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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."
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.
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
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
Well, the closer you get to the users, the more complex things get... never mind the feature involved. The Win32 libraries include everything from the base file system things to sound libraries to MIDI support to all the UI widgets to networking to printer support to ...
There's a lot in there. Somethings haven't really been done on built-from-scratch UNIX environments, never mind trying to emulate exactly what Microsoft did...
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche