sandwich and look to see if there's a bug in it, but that's not legal persuant to the DMCA.
darius
darius
no, not on every gd... only some dreamcast games use windows ce. soul calibur for example uses the katana devkit, which is 100% sega libraries and no wince code anywhere at all.
There is - it is called VCD.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
But you can patent them, the way Smuckers did.
Best Slashdot Co
That reference to the dreamcast network driver sticks out like a sore thumb. It doesn't run on an SH4, but it has drivers for the DC's NIC? Why?
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Custom MIPS 4300i running at 93.75MHz (rounding off.) Don't ask me why I know this.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Ha ha. I always loved how WinCE without caps was a very accurate term for the facial expression you get when using it. Something that seems to have gotten past the MS marketing dept.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Tsk, tsk tsk. Is Rasterman the only geek with some asthetic sense? Names DO matter. UNIX, for example, is a very cool name. It makes you feel good to run a UNIX machine. However, the new gen of OSS programmers is ignoring the good-naming heritage of their UNIX ancestors. Linux just sounds nasty, GNOME sounds GIMPy (oh god, bad pun), XFce sounds gross, and all the G's and K's in GNOME and KDE apps creates a very childish resemblance to all the 64's at the end of Nintendo games. On the other hand, KDE is pretty good, ORBit is plausible, aRts is really nice sounding and fitting, and X is just plain cool.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Lexus, yech. If I bought a car that expensive, it would only be with a Jag license plate. It's not marketing, but style. I don't agree with style over substance, or substance over style. The two are not mutually exclusive. If you make the hype, you better have the goods to back it up. If you have to goods, don't forget the hype to show it off. In the end, to each his own. There is no rule that says that nerds are not allowed to have any artistic sense.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
if it takes off 10 years from now you'll be sorry ....
As Steve Maguire said in "Writing Solid Code," programmers need to be aware of the interfaces they are working with. getc returns an int, not a char! It is a poorly designed function interface that you should be aware of.
:)
For the record, the definition is int getc(FILE *stream);
Maybe the booyah was a bit premature.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
They were CISC, and RISC outran them.
They were caught in the AI Winter downdraft.
LispOS was harder to port than Un*x.
Mass parenthephobia.
They were The Right Thing (see section 2.1) and were killed off by the New Jerseyites.
Choose any or all of the above.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I am also currently working on my own hobby Open Source OS, and have considered a job at Be after I graduate, doing kernel level stuff. The thing I was concerned about was Be reacting to my involvement in an Open Source project where I might feel compelled to implement similar solutions to the BeOS kernel, and thus leak Be's trade secrets. I am sure this would be a serious issue for someone in my position, but I wonder, as an ex-employee, whether the author of this OS has received any heat from his former employer.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
I don't find this to terribly new. There are literally hundreds of OS projects like this one, at various stages of completion. Read alt.os.development sometime, there are plenty of brilliant people toiling away on their hobby operating systems. Recently the developer (or someone pushing it) posted a link to this OS on the newsgroup, but the page was in Italian or Portugese. Needless to say, good way to frustrate a bunch of OS developers!
For some info on developing your own OS check out:
http://www.execpc.com/~geezer/os/
Is just one of the regulars (well not too regular these days) on the newsgroup. The "Triple Fault Club" is kind of funny actually. Everyone's OS has flummoxed many a frustrated x86 processor at some point! From his site I learned some of the ropes. Also check out some of the sites on the webring. Many OSes, varying from toys to useable systems.
BTW, people on the newsgroup generally sneer at any OS named ____OS or ___ix. There are so many ChrisOS, and DaveOS, and Winix and Finix and Pukenix, etc...
But of course there is MacOS and Linux...
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
MIPS (whose supporting that anymore?)
haha, this is so funny because i think you're actually serious. there are shitloads of companies suporting the MIPS processor and it's extrememly popular in the embedded market. there are a hel of a lot of devices that you probably use on a daily basis that use a MIPS processor, not to mention all the Cisco equipment this message passes through to get to you.
for a group that's supposedly in tune with technology it suprises me how many of the slashbots are so unbelieveably igornant. if it's not a PC it doesn't matter i guess. hah.
- j
If it is a "collective unconscious" thing though, that's going to blow a personal hypothesis of mine out of the water; that being that the collective unconscious (if it even exists) is primarily a genetic race memory thing. The explosion of knowledge that we're seeing in this field would tend to point to other factors.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
As was noted by someone, he doesn't seem to ask for help either, so I think that sums it up quite well.
Still, this is nice but I'm not sure it's stuff that matters© that much. Oh well...
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
High UID kids these days -- no respect for their history. ;-)
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
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-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
- Atari
- Dreamcast
- Amiga (it's dead, face it!)
- MIPS (whose supporting that anymore?)
At least there's no PowerPC port. That would be a bad omen for Apple!By the way, this isn't troll...I'm just stating an obvious anachronism.
Ryan Finley
Ryan Finley
SurveyMonkey.com -- Create your own professional surveys
Its just a guess (I don't know the author), but if I wanted to port my new operating system that I'd built as a hobby on my PC to another platform, then the one over there by the TV that I already own, rather than going out and spending a bunch of cash on buying a mac, SPARC, whatever machine. The Dreamcast is turning out to be quite a fun little box for homegrown development - take a look at some of the sites where things like emulation and even a sourceport of Quake have been performed.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
There happens to be no such language called hindu. If it is hindi which is being referred to, I don't think that "Newoess" means one who makes false promises. In fact "Newoess" does not mean anything.
Well... at least this is shorter than the previous versions. What I want to know is what this has to do with something that isn't even Unix.
/Brian
I thought it was to allow children to be directly interposed into an execution context for performance reasons rather than putting them through normal procedure calls?
/Brian
Uh... can you expect much out of a community whose favorite database is called MySQL :-)
/Brian
Why not? The Dreamcast is cheap and very well documented. It's a de facto open system.
/Brian
NewOS's name is funny. In Hindu, "New Oh Ess" or "Newoess" means "one who makes false promises."
Sort of funny. Like how CIPA (Children's Online Protection Act) means "pussy" in Swedish.
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Tonight on Fox: Deadliest Executions Part XVII
Curious, this guy makes no mention of wanting any developer help. This reminds me of the guy making AtheOS. I am absolutely amazed at the ability for one developer to whip up something so quickly - within months. The coding talent and drive to create these small OSes is incredible. Considering much smaller applications easily have dozens of developers, the idea of creating an OS from scratch with multiprocessor and multithreading support is unbelievable. Perhaps they used some code or ideas from other open source kernels, but hey, that's what open source is all about.
Even if neither of these OSes take off, I admire their drive to focus this well as a solo developer.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Well, you could burn a boot CD, witch would contain all the neccisary files to "run" the system, and then you will indeed be running that OS (although a system without connectivity is hardly a system at all). Keep in mind that you can fit 650 to 700 MB on a CD-R, which is more than enough room to contain your kernel, X, apps, etc.
Or, if you want a more usefull system, you could tell the boot CD to access a NFS on your LAN via the DC's ethernet adapter.
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#nohup cat
Eh, another OS. Too many, if you ask me!
:-)
On the other hand...
It is absolutely great that they can even do this. Clearly it takes so much to make an OS work, and even more so to work well. It's really inspirational to "younger" developers interested in programming.
I once tried to write an OS for my PPC machine, based on a system called OpenOS and another, PowerOS.
Bombed horribly - it sucked.
The Idea: someone create a VERY simple OS... and let people build onto it. Not an open-source effort. But rather, they could "roll their own OS,' in essense, by following a tutorial, and see how it's done. I would feel SO proud to say, "I finally got threading written into my OS...."
So NewOS is my Hero of the Day.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
First, the Dreamcast is NOT obsolete. Hello! I STILL don't have a 64bit desktop! Do I need one? Of course not. But it would be cool. I run linux on my home computer because it's free and fun. I run minix on my 286 laptop because I can. I reboot windows at work because I have to. What you morons are missing is that OS's are fucking dead! Average Joe Creditcard does not give a rats ass what OS his box runs. All he wants is streaming porn, email, and well, thats about fucking it. This big ass box with cooling fans all a whir next to my feet is soon to be a relic. The average business/home user can accomplish all their computing needs with a dreamcast. Internet? yep. MP3? yep. Awesome lookin games? yep. (that work out of the box I might add.) DVD? not quite... But why the hell isn't there a vhs quality cd-rom movie medium? I mean, there is a damn market for it. Email? yep. Porn? yep. office apps? wouldn't be too big of a problem. To those of you who whine about good people not working on linux, are you retarded or something? I mean people work on linux cause they want to. This guy does newos cause he felt like it. Microsoft did windows to enhance shareholder approval of their value-added quality initiatives to rake in big fat sacks of cash. I'm more worried about brilliant coders being paid truckloads to implement "Planned Obsolesence". Shouldn't you?
Shift happens. Fire it up.
*sigh* Another day, another partitiion on my hard drive.... what's that, now 5?
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
I have found that most people with only one system partition are those that are most surprised when they lose all their data due to a random disk formatting, they tend to be secretaries, businessmen, and those who find multiple partitions confusing.
:-)
Humorless sig goes here.
All the "basics" to get you started on your own operating system.
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Garett
For the love of God, can't someone do something for fun?
Why do would someone do something for fun?
yep, not many operating systems out there...
However, and I know this has been brought up before, is the open source community sporeading itself too thin? I'm not saying that there shouldn't be several flavors of operating systems, but I think some of these folks should try focusing their energies on one project. One secure, stable, fully-featured product is more desirable than 20 that do different things fine and other things horribly.
You're missing the point. The coolest thing you can possibly do in geekworld is to write your own OS. This guy is just having FUN! He doesn't want to concentrate on the OS you want him to concentrate on. He wants to be creative and come up with his own thing.
"And like that
Okay, I'm all for Open Source and sharing of ideas and all that, but this has gone too far. For the love of God, you CAN'T open source a good sandwich!
Where does it all stop? Why? WHYYYYYY?!?!?!
(sorry)
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
It is not *too* dificult to create your own opperating system. Many colleges even have a course (usually in a masters program) where you have to create your own OS. The diference between Linux and any other number of fledgling opperating systems is that Linus never stopped developement for it after he got it to work. He ported some gnu stuff to it and the ball just kept rolling. It will be interesting to see if any of these new fledgling OS's "keep the ball rolling".
I miss the Karma Whores.
Why a port to Sega Dreamcast? Doesn't it have its own OS already, in ROM or something?
looks like "High-performance TCP/IP stack" is a planned feature
That's pretty cool. I was thinking of implementing a "packet-losing, barely functional TCP/IP stack" with the upcoming SantaOS, but I may have to change my strategy now that someone's come along and promised better...
Dancin Santa
Uh.. not according to the comments here:
** Copyright 2001, Travis Geiselbrecht. All rights reserved.
** Distributed under the terms of the NewOS License.
*/
Now I've been poking around his Perforce repository, but can't find a copy if this "NewOS" License anywhere.
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Gnu/Newspeak?
Despite what many people seem to think, an OS is not an inherently complex thing.
As far as I can see, there are only two extremely difficult (read: time-consuming, tedious) things to do re something as familiar and well-defined as an OS: comply fully with someone else's standard, and tune an entirely original design (not borrowing the main character from a familiar system).
Making a unix-like OS is not much harder than making a compiler for a c-like language (I dunno about you, but I could do the latter in a couple of days). But then supplying every library routine and going and checking that you comply with the POSIX standard on every point would take forever (alone, that is).
The win32 thing is a hundred times harder than that, because it's a huge, poorly designed, inaccurately specified, buggy interface. It's painful enough to even use that the vast majority of windows programmers hide it behind some other tool. Recreating it perfectly, without access to the source, is an exercise in futility, far harder than making it in the first place.
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Original? Ever heard of Window ME?
I'm sold!
Microsoft out the window!
Linux out the window!
C'mon new OS... save me taht 75 bucks!
Isin't newOS the default folder name Microsoft Operating System Creator uses for a new project?
No, that would be "MyOS".
(Giveaway)
By far one of the greatest things about open source is that anyone has the opportunity to go out and build whatever they want. This adds to the mix and to the overall quality of the products. However, and I know this has been brought up before, is the open source community sporeading itself too thin? I'm not saying that there shouldn't be several flavors of operating systems, but I think some of these folks should try focusing their energies on one project. One secure, stable, fully-featured product is more desirable than 20 that do different things fine and other things horribly. I'm not looking to get blasted with why having many different OSs do different things is good, because I know that. I'm just raising a question that seems to have faded from the open source community's mind.
----------What the Chiquita banana?